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

> But also Michael's arguments is equally clear and correct: (1)

due to a

> bunch of historical reason (which we don't need to go into

now), we can

> assume that *ANY* person who is literate in Vai *AND* wishes

to use a

> computer *IS* also literate in some language (probably

English, the official

> language of Liberia) written with an alphabetic script,

I disagree. Creating keybords with this in mind puts computer
literacy in the hands of the western literate alone. Why not carry
a laptop and battery in to a village and ask someone to record
their journal on it for a collection of Vai stories.

Now what will happen is that the stories will be transcribed and
rewritten in the new orthogrphy and that will become the
standard even though no Vai traditional literate would ever have
written that way.

Suzanne





so she is already

> capable of performing the overmentioned analysis, and (2) due

to the

> socio-economic situation of Liberia and of the Vai speaking

community,

> potential users cannot afford to have computer industry

producing keyboard

> hardware specifically built for Vai.
>
> From Michael's arguments (1) and (2) *follows* that

implementing a Vai

> keyboard as an alternative software driver running on top of a

standard

> "QWERTY" (i.e. English) keyboard hardware is the optimal

solution for the

> needs of Vai users, and that's why he favors this approach.
>
> In a hypothetical world where Vais where (a) a very numerous,

powerful and

> rich community which (b) had never in their history been

colonized by

> peoples using alphabets, a different approach could be

preferrable to

> implement a Vai keyboard. In *that* hypothetical world...
>
> > At least by now you seem to be tacitly admitting that the

"alphabet"

> > might be the Arabic one.
>
> Why not? Technically, it could also be the Cyrillic alphabet... But

English

> is the official language of Liberia, and US English keyboards

are cheaper

> that Arabic keyboards, so perhaps English is a better choice.
>
> And, anyway, as this approach requires no hardware changes,

nothing impedes

> to implement variants of the input method targeted to various

layouts, e.g.

> US QWERTY, US Dvorak, UK QWERTY, French AZERTY,

Arabic in all its national

> variant layout, etc.
>
> --
> Marco