From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Fri Oct 17 2003 - 17:05:31 CST
On 17/10/2003 14:19, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
>
>
>
>>Marco Cimarosti scripsit:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Why? 200 millions should be more than enough: that's more than 30.000
>>>
>>>
>words
>
>
>>>for each living language.
>>>
>>>
>>The Oxford English Dictionary has almost 10 times that many main entries.
>>And if we want to record every obvious derivative, 4 million words (times
>>6000 languages) seems a reasonable upper bound. Granted, English has
>>a fat vocabulary, but let's think big here.
>>
>>
>>
>>>In practice, it will always be rendered as
>>>"-tu wa-" because no one will invest in implementing Swahili rendering.
>>>
>>>
>
>Isn't most of that work already implemented for Indic scripts that require
>glyph reordering? Or do you mean the complexity of the work needed to
>create the glyph reordering tables (for logical to visual order)?
>
>Isn't the Indic system now flexible enough to encode Banthu & Swahili
>languages? That's a shame because Swahili is one of the most spoken
>languages of the world (with millions of speakers), even before a lot of
>regional European languages that are fully encoded and supported in
>Unicode, and it really urgently needs to be more easily published to
>keep its associated culture.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Are we talking about a real non-Latin script, some kind of syllabary or
logographic script, for Swahili and other Bantu languages? If so, I have
never heard of one and I have not seen it roadmapped. The Latin script
in common use certainly doesn't require complex ordering behaviour,
although for some Bantu languages characters outside ISO-8859-1 may be
required.
Or did someone not notice that Marco's comments were about the word "joke"?
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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