Re: Bopomofo keyboards in Taiwan

At 22:58 -0400 2005-08-30, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>Are you aware that Ethiopia's biggest language, Oromo, is written with
>roman script? (As is its close relative Somali.)

Certainly.

>Why don't you visit the Cherokee communities in
>Oklahoma -- or virtually every other Native
>American community -- and ask them "So what?"
>with respect to what the government schools and
>the Catholic schools did to their children
>between about 1900 and 1950? Two to three
>generations of having their native languages
>beaten out of them has managed to extirpate
>almost every one of those languages.

The reason we encode the world's writing systems
in Unicode and the reason we make software
available for them is to enable users to be able
to use their languages and scripts in the modern
world. This is hardly the work of extirpators. I
helped to encode Cherokee, by the way, as well as
Canadian Syllabics, and now Vai.

>Doesn't the memory of the Gaeltacht come creeping up on you?

Is dócha nach bhfuil mórán eolais agatsa faoi sin.

> > What does this mean with regard to teaching people to type t + a for
>> ta and t + i for ti? It is impossible to imagine that a Vai using a
>> computer will not know the Latin script. It is certainly impossible
>> to imagine that a Vai will get very far using a computer without such
>> knowledge.
>
>Then you are condemning more than 70% of all literate Vai people to
>having no access to computers:

Hardly. If a literate Vai person sits down in
front of a computer, he will need to learn a lot
of things. How to use a mouse. What a menu is.
What a keyboard is in general. He will,
doubtless, see the Latin script. (This is more
likely, I think, than that he will find himself
in front of an Arabic computer.)

>It doesn't even occur to you that Arabic computers would be almost twice
>as effective in the Vai community?

Bidirectional text processing is complicated, and
it would add a great deal more complexity to the
experience of learning to write Vai. Of course, a
keyboard layout could be based on an Arabic
hardware keyboard if necessary.

> > Assuming access to the basic alphabet (which EVERYONE in Liberia has,
>> insofar as the road signs are written in Latin script), it is not
>> outrageous to suggest that Vai people, who are as smart as anyone
> > else, can be taught to type t + a for ta and t + i for ti.
>
>You really are a cultural imperialist.

That'd be laughable, given my work record, except
that it's just another pointless little jab, so I
guess it's not very funny.

Do you suggest that everyone in Liberia does
*not* have access to the basic Latin alphabet?

Are you suggesting that Vais are not smart enough
to learn to type t + a for ta?

>And you seem never to have so much as opened an anthropology text.

That would be an incorrect assessment on your
part, I'm afraid. In point of fact I have worked
with many native communities to encode their
writing systems. Including Vais.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com