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HughP / dnj-corpus

A small corpus of a local newspaper
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Alternate alphabets #7

Open iandoug opened 6 years ago

iandoug commented 6 years ago

Hi

Poking around the net, getting educated. The current DNJ alphabet has things I don't like so much, like confusing letters, excessive diacritics, and doubled letters for vowels, all of which are unhelpful in designing an efficient keyboard.

So posting this here for reference/discussion. In particular, Nigeria is in the same broad language grouping (plus two more), with over 500 languages, and they produced one keyboard to rule them all... so maybe we can borrow some ideas here. I know this is not in alignment with current corpus or current usage, but linguistically it is early days and maybe possible to steer the boat in a better direction. Also like to stand on the shoulders of giants when reinventing the wheel :-)

image_2018-06-09_13-49-31

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Nigerian_alphabet (b, d, k variants may be confusing)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinka_alphabet (not wild about this but it includes /ŋ/ )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_Alphabet ( f ƒ ʃ may cause issues, especially when hand-written)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_reference_alphabet (not Unicode friendly)

HughP commented 6 years ago

This is a good discussion to have. There is lots of strong opinion on this issue. Dnj is in fact considering a proposal for an orthography revision. However, there are a lot of issues that go into what makes a good revision. One of those issues is type-ability. However when orthography changes do occur th role of technology in them is either minimized or subjected to. There must be a difference between a good keyboard layout and a good orthography. Both play into a good user Experience when typing.