Re: [A12n-Collab] Re: [africa] 5 categories of African orthographies (Latin)

[Andrew Cunningham <andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all

Tunde Adegbola wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> Another interesting perspective on categorizing African orthographies 
> is offered by Conrad Taylor.  See 
> http://www.ideography.co.uk/library/afrolingua.html
> In my own work in language technology however, I do have problems with 
> the lack of unique code points for high/low tone sub dotted vowels.  
> This presents ambiguity because they can be achieve in more that one 
> way; by subdotting a tone-marked vowel, or by tone-marking a subdotted 
> vowel.  Both look exactly the same to a human reader but requires extra 
> lines of code for a computer to see both as the same.  It starts getting 
> distracting when you consider that this has to be cattered for in both 
> lowe and upper cases.
not really, from the point of view of web applications and web services, 
you're talking about one extra line of code to handle unicode 
normalization to your preferred normalization form. It would also be 
simple in various scripting languages to include either generic unicode 
case folding, or language specific case folding.
Fairly straight forward.

The issue isn't whether it is more complicated or relatively simple to 
process. Th issue is whether developers actually do the right thing.


> The response to requests for these code points is that such english 
> digraphs ans `sh` do not have code points.  This totally misses the 
> point because `sh` and `hs` do not look allike in any way.  If we accept 
> that Africans need to do more than read texts produced on a computer, if 
> we accept that Africans need to take full advantage of developments in 
> language technology, then UNICODE should concede these code points to 
> the relevant languages.
I'd actually argue that its not a Unicode issue. Its an application 
developers issue. Unicode provides both normalization and case folding.
The issue for so long has been:

1) very few font developers have created opentype or graphite that 
support Yoruba and other languages.
2) few vendors have implemented support for rendering with these fonts. 
But thankfully that's changing.
Although others on this list like John and Peter are in a better 
position to comment.
These two points are even more of an issue with languages that need to 
stake combining diacritics. In that sense,
3) applications and web services need to support input/rendering of 
combining diacritics, cursor movement and selection behaviour, Unicode 
normalization and case folding, among other things.
Most European languages don't need this type of support, so many 
developers either don't bother, or don't realise they need to bother.
When an developer says their application supports Unicode i always ask 
with bits they support (and which bits they don't support).
4) use a "smart" input mechanism, instead of a simple input mechanism. 
There are solutions on both Linux and Windows for developing keyboard 
layouts that will produce NFC or NFD output. Obviously this doesn't work 
with all input mechanisms, ịẹ the obvious ones.
My approach tends to be to prefer NFC, few fonts perform well when 
thrown NFD data, esp in web browsers. I've observed some interesting 
anomalies where characters do not visually appeared although actually 
present in the data. As soon as you convert the NFD data to NFC data you 
see the characters. When i have time i'll compile a list of problem 
character sequences the fonts and applications these appear in, and 
wether the problem is reproducable on other computers.
And it is possible to create a layout for Yoruba and other languages 
that produces NFC output.
I suppose I'm spoilt, I'm used to Vietnamese input systems that allow 
you to control output, i.e. NFC or NFD, NCRs and other formats.
--
Andrew Cunningham
Research and Development Coordinator (Vicnet)
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Australia

Email: andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au
Alt. email: lang.support+AEA-gmail.com

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