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

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

Okay. I feel better.

>
> OK. And what Michael is trying to achieve with his Vai keyboard

I have no issue with Michael's Vai keyboard. I am not sure where
that came from. We are discussing how it would be possible to
*also* design a glyph-bsed keyboard, what the design and value
of such a keyboard is and so on.

I see roman orthography keyboards as a given - they exist, they
should exist and they will be prefered by many.

> People who are not "alphabetic" or "westernized" enough are

excluded, but so

> what? They wouldn't be able to use a computer anyway,

This is where I differ. A five year old who is not literate can use a
computer.

>access to computers.

Ethnographers often take tape recorders in to record stories. I
can see carrying a laptop and battery that might last a week and
getting Vai literates to record their own letters and stories - just
see how they would chose to write.

> 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?

That is why Vai is so interesting. For Chinese there is a way to
compose the characters, for Tamil another way. But for Cree and
Japanese each one can fit on the keyboard. However, Vai, in the
original form, 60 characters would have been closer to a
keyboard fit. I still don't know how the Cherokee traditional
keyboard works.

And I do think that for Cree, the roman orthography keyboard did
influence Cree orthography. There is an effect that took place
and changed the standard orthography and no one to my
knowledge has ever studied this apart from myself.

Of course, this roman-Cree transliteration program was
developed before Unicode - it is not a Unicode issue but a
technology issue in general. If you can generate a writing system
by using another type of writing system will you change the
characteristics of the orthography in the original system. I say
yes. But I am looking for someone else to discuss this issue
with.

Suzanne