suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels"
> <grammatim@...> wrote:
>
> >
> > (I thought your little table showed far more V-A biliteracy than
> V-E.)
>
> It is not the numbers that disagree but the domains. That is, a lot
> of people can read Arabic but they don't appear to use Arabic to
> write letters as they do in Vai. Since English is the official
> language, each village has to have someone lterate in English to
> help with record keeping and official business.
>
> So definitely English keyboards are the winners but I am
> hypothesizing that working with the English alphabet, any
> alphabet, and then working backwards from there to
> standardizing or reforming orthographies in syllabaries changes
> the way the syllabary functions.
>
> It is a theoretical concern, to a certain extent, but if it devalues
> traditional literacy skills and makes older literates feel they
> cannot spell correctly becuse they do not use the script with the
> phonemic 'accuracy' that is the new standard then, this effect
> should be studied or recorded, at least observed and discussed
> at any rate.
>
> Maybe what we are seeing here is comparable to what
> happened when typesetting was introduced by the Jesuits in
> India. I am both interested in the most arcane and obscure
> details of writing system history, hence my continued interest in
> sharing this discussion with you, and I am interested in the
> practical success of minority literacy initiatives.

I thought printing came to most of India with the Brits. There were
indeed no state-wide standard scripts before then. Look at the first few
pages of each subpart of the Linguistic Survey of India. It uses type
for many more than the present standard range of scripts, along with
lots of lithography for manuscript samples.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...