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

[Tunde Adegbola <taintransit@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Don,
No, I do not have any problems with your classification. I was only pointing the out the Conrad views for completeness.
Tunde

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Tunde Adegbola (Ph.D.)

Executive Director

African Languages Technology Initiative

(Alt-I ... Inserting African issues into the agenda of the knowledge age)

www.alt-i.org

 

President

Tiwa Systems Ltd.

 

11 Oluyole Way, New Bodija Ibadan, Nigeria.

+234 8034019398

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Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:53:03 +1100
Subject: Re: [A12n-Collab] Re: 5 categories of African orthographies (Latin)
From: andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: a12n-collaboration@xxxxxxxxxxxx


On Fri, December 21, 2007 4:58 pm, Don Osborn wrote:

> 1) The original question: whether the system of categorization - 5
> categories of orthographies according to how unicode etc. supports them.
> Am
> I correct in concluding that no one has a problem with this? Reason I ask
> is
> that I want to use this in some writing and would rather get criticism now
> than later.

Don, sounds like a reasonable categorization to me.

> 2) Existing information on Latin-based orthographies of African languages.
>
> 2a) Hartell's 1993 book. Yes, this is one we refer to often. I used it for
> a
> series of charts on http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/#countrytables (Lee
> Pearce
> also did some work there), and more recently Christian Chanard set up a
> database using Hartell's data at http://sumale.vjf.cnrs.fr/phono/ .
> Problem
> is that there is no update to this, and indeed that expanding it would be
> a
> challenge given the fact some orthographies are not set. Some even
> apparently are changing

There are a few sites that now have collections of the Hartell data, e.g. Christian Chanard's database and the material on the Bisharat site to name two.

AT some point, it might be worth conforming the currency and accuracy of the Hartell data set.

Although some languages are still in a flux, it may be possible to start building a repository of orthographic data for various languages, start with what we know and extend out.

One issue is that most treatments only cover alphabetic characters. They don't necessary identify punctuation required to support a language, grammatical symbols required, or even other symbols such as currency symbols.

Additionally, its useful to collect information on collation sequences, some languages may have more than one collation sequence, a traditional order, and a more recent dictionary order.

Its also useful to collect sample texts in each language.

From the point of view of developing fonts, keyboards, locales and other building blocks
 
> 2b) Documents like the one by Jim Agenbroad that Charles referred to, and
> indeed the oft-discussed research John did (time to bring that up again)
> would indeed be great to get online for greater access.

I'd be interested in seeing how much of Jim's work was shaped or influenced by the limitations imposed on MARC.

A few of us have over the years gathered information form a variety of resources and in the early stages of this mailing list there was some quite useful sharing of information and data.

Recently, I've started going through some of the material I've gathered over the years, and cross checking it with other resources that are now available.

If anyone is interested, I'd be willing to coordinate a repository of data on African languages, assuming there is interest in collaborating and contributing to such an archive.

>
> 4) With regard to support for Category 4 orthographies (if we agree on
> that
> terminology), that is orthographies that need combining diacritics and
> hence
> support for those, the question of how good that support is, and indeed
> how
> good the concept is, have been around for a while. The suggestion that
> more
> precomposed characters be added to Unicode has been discussed on this list
> -
> see for instance the thread beginning with
> http://lists.kabissa.org/lists/archives/public/a12n-collaboration/msg00182.h
> tml .
>

>
> The fact that the question keeps getting raised (I hear it from others
> occasionally) is sign enough that there is a need to either clarify the
> support issues and how those are being addressed, or clarify how the
> system
> doesn't work. Continued doubts about dynamic composition either need to be
> addressed with better explanations (and real support) or alternatively -
> again from a NPOV - with a real proposal that makes the justification and
> proposes specific precomposed characters. This so that we can move forward
> one way or another rather than recycling debates.

The question is to what extend are these debates formed and shaped by old experiences, or the struggle to handle older computer hardware, software and operating systems (esp proprietary systems?

The biggest barrier to correctly handling combining diacritics are:

1) the amount of older computers in use, for which no practical solution exists (although it may be worth investigating the possibility of cut down Linux installations for older hardware that is optimized to support combining diacritics.

2) a lack of sound advice and detailed instructions on what is needed to successfully work with combining diacritics. I think part of the problem is lack of training and awareness.

>
> That said (now I'm no longer NPOV), the system apparently works but the
> support is not yet there for African languages. Maybe what the problem is,
> and also the key to the concerns raised by Tunde and Samuel, is that there
> still work to do to support input and display of Yoruba diacritics (and
> other "category 4 orthographies") - so obviously it doesn't seem to work.
>

>
> In any event, I think this discussion is very timely and would like to
> encourage people with whatever experience or expertise with category 4
> orthographies (i.e., ones that require use of combining diacritics or even
> stacking of diacritics) to let us know what they think.
>


--
Andrew Cunningham
Research and Development Coordinator
Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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