On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 12:41:06AM -0400, William J Poser wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] has made several claims about writing systems > for indigenous languages that I, as a linguist with a strong > interest in writing systems and substantial experience working > with indigenous people, not only as a linguist > studying their languages but as a staff member of indigenous > organizations, believe to be false.
I apologize if some of the claims I made were offensive to you as a linguist, or to other linguists. I was more offended by David Starner’s “Euro-centricism” as I called it, than by the activities of linguists and orthographers in themselves. Thank you for speaking up and for the detailed accounts and anecdotes. One situation I particularly had in mind was the colonial times in Africa. From my naive knowledge (mostly derived from bits and pieces I’ve heard here and there, and mention of African languages in documents on character set coverage and Unicode), it seems like there’s a lot of Latin orthography for African languages. Can you fill us in on any particular cases, and whether they were developed/imposed by white colonists or developed alongside and embraced by Africans at the time? As is quite apparent by now, I’m pretty ignorant on the matter and interested in learning. Another interesting example to look at is the use of Latin in writing Indian (India, not Native American) languages. My understanding is that now there are various scholarly standards for doing so, and perhaps Indian government standards for how to write names of places, etc., but my experience while in India was that spellings were extremely inconsistent and based on naive “phonetic English” spellings probably invented during the British occupation. The book you mentioned would surely be an interesting read. One example on which I’m not ignorant is systems for writing Tibetan in Latin script. These days there are primarily three systems, none of which seem to be used much by Tibetans except for language scholars. One, the Wylie transliteration, is a direct systematic transliteration of the Tibetan orthography. While it comes across very logical to me, it’s difficult to read and pronounce without being accomplished in both Tibetan orthography and the Wylie scheme, and I’ve met very few Tibetans who find it natural at all. For purposes where preservation of the original orthography is not important, members of the THDL project (www.thdl.org) have proposed a standard which seems somewhat reasonable, but which discards some phonetic data that’s meaningful to Tibetans for the sake of being easy for Westerners. Finally, there’s a Chinese-imposed system which they call “Tibetan Pinyin”, which is the worst of all. It basically preserves only the parts of Tibetan which fit into Chinese phonetics, resulting in horrible mispronunciation and confusion about word identity unless you can ‘guess’ which Tibetan word a “Tibetan Pinyin” word came from. In this latter case it’s a clear instance of imperial (albeit not Western) imposition of a Romanization, though thankfully without much success. Amusingly, I’ve hardly ever met Tibetan people who uses any of these systems, even when writing in Latin script. My experience has been that most just write according to whatever “English-like” phonetics come most easily. :) So, this is where some of my sentiment that linguist-designed Latin orthographies don’t work so well comes from. Obviously it’s not extensive data, just my own experience in a limited field. Again, I apologize for “mis-stating the ideology of linguists” as you quite nicely put it. I’d be happy if you have more information on these subjects to share, both insomuch as it relates to m17n and i18n and issues that developers should be aware of, and for its own sake. Best, ~Rich -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
