suzmccarth wrote:

> [...]
> 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.

AFAIK, you also have to drive a SUV to be a soccer mom.

> [...]
> 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."

I suspect that what the FAQ means by "adult Chinese" might be the same that
I meant by "older people": people who are young enough to be potential
computer users but who are old enough to have not been educated with pinyin
since first grade.

> 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.

OK. And what Michael is trying to achieve with his Vai keyboard (and with
his Unicode-related activity at large) is that your "alphabetic, westernized
literate" would instead input the story in the *traditional* script, so that
the traditional orthography is preserved too in the computer age.

People who are not "alphabetic" or "westernized" enough are excluded, but so
what? They wouldn't be able to use a computer anyway, as you can hardly
expect that menus or error messages be translated into Vai, or indeed that
someone who cannot speak the official language of his own country will ever
have access to computers.

> > 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 don't see the problem, in fact. Michael's approach of using an IME built
on a standard English keyboard should work perfectly well for the *actual*
Vai computer users, which are arguably all literate in English.

Do you really think that a Vai who does not speak English would have any
chance of sitting in front of a computer? I think no, so I don't see a
reason to design a Vai keyboard based on the (inexistent) needs of those
Vais who will never use computers in their life, disregarding the actual
needs of actual users.

> I am not suggesting changing
> the hardware at all.

So, provided that the keys on a standard keyboards are about 1/10 of the
number of characters in the Vai script, what kind of *elements* are you
thinking to map each key?

Chinese shape-based method are based on a the *pre-existing* methods for
analyzing Chinese characters in smaller units: either some hundreds
"components" (such as the well-known "radicals"), or a handful of "strokes".
By "pre-existing" I mean that these methods have been invented centuries ago
(mainly for lexicographic purposes, i.e. sorting dictionaries), and that
knowing these methods of analysis is a (hard-acquired) part of Chinese
literacy.

What Chinese shape-based input methods do is simply to *exploit* this
pre-existing skills that Chinese user acquire in school, and they do this by
mapping the available keys to these elements. On a computer keyboard, keys
are loosely mapped to "components"; on a cell-phone keypad, they are mapped
to strokes.

Going back to Liberia, AFAIK, no corresponding shape-based analysis ever
existed for the Vai script. So, again, what kind of "widgets" would you map
to keys? Mind that, whatever these 30-odd "widgets" are, you cannot expect
potential users to learn them and how they map to Vai characters just to
learn your input method: they must something that the users *already* know.

--
Marco