Re: Bopomofo keyboards in Taiwan

--- Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:

> At 22:48 -0400 2005-08-30, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> >People who have not learned an _alphabet_ cannot
> divide a syllable
> >into anything smaller.
>
> I'm always amazed at estimations about what people
> "cannot" do. People can learn. That's how we
> survived the Ice Age.

Well it's pretty widely accepted that learning
languages is special. They are much more easily
learned by children than by adults. What's to say
that phonemic analysis is not one of the things that
is difficult for adult learners for instance?

Andrew Dunbar.

> >I don't know what "the Ethiopic 'standard'
> keyboard" may be,
>
> It is not a formal Ethiopian National Standard
> specification (yet),
> but it is the most common computer keyboard
> configuration available
> on various platforms.
>
> >but the Amharic typewriter keyboard that was made
> by Olympia is not "consonant
> >followed by vowel," for the simple reason that the
> 182 basic Ge`ez
> >shapes, not to mention the labiovelars and the
> extra Amharic diacritics,
> >could only be fitted onto a standard typewriter by
> making lots of
> >ingenious dissections of the characters.
>
> Yes, those typewriter keyboards were ingenious,
> given the hardware
> technology. To my knowledge, no software emulates
> that layout,
> however.
> --
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
>

http://en.wiktionary.org -- http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl



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