Re: Bopomofo keyboards in Taiwan

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> Michael Everson wrote:
> [....]
> > I have already said (several times) that in
> > addition to QWERTY-based transliteration-deadkey
> > keyboard drivers for Cherokee and Inuktitut, I
> > have also developed non-Latin-alphabet keyboard
> > drivers for them.
>
> And you stubbornly refuse to believe that for people who are only
> syllabic-literate, dividing those syllables into consonants and vowels
> is a totally new intellectual skill that needs to be learned anew as
> from First Grade.

Well, Peter, as I said I *do* believe that. But I also believe that, in 2005
A.D. on planet Earth, people who are only literate in a syllabic script
invariably belong to one or more of these three categories:

1) monolingual Chinese speakers,
2) monolingual Japanese speakers,
3) people who won't ever need to type on a computer in their lives.

Prove me that this characterization is wrong, and I'll concede that
Michael's design for a Vai keyboard is wrong.

> [...]
> Especially if he's a First World technocrat telling a Third
> World person how to do that thing.

I inform you that computers have been invented by First Word technocrats.
Who else would be more qualified to tell Third World persons how to achieve
native languages support on computers?

> [...]
> > And only useful if Arabic hardware is more
> > readily available in Liberia than English
> > hardware, which is unlikely.
>
> Why? Because Arab entrepreneurs haven't noticed the market yet? Or
> because Arabic computing is controlled from the US or Europe?

The second reason you said, and it sounds like a perfectly valid rationale
for Michael's technical choice.

Another even better rationale is that English, not Arabic of Finnish, is the
official language of both Liberia and Sierra Leone.

>
> > > > You know what? I know some actual Vai people. And
> > >> they are happy with my work. Ain't that something.
> > >
> > >At a guess, they belong to the Western-oriented, educated
> > >elite. Which sides did they take in the Liberian civil
> > >war? If Idi Amin or Baby-Doc Duvalier, from their
> > >comfortable exiles on the French Riviera, commissioned
> > >work from you, would you suppose it was for the
> > >benefit of the people of Uganda or Haiti?
> >
> > This insinuation is contemptible. You have
> > insulted me, and you have insulted the good Vai
> > experts with whom we worked to encode this
> > marvellous writing system.
>
> What's marvelous about it?

That experts belong to the educated élites by definition. And educated
élites are normally bound to power élites, else I don't see how they could
have become educated. Indeed, what's marvelous about it?

Are you arguing that Michael should rather have contacted some illiterate
Liberian shepherd to help in his project? Would you likewise say that, e.g.,
"The World's Writing Systems" should have rather been written by some
ignorant red-neck who only knows about beer and wrestling, rather than by a
member of your country's educated élite such as you?

--
Marco