--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Marco Cimarosti
<marco.cimarosti@...> wrote:

> Au contraire! I am saying that segmenting a syllable into

"phonemes" (in

> order to map them to letters) is *not* an intuitive or natural task.
>
> My surprise rather come from the fact that *you* (a teacher

having, AFAIK, a

> great experience with pupils of many languages and scripts)

even consider

> that the contrary may be true.

A miscue, Marco. I have been trying to sound like a moderate
and reasonable person when talking to Michael, who doesn't
seem to recognize this. I wouldn't consider the contrary to be
true, but I have been trying to imagine or figure out what Michael
is thinking.

> Soccer is less popular that it used to be in my times...

I just mentioned soccer because it was on my mind to sign my
daughter up for soccer again this fall. It is still the most popular
sport here. I know this puts me in the demograhic of 'soccer
mom' - so be it.

>
> I think that everybody *can* do that, and they certainly do when

they have a

> valid reason for it, such as learning a foreign language. But

learning such

> a skill for the *sole* purpose of typing a non-alphabetic script

on a

> computer is clearly asking too much to a potential computer

user. On the

> other hand, it is perfectly OK to *exploit* this skill when it is

*already*

> in place.

I have no problem with that.

> For Chinese who are *not* literate in pinyin (e.g. older people)

not that old - here is a comment from
http://www.zhongwen.com/

FAQ "How do you know the pronunciation of a character"

"Many adult Chinese unfamiliar with alphabet-based writing
systems have a very hard time writing even their own names in
Pinyin since it requires phoneme-by-phoneme dissectin of the
syllables."

> So, how could (and why should) a monolingual Vai use a

computer at all?

My observation from Cree is that the first and most basic use of a
computer is to produce a newsletter or post information of their
community. The next purpose is to record on the computer
traditional stories. However, it would be nice to have the native
literate actually write the stories themselves. Instead what is
often done is that the traditional literate *tells* the story and the
alpabetic literate, the westernized literate, inputs the story on the
computer in the 'new' orthography. Then the story is preserved
but the traditional orthography is not.

> And, as we are talking about dramatically poor countries of

West Africa, I

> must emphasize again the word "economic"! Special hardware

keyboards stuffed

> with hundreds of extra keys are a daydream even for major

languages such as

> Chinese and Japanese

If you can input Chinese on a cellphone keypad then why does
Vai seem like such a problem? I am not suggesting changing
the hardware at all.

I wonder if anyone has tried 'squawk' from www. yuvee.com ?

Suzanne