2012/6/10 Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: > Michael Everson wrote: > >> we would want to see some practical examples of how and where it is in use >> by more than the inventor. > > Yes, but that's true for all proposals, isn't it? Otherwise Ewellic would > qualify.
May be that's not enough, there's now much more people than the inventor of Ewellic and Klingon, in many countries. But yes this is a side effect of the success of the books written by the inventor, the scripts and languages are popularized by fans (which then use these creations for new unrelated artworks and communications). Is that bad ? Ewellic in my opinion would qualify for encoding first before Mandombe which is still not representative of how the intended people even write their own language (and that certinaly first need to get litteracy decent level, without requiring a so specialized representation suitable only to those that are trained with a "mathematical" eye, and that will for now always need a paper with a preprinted grid, until there's some more convenient way : the computer will be more convenient than a simple sheet of paper, but much more expensive ; paper preprinted with grids may be found in schools, or in the form of notepads and paper notebooks.) But in Africa too, paper has a cost, wood resources are precious, and a script that uses so much space on costly types of paper with decent quality, just in order to be readable once it is rendered, cannot succeed easily. So the script will succeed somewhere else than in education : for artistic creations, or a secret code known to a small educated community that already has no problem reading the usual Latin and/or Arabic scripts. Another factor of resistance is the intent to make the sript "sacred" : this will hurt religious communities that will strongly refuse to use it, as long as no Bible or Quran is written transcripted with it, and as long as the author claims a distinct sacred status of his script. He would have more success in developping the script simply as an artwork, for fun, or because it may be beautiful (by using creative and less strict designs for its typography). He should no forget that Africans are experts in arts, and love geometric shapes in lots of objects, as long as they can be decrorated, recolored, dimensionned more freely, and used on various types of materials (not just paper but also stones, wood, clothings, carpets, everyday-used objects like plates and bowls, jewelry, or painted on walls, or as a decorative alternate script on the frontcover of books...)
