From: Don Osborn (dzo@bisharat.net)
Date: Wed Dec 20 2006 - 09:05:11 CST
Luke, IMO there are a few issues involved here. Mike Maxwell's comments are
also relevant (I append those for reference since this seems to begin a new
thread).
First, was the main reason your friend stuck with the old product
convenience or a perceived problem with Unicode? If the former, I have
encountered similar attitudes. And I don't see that as a problem so long as
they are not encouraging other colleagues and students who don't know better
to use the same solution. On the whole Mike is probably correct that this is
ever less a problem in academia. WRT the field and locations outside of
relatively technology-privileged (and Anglophone) environments, see below.
Second, if they perceive a problem with Unicode and don't air it, that
penalizes everyone - if a misunderstanding it is not cleared up; if a real
problem it is not addressed. Non-conflict is not assent. I'm aware for
instance of a continued current of concern re dynamic composition among some
Francophone researchers who have a lot of field experience, but haven't had
time to dialogue with them to better understand better their POV.
Third, the issue of "not knowing" about Unicode (which we may extend to
include having heard about it but not much more) is of concern on another
level. I have just learned of an effort in Togo to create a font for Ewé and
other languages of the country. Still seeking info on that, but if indeed
this is a new 8-bit font, it is part of a larger problem relating to missing
entirely the existence and point of Unicode (to create such a font, one
would probably be working on a computer system with one or another "Unicode
font" already installed that includes the characters one seeks to use).
In the longer run, Unicode, by force of logic and decisions of industry,
will continue to expand in use. But is that sufficient? Are the cases
indicated above just isolated anomalies or do they indicate a need for more
proactive international PR and extension (which involves listening & taking
account of local issues as well as giving info & training) by Unicode? If
the latter, then what approach - a "diva"? or someone to strategize and
organize "roadshows"? or? (Money, of course is needed, but let's talk of the
ideal approaches - beginning with whether they are indeed needed.)
Don Osborn
Bisharat.net
PanAfrican Localisation project
_________________________________________
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On
Behalf Of Luke Onslow
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 5:53 AM
To: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: Linguistics and Unicode
Dear all,
I am sure there are some linguistic scholar on board of this mailing list.
Do you currently see any limitations of the current version of Unicode apart
from the fact that there are still some writing systems that haven't been
ported to Unicode. Well to be PC, I mean non-official writing systems and
obsolete writing systems.
I talked with a linguist friend from Germany once and he was absolutely
unaware of Unicode and was sticking to the good old product he was using.
Didn't give the name of the product though? Anyone knows?
Regards,
Luke
________________________________________
> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On
> Behalf Of Michael Maxwell
> Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2006 4:37 PM
> To: unicode@unicode.org
> Cc: Michael Maxwell
> Subject: RE: Unicode or specific language charset
>
> > 1) Some people working with diverse languages (thinking here of some
> > academic linguists) who have found comfortable solutions in the past
> > involving non-Unicode fonts may be reluctant to change. These are
> > probably fewer by the day, and I imagine that anyone who has been
> > exchanging text widely in languages with extended Latin or non-Latin
> > characters will have seen the advantage of working in Unicode.
>
> I used to be one of those persons, when I worked on minority languages
> in Colombia. I would say the situation was (and maybe still is) more
> common with field linguists (working in minority languages) than it is
> with academics in general.
>
> Still, there is considerable impetus towards using Unicode in field
> linguistics--an increasing number of tools for field linguists are
> available in Unicode versions, the IPA has virtually all the characters
> one would need when recording data phonetically or phonemically,
> sufficient characters are available in Unicode for practical
> orthographies(!), major organizations that deal with minority/
> previously unwritten languages are encouraging or even mandating the
> use of Unicode, etc.
>
> I think the only real issue for field linguists is that in some areas
> with complex orthographies, the fonts to implement those Unicode
> characters might be too language-specific. I can imagine that someone
> working with a minority language in India might find that standard
> Devanagari (etc.) fonts might not behave they way they need.
>
> I don't have any real examples of that, but I can say that the font/
> rendering support of Unicode for Yoruba (which of course has been
> written for over a century) was lacking. Specifically, the combination
> of a dot under a vowel ('e' or 'o') plus a tone mark (grave or acute
> accent) does not look "pretty". You can see examples at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_language. When I look at this page
> on a Windows XP machine, the tone marks over the plain vowels are
> "correctly" placed (presumably built-in glyphs in the font), whereas
> the tone marks over the dotted lower-case vowels are much too high;
> while either the tone marks are too far to the right over the dotted
> upper-case vowels, or else the dot is too far to the right under the
> accented upper-case vowels (depending on which is composed first and
> therefore uses a built-in glyph, I suspect). (Mid-tone marks are not
> usually written, but in the wikipedia page you can see a few of these,
> and they have the same problems a!
> s the acute or grave accents on the dotted vowels, and also over the
> 'n' or engma.)
>
> While the font issues I'm describing are not the fault of Unicode, this
> is not obvious to the casual user--and the distinction may not matter
> to the user in any case. Such a user might very well turn to a
> proprietary font/ encoding for displaying Yoruba or some other language
> with similar issues. And as you may know, those proprietary fonts/
> encodings are all too common among the Indic languages...
>
> Mike Maxwell
> CASL/ U MD
>
> Mike Maxwell
> CASL/ U Md
>
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