[Lexicog] UNICODE

[Jimm GoodTracks]

I thank you for your perspectives and example for the conversion to use 
Unicode for Yoruba.  I am in agreement as to its usefullness and I do 
appreciate the value for standardization of fonts which has been an issue in 
the past.  The key is to have easy and reliable application software 
programs available, in order to do the conversions without it becoming a 
chore.
Jimm GT


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Maxwell" <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2005 9:55 AM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] UNICODE


> Jimm GoodTracks wrote:
>> What is the thoughts of those who are well into their dictionary work
>> and may be confronted with the task of redoing it all over again in the
>> Unicode fonts.
>
> This story is not about my dictionary, but I was a consultant on it.  At
> the LDC, Yiwola Awoyale compiled a large dictionary of Yoruba in Shoebox,
> using a hacked (home-made) font.  I recently wrote a simple encoding
> converter that changed this unique encoding into Unicode.
>
> It wasn't a question of re-doing anything, it was simply a question of
> running the encoding converter over the dictionary and opening the result
> in a Unicode-aware editor (we used Toolbox) to make sure things came
> through correctly.  (As it turns out, there were some difficulties in the
> resulting Unicode, having to do with stacked diacritics that didn't appear
> correctly in the Arial Unicode MS font.  So I modified the converter and 
> we
> ran it again, using a different way of representing the stacked 
> diacritics.
>  For the techies here, the better visual result was obtained with a
> non-normalized Unicode representation.)
>
> The other issue we had to deal with was the keyboard setup.  Yiwola had
> been using one keyboard program, but Toolbox doesn't work with that.  So 
> we
> had to install Keyman, and produce a key mapping that conformed to the way
> Yiwola is used to doing them.  Last I heard there were some other minor
> issues with this, but I expect them to be solved.
>
> > Is it not unlike the large nations imposing their national language
>> on the minority languages, Tagalog, English, Japanese, et.al., on the
>> individual Filipino, the Native American and Spanish/ Chinease Americans
>> or the Ainu.   The plan for a standard is well meant, but devaluation
>> sets the course for the minority community language to become an
>> endangered language, and with that, a whole culture world view and way
>> of thinking.  Perhaps it is not the same thing.
>
> I agree with the last sentence: I don't see standardising on Unicode as
> devaluation in any way.  Quite the opposite: it is a way for minority
> languages to gain access to computational tools despite the fact that the
> languages in question do not have "market value."   So you can use Unicode
> to preserve the minority languages.  It is also a way to avoid 
> splintering,
> where there are different--competing--ways of representing texts in the
> language.  Here's a comment on splintering in Ethiopic encodings (for
> languages like Amharic and Tigrinya):
>
>    The task of describing formatting practices in
>    Ethiopia is one on par with describing the shapes
>    of clouds in Ethiopia.
>   (—http://www.abyssiniacybergateway.net/fidel/l10n/)
>
> That is, in the past it has been difficult to share electronic versions of
> Ethiopic data among different users precisely because there was no
> standard.  When (or maybe if) Unicode becomes a standard for Ethiopic, 
> this
> problem will go away, at least for new documents.
>
> There's of course no reason that Unicode has to be the standard for any
> particular language, but it has the best chance.  There have been other
> attempts to develop standards for a language or for a group of languages;
> some have been successful (e.g. Thai), others have not (ISCII, for Indic
> languages).  But I see no reason not to go with Unicode as a standard.
>
>   Mike Maxwell
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 




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