Re: Bopomofo keyboards in Taiwan

Michael Everson wrote:

>
> 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.

Yet you insist that they access these softwares via English.

How can you not see the contradiction?

> >Doesn't the memory of the Gaeltacht come creeping up on you?
>
> Is dócha nach bhfuil mórán eolais agatsa faoi sin.

My, my, aren't you clever.

> > > 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.

Arabic-Vai computing would be more useful than English-Vai computing.
See the table you again deleted. Bidirectional text processing already
exists, so it doesn't matter how "complex" it is, and knowing to push
some button to switch between Arabic and Vai doesn't seem any more
complex than knowing to push some button to switch between English and
Vai.

> > > 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.

None is so blind as he who will not see.

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

I've never been there. Scribner & Cole have.

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

Once again, Suzanne and Marco dealt with the notion of "smartness" in
considerable detail, hours before you sent this message. Had you not
received their messages yet?

> >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.

Then it would seem you never learned anything from an anthropology text.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...