From: "John Cowan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Are we talking about a real non-Latin script, some kind of syllabary or logographic script, for Swahili and other Bantu languages? If so, I have never heard of one and I have not seen it roadmapped. The Latin script in common use certainly doesn't require complex ordering behaviour, although for some Bantu languages characters outside ISO-8859-1 may be required.
Marco Cimarosti scripsit:words
Why? 200 millions should be more than enough: that's more than 30.000
for each living language.
The Oxford English Dictionary has almost 10 times that many main entries. And if we want to record every obvious derivative, 4 million words (times 6000 languages) seems a reasonable upper bound. Granted, English has a fat vocabulary, but let's think big here.
In practice, it will always be rendered as
"-tu wa-" because no one will invest in implementing Swahili rendering.
Isn't most of that work already implemented for Indic scripts that require glyph reordering? Or do you mean the complexity of the work needed to create the glyph reordering tables (for logical to visual order)?
Isn't the Indic system now flexible enough to encode Banthu & Swahili languages? That's a shame because Swahili is one of the most spoken languages of the world (with millions of speakers), even before a lot of regional European languages that are fully encoded and supported in Unicode, and it really urgently needs to be more easily published to keep its associated culture.
Or did someone not notice that Marco's comments were about the word "joke"?
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
