From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Wed Dec 24 2003 - 01:39:42 EST
> Could you instead take the time to work on the missing Latin
> letters for African languages?
Why don't you take the time to work on the missing Latin
letters for African languages? They aren't exactly the
hardest proposals in the world to write; just copy the
pages that show your needed character in action and fill
in the obvious answers (L to R, etc.) You can probably
beg a fontmaker to make a font.
> Why isn't there any serious
> work about these living languages that don't have lot of
> universitary support and nearly no computer resources in
> Africa to make this job?
Probably because there isn't much being printed in these
languages, and because there's no stable orthographies
for many of these languages.
> There are lots of work there to work with specifications,
> work with simple 8-bit encodings that could be mapped easily to
[...]
This is all moot. This is Unicode, not Save-the-world-code.
> You get people learn happily other cultures if they are not
> offered first the legitimate right to learn and use their own
> culture, i.e. their native languages and scripts.
Do many of these languagse have native scripts, or any
significant amount of writing in their languages?
> In many cases, African languages would be better served if the
> Latin characters needed for their languages were added and
> specified in accurate lists,
Arguably, African languages would be better served if they
could find within the 500 Latin characters already encoded
and the enormous selection of non-precomposed reasonable
Latin characters a set to fit their language. How many
different ways does a script really need for writing "sh",
anyway?
> But please avoid
> dogmatic attitutes, simply because people in this list do not
> have the same formalism as the one you created.
Generally, members who do a large part of the work and have
for a long time get to be dogmatic, because they actually
know what's up. The new guy who disagrees with him needs to
do some solid work for their disagreement to be of interest.
The roadmap isn't the standard, and it's not exactly immenent
that it be fixed even if it is wrong.
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