Re: Bopomofo keyboards in Taiwan

At 17:43 +0000 2005-08-31, suzmccarth wrote:

>I disagree. Creating keybords with this in mind puts computer
>literacy in the hands of the western literate alone.

At present, a Vai who cannot use an English (or even an Arabic)
computer cannot use a computer at all.

>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.

Record it how? By asking that person to type it in? Then that person
will have to learn how to type.

>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.

It doesn't matter what orthography it is, if you are interested in
the content of the stories.

My keyboard will allow a user to access any of the 284 Vai
characters, in any case, so questions of orthography are moot.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com