From: William J Poser (wjposer@ldc.upenn.edu)
Date: Sun May 29 2005 - 12:33:10 CDT
Hans Aberg wrote:
>But is the reason unavailability of the correct characters, or that
>one feels that this is the correct way of writing the language?
The avoidance of non-ASCII characters in the practical writing
systems for languages of British Columbia is probably due to
two main factors:
(a) these are the characters that were readily available on
typewriters and could easily be printed prior to the advent
of printing on personal computers. Indeed, the practical
writing system most widely used for Carrier reflects this
in that it consists entirely of ASCII characters except for
the fact that several letters are underscored. Underscoring
of course cannot be done in plain ASCII (that is, the superposition
cannot be) but can be done on standard English typewriters.
(b) the letters with which native people were generally familiar
were the letters used to write English. For us professional
linguists IPA symbols may be the "correct" symbols, but
few native people were or are familiar with IPA. Furthermore,
native people have no particular interest in people other than
speakers of their own language being able to read their
writing, so there is no reason for them to want to use an
international standard.
I'm not aware of any trend for people to change their
writing system due to the greater ease of using IPA symbols
or other "exotic" characters. That's probably due to a combination
of lack of motivation to change, investment in the current
system in terms of materials already printed and people already
trained to read it, and also a personal investment in the
existing systems by language specialists. In many cases
the principal qualification of a language specialist, beyond
knowing the language, is the ability to write it. Such people
are usually not keen on changing the writing system since
it introduces the risk of undermining their expertise.
Bill
-- Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer@alum.mit.edu
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