From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Dec 24 2003 - 05:35:32 EST
D. Starner
> > 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.
The absence of consensus for the orthograph is not a good reason,
it just reflects the low litteracy in these countries, which is
a consequence of a past absence of printed publications to teach
these languages at reasonnable costs, and the fact that all past
efforts have been to force natives to learn an official language,
most often foreign to them, to get access to culture and jobs.
Even in aided schoold programs that concentrate their efforts to
teach English, French or Arabic.
> > 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?
The number of writings is exploding, but most often out of Africa,
from the communities of emigrated people publishing books in other
countries. But there does seem to exist now efforts to print books
with local culture directly in Africa (notably in the North and
West of Africa, i.e. countries with Arabic and French official
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?
I know that: and there are reasons why some new characters are
needed to better reflect the oral language which corresponds to
the most important part of African cultural exchanges. Trying to
map approximate phonetics does not meet the requirements for people
that don't recognize there the phonology. There's a need to get
a coherent set of letters and diacritics that match their need.
The proposals already exist, and they are now theorized and used in
printed publications. But these publications are too much expensive,
to be exported to Africa, or often to be printed locally. If these
missing African letters used in printed publications were made more
accessible to average users of low-cost computers, there coul be
a flow of low cost transcripts of these languages for various social
uses, notably for education.
Having expensive printed books that just speak poetry or literature
is not enough: people need also more basic prints for their everyday
life. In English, you can learn to read Shakespeare, but you don't
have to learn to read with Shakespeare texts; this comes after. For
African languages, all what is available is often only high-level
poestry and languistic theories. But popular songs and common oral
culture is not printed in native languages, as well as political
subjects, agricultural technics, recipes, commercial documents,
advertizing...
Radio is the most popular media, but it also requires access to
energy (and battery cells are expensive), TV is rare and found only
in large cities, and too much seen as institutional. However free
radios are rare in Africa. Shamely, books and newspapers should be
the prefered and easiest way of exchanging information and culture,
but language is still a limit. Phone is expensive too, and snail
mail is too much exposed to aleas, but manually written faxes
could be cheap and easy for long distance communication, only if
African people really did know how to write and read themselves in
their own language, and it could promote freedom of communication.
> The roadmap isn't the standard, and it's not exactly immenent
> that it be fixed even if it is wrong.
I have said nothing about the roadmap. I ignore it, except for the
documents that describe the missing scripts and sometimes contain
draft proposals.
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