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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=3>Greetings! I am new to this list and am looking over some off the
archives.<BR>Hope it's okay to comment on some older postings.<BR><BR>Matthew
Ward's comments are very interesting. I've personally noticed the<BR>evolution
of e-mail and the internet in Chinese over the last decade or so<BR>(my wife is
Chinese). In the case of Africa and African languages things<BR>are moving
also, though the sociolinguistic terrain varies and has some<BR>differences from
much of Asia (the higher prominence of former colonial<BR>languages being one,
less of a written tradition, non-use of maternal<BR>languages in instruction,
and in the case of some less-spoken languages,<BR>lack of standard
orthography). One wonders about the potential for more<BR>multimedia uses
of ICT, including more creative use of audio, as the lines<BR>between
technologies become more blurred.<BR><BR>From a technical point of view, there
are no particular problems for text<BR>e-mail for languages using basically the
same Latin alphabet as West<BR>European languages. For the many languages
using modified letters and those<BR>using non-Latin scripts the technical
hurdles are no more insurmountable<BR>than those faced in Asia. Oddly it
sometimes seems that the orthographies<BR>with extended Latin orthographies have
more issues, because there may only<BR>be a few characters outside the European
character set - one can get by with<BR>substitute measures, more or less, and if
you use the extended characters,<BR>still some browsers and many e-mail readers
mess them up. Just recently on<BR>the Unicode-Afrique list, someone
actually wondered about creating an<BR>ISO-8859 for the Latin transcription of
Tamazight (not likely to happen, and<BR>a backwards step from implementation of
Unicode if it did).<BR><BR>Re the MailAfrica.net e-mail system that Phil Cash
Cash brought to the<BR>list's attention, there has also been another one out
there for a while at<BR></FONT><A href="http://www.africast.com"><FONT
face="Times New Roman" size=3>http://www.africast.com</FONT></A><FONT
face="Times New Roman" size=3> . Haven't checked to see if the two
are<BR>intercompatible.<BR><BR>Don<BR><BR>Don Osborn,
Ph.D. </FONT><A
href="mailto:dzo@bisharat.net"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=3>dzo@bisharat.net</FONT></A><BR><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=3>*Bisharat! A language, technology & development
initiative<BR>*Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie -
développement<BR></FONT><A href="http://www.bisharat.net"><FONT
face="Times New Roman"
size=3>http://www.bisharat.net</FONT></A><BR><BR><BR><BR><FONT
face="Times New Roman"
size=3>Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002
10:52:11 -0700<BR></FONT><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=3>From: Matthew Ward
</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=3>Subject: Re: Native Language Email
(article)<BR><BR>Good article, thanks.<BR><BR>I lived in Asia in the 1990's and
the early part of this decade, and I<BR>witnessed an amazing revolution in terms
of native language use of<BR>e-mail and Internet. In Thailand in the early
90's, for example, e-mail<BR>use was restricted to an elite who could
communicate in English, as<BR>then-current technology could not handle the Thai
writing system.<BR> Technological advances not only caused most people to
switch to Thai,<BR>they also brought in the majority of Thais who do not speak
English.<BR> Today, the idea of writing e-mail in English to other native
speakers<BR>of Thai would seem quaint indeed to most Thai teenagers, who
have<BR>already grown up with technology which allows them to use their
native<BR>language online with ease. People who are fluent in English may
use it<BR>to communicate with native speakers of other languages, but
native<BR>speakers of Thai now use almost exclusively Thai to communicate
among<BR>themselves. This revolution has also occurred in Japan and
Taiwan, the<BR>other two Asian countries that I have lived in.<BR><BR>Now, with
the need to write e-mail in English already a thing of the<BR>past, the new
trend has been towards e-mail programs which allow<BR>minority languages and
dialects to be used, which lessens the dependance<BR>on national Asian languages
like Standard Japanese, Standard Thai, and<BR>Mandarin Chinese. Last year,
my Japanese wife and I were riding a train<BR>in Japan, and she was transfixed
by a huge advertisement for a program<BR>which would allow her to write her
native dialect, Kansai Japanese,<BR>online. The advertisement showed what
would happen if you input Kansai<BR>Japanese into a standard program (the
computer would "misread" the<BR>phonetic input) vs. what would happen if you
used the program advertised<BR>(the program would correctly interpret the
phonetic input).<BR><BR>It is my experience that if you create technology which
allows people to<BR>easily use their native languages online, they will do it,
just as<BR>people prefer to use all other technologies in their native
languages.<BR> The only real challenge is creating the technology and
making it<BR>available to everyone.<BR><BR>Matthew Ward<BR><BR>Phil Cash Cash
wrote:<BR><BR>>Dear ILAT members,<BR>><BR>>Many of you might find this
recent news interesting where e-mail is used<BR>>for African languages such
as Swahili, Kikuyu, Luaya, Luo, Yoruba, Hausa<BR>>and Igbo. Below is a
link to the article, "Kenyan Company Creates Native<BR>>Language Email
Services."<BR>><BR>>http://www.time.com/time/interactive/stories/technology/inside_africa.html<BR>><BR>>Enjoy!
Note the multimedia links as well.<BR>><BR>>Phil Cash Cash (cayuse/nez
perce)<BR>>ILAT,
UofA<BR>><BR>><BR>></FONT><BR></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>