D. Starner > > Why isn't there any serious > > work about these living languages that don't have lot of > > universitary support and nearly no computer resources in > > Africa to make this job? > > Probably because there isn't much being printed in these > languages, and because there's no stable orthographies > for many of these languages.
The absence of consensus for the orthograph is not a good reason, it just reflects the low litteracy in these countries, which is a consequence of a past absence of printed publications to teach these languages at reasonnable costs, and the fact that all past efforts have been to force natives to learn an official language, most often foreign to them, to get access to culture and jobs. Even in aided schoold programs that concentrate their efforts to teach English, French or Arabic. > > You get people learn happily other cultures if they are not > > offered first the legitimate right to learn and use their own > > culture, i.e. their native languages and scripts. > > Do many of these languagse have native scripts, or any > significant amount of writing in their languages? The number of writings is exploding, but most often out of Africa, from the communities of emigrated people publishing books in other countries. But there does seem to exist now efforts to print books with local culture directly in Africa (notably in the North and West of Africa, i.e. countries with Arabic and French official languages. > > In many cases, African languages would be better served if the > > Latin characters needed for their languages were added and > > specified in accurate lists, > > Arguably, African languages would be better served if they > could find within the 500 Latin characters already encoded > and the enormous selection of non-precomposed reasonable > Latin characters a set to fit their language. How many > different ways does a script really need for writing "sh", > anyway? I know that: and there are reasons why some new characters are needed to better reflect the oral language which corresponds to the most important part of African cultural exchanges. Trying to map approximate phonetics does not meet the requirements for people that don't recognize there the phonology. There's a need to get a coherent set of letters and diacritics that match their need. The proposals already exist, and they are now theorized and used in printed publications. But these publications are too much expensive, to be exported to Africa, or often to be printed locally. If these missing African letters used in printed publications were made more accessible to average users of low-cost computers, there coul be a flow of low cost transcripts of these languages for various social uses, notably for education. Having expensive printed books that just speak poetry or literature is not enough: people need also more basic prints for their everyday life. In English, you can learn to read Shakespeare, but you don't have to learn to read with Shakespeare texts; this comes after. For African languages, all what is available is often only high-level poestry and languistic theories. But popular songs and common oral culture is not printed in native languages, as well as political subjects, agricultural technics, recipes, commercial documents, advertizing... Radio is the most popular media, but it also requires access to energy (and battery cells are expensive), TV is rare and found only in large cities, and too much seen as institutional. However free radios are rare in Africa. Shamely, books and newspapers should be the prefered and easiest way of exchanging information and culture, but language is still a limit. Phone is expensive too, and snail mail is too much exposed to aleas, but manually written faxes could be cheap and easy for long distance communication, only if African people really did know how to write and read themselves in their own language, and it could promote freedom of communication. > The roadmap isn't the standard, and it's not exactly immenent > that it be fixed even if it is wrong. I have said nothing about the roadmap. I ignore it, except for the documents that describe the missing scripts and sometimes contain draft proposals. __________________________________________________________________ << ella for Spam Control >> has removed Spam messages and set aside Newsletters for me You can use it too - and it's FREE! http://www.ellaforspam.com
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