Dear Tony Sir, When I was teaching in a Goa college, I had had formed an impression that, by and large, a student who had done all his studies in the English medium was very weak in the English language as far as understanding and expression are concerned; and I don't mean ordinary conversation at which he would be very good. He could never appreciate the fact that he must understand whatever he is learning; for him "learning" meant memorizing, period! And the reason for this was not far to find; all his life he earned his marks by reproducing verbatim the notes dictated by his teachers who never gave him any room to frame his own sentences. His power of expression was stultified. That was regarding a student in college. However, I never expected that the same would be the plight of a school teacher. But, to my mortification, I have lived to see that day as well! Today I find that a senior school teacher (a Headmaster, nothing less) is not able to differentiate between IMPLIED and EXPLICIT. When this is pointed out, he masquerades as a penitent infidel who offers to become an apostle of his opponents' perceived creed to the extent of embracing martyrdom, pound of flesh et al. He also concludes by saying "end of thread". But, like my former students, he did not mean what he wrote and did not write what he meant! For, within a matter of seventeen minutes, without provocation, he sent a missive in the self-same thread! Actually, I should not have been surprised; he is perhaps a product of the same learning-by-rote system. Poor guy! But I must exclaim: God save the Goan children who are being taught by such teachers! My dear Tony Sir, where have I (or Freddy) accused you of being against Konkani in Devanagari script? Please point that out, I beg of you. Or was it just a pretext to advertise your own supposed exploits? If so, let me tell you that downloading Devanagari softwares and using them is no great shakes. (And you don’t have to pay a pie unless you want to use them commercially.) I have been using them for over ten years. I first felt the need for this when the Konkani book I translated contained (in footnotes) many references in Devanagari and quotations in Sanskrit which, to be authentic, had to be reproduced as such. My colleagues in the Computer Science Department were not of much help in this regard; they were themselves beginners in this field. So I had to browse through the internet and try out my own solutions. And later, I even carried the software on a floppy to TAME cybercafe to do my typing there. (The volume of such a software is just around 50 kb.) Today I do my Devanagari typing at home and get print-outs of the same from TOQUINA (or any other) cybercafe who, by the way, do not have this software on their computer. It is so simple that many others could (or might) have done the same; but perhaps they were too modest to crow about it. So please cut the heroics and disabuse your mind of the notion that you have made an earth-shaking contribution to knowledge. Sorry to have burst your balloon! When you say that I fell for your spoof, either you are being naive or you rate all Goanetters as utter morons. Had I fallen for your ruse, I would have typed the word in DEVANAGARI. I did nothing of the sort. Perhaps, not surprisingly though, you did not understand my English. I had clearly stated that Goanet has no provision to correctly upload Konkani in ROMAN script. And, the Science teacher that I have been, I proceeded to demonstrate the truth of my statement. Here is what I did: On a Word document, I typed: (1) Quote -- (2) shift+g -- (3) Alt+0245 -- (4) y -- (5) Unquote. The Result was "Goy", the o having a ~ sign upon it. I copied this word and pasted it on my post to Goanet. The end result is what you saw. If you do not believe me, please try it yourself. For your information, and if you have not noticed it yet, posts in Goanet contain a question mark in place of quotes, hyphen and accented letters in the original text.
Sebastian Borges On Sat, 9 Apr 2011 11:17:04 +0100, Tony de Sa <[email protected]> wrote: << I am now yours and Freddy Fernandes' most ardent disciple for the cause of devnagri Konkani. Please keep Freddy by your side and lead me to the domains of those stupid parents from Diocesan schools and let us quell their demands with the power of your brilliant reasoning. With the zeal of a neo-convert, I shall join you in trumpeting your cause. Satisfied Prof? Or do you still want another pound of flesh? You may have that. Poof - end of thread. And on Sat, 9 Apr 2011 11:34:46 +0100, Tony de Sa <[email protected]> wrote: << For all the tom-tomers for the Devnagri script Konkan - A simple question : How many of you use the Devnagri script software? This thought was inspired when I sarcastically mentioned that GN was making arrangements to transliterate posts in Devnagri and the very enlightened Prof Borges fell for the spoof. For the information of all those who accuse me of being against Konkani, I would like to tell you at the risk of being called a boaster, that my institution was one of the first to procure Devnagri software and I saw to it that all my Konkani, Marathi and Hindi teachers typed their papers personally in the Devnagri script. Let me add to the first question : How many of you tom-tomers personally possess Devnagri software? I do. It is only a matter of investing some Rs. 300. How many of you have made efforts to try and see that our schools have free access to Devnagri software? I have. If you are grudging the Rs. 300, for whatever reason then go to the CDAC website - Google for CDAC and download it for free. Its a small download. I DO NOT sell software nor do I have commercial interests in this direction - in fact, I promote Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) but if you want to purchase the software, send me a private mail and I will direct you to the source.>> Sebastian Borges --
