Re: Re[2]: Berber/Tifinagh (was: Swahili & Banthu)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 17:22:21 EST

  • Next message: John Hudson: "Re: Re[2]: Berber/Tifinagh (was: Swahili & Banthu)"

    From: "John Hudson" <tiro@tiro.com>

    > At 06:36 AM 11/10/2003, Alexander Savenkov wrote:
    >
    > > > Yes, Philippe. It is the same thing as mapping Cyrillic to ASCII
    > > > letters. It is a hack. It is to be avoided. It is the Wrong Thing To
    > > > Do.
    > >
    > >I'm not sure I'm not taking your words out of the context, Michael.
    > >"The Wrong Thing To Do" can be seen everywhere in the newspapers when
    > >the names and some other words originally written in Cyrillic and
    > >other scripts are letter-by-letter (mapped?) transliterated to the
    > >resulting script.
    >
    > But that's transliteration *at the character level*. You are writing words
    > from one language in the conventions of another language (note that this
    > doesn't necessarily mean a change in script)

    The the case of Berber this is not true: it is the same language written
    with
    2 scripts (actually 3 as Arabic is also used). The mapping is not perfect
    for
    now, but there are works to correct this and adopt a single convention in
    each script (but with a question about whever the Tifinagh script used in
    Berber will be enough to display Berber texts written in Latin: will it
    accept
    new glyphs or diacritics to exhibit the missing letters used in the Latin
    script which unifies the whole set of languages using some variant of the
    Tifinagh script?



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