From: dzo@bisharat.net
Date: Thu Jun 05 2003 - 20:34:29 EDT
In the context of Tamazight input Philippe Verdy wrote:
[ . . . ]
>
> There are probably some existing standard for keyboard mappings, promoted by
> UNESCO and published in a ISO standard.
If there were such a thing (for Tamazight or any other African language) I'd be
very interested to know about it. My impression is that there are no such
standards for African languages that use extended Latin characters. In fact
SIL is apparently working with UNESCO on a proposed keyboard layout for African
languages precisely because there is not yet any such standardization. See
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?
site_id=nrsi&item_id=AfricanKeyboard1 . Likewise, part of the reason for all
the effort re keyboards that you see at http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/Projects/
is that there lack any standards.
Ultimately, however, we may be talking about not one keyboard that covers all
languages nor keyboards for each language, but, as Marcel Diki-Kidiri of CNRS
has suggested elsewhere, several layouts that would each cover a region or
number of countries and all the languages therein.
This may be a bit off-topic for the Unicode list but is definitely on-topic for
the a12n-collaboration group for any who want to pursue it there.
Don Osborn
Bisharat.net
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