Re: intrinsic advantage of Latin alphabet over bopomofo (for Chinese)??


Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Mar 4, 11:47 am, phogl...@xxxxxx wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Mar 4, 5:53 am, phogl...@xxxxxx wrote:
Herman Rubin wrote:
I do not know if much larger alphabets than the Latin one
have been successfully placed on typewriters.

As I am supposed to learn Amharic one of these days, I wonder how a
typewriter would handle fidal, i.e. the Amharic syllabary.

Olympia manufactured an Amharic typewriter; its keyboard layout is
included in the catalog reproduced in the back of Beeching's *Century
of the Typewriter*. Have you not noticed that there is a considerable
amount of regularity in the composition of the characters?

Of course there is. As I understand the idea, it is somewhere between
a pure syllabary and an Arabic-like system, where (short) vowels are
written (if at all) by adding diacritics. In the Amharic writing
system, there are no diacritics, but rather modifications of the basic
letter forms (like, adding a hook on the right side, or shortening a
branch on the left side).



Actually,
the whole thing - I mean fidal - looks terribly crude and unreadable
to me.

Haven't you learned your lesson _yet_ about broadcasting bigoted
statements here?

You are the only bigot here. I am familiar with several alphabets, and
they all have their shortcomings. Arabic alphabet is excellent for
Semitic languages, but it is hardly bigoted to say that a more vowel-
friendly writing system would suit better for, say, Iranian languages.

Funny, the Iranians have never felt that way.

AFAIK some Kurds do use the Latin alphabet for their language, which
is unmistakably Iranian. And there are Latinization schemes for Farsi,
too.


Even though the Avestan alphabet was available to them several
centuries before the Arabic script.

It certainly was,. but if I am not very much mistaken, Middle Persian
(Pahlavi) used a script that represented vowels at least as
inadequately as the Arabic alphabet.

Cyrillic alphabet is very good for Russian, but it is tiring to read.

Thanks to uninspired typographers.

Just for this once, I completely agree with you.

Georgian alphabet is otherwise great, but it does not distinguish
upper- from lower-case letters, which in my opinion reduces
readability.

Hardly any of the world's writing systems distinguish majuscules and
minuscules.

It might be my natural Latin bias, yes.


Javanese has an interesting alternative.

Javanese? If I am not very much mistaken, they had a special set of
characters for writing important proper names.

I would prefer to write Amharic in the Arabic alphabet.

Even Ethiopian Muslims don't use an Arabic-derived script.

Well, I guess I'd better learn the fidal then and stop complaining.
There are lots of calligraphy books for learning to write Arabic, but
I have failed to find any for Amharic. Probably calligraphy is not
their cup of tea?

It looks more
elegant and is easier to read, and I think it would be no problem to
modify the Arabic alphabet for use in Amharic. But of course, for
saying that you will call me a crypto-Muslim fundamentalist bigot.

No, your bigotry is exposed by such words as "crude," "unreadable,"
and non-"elegant."

People have these things called aesthetic preferences, and I very much
prefer the Arabic alphabet - for aesthetic reasons. But then I have
always been fascinated by calligraphy.

Are you not aware that the Ethiopic script was the very first offshoot
of the West Semitic "alphabet" to include complete and consistent
vowel notation? And that it has been in use in virtually unaltered
form for more than 1750 years -- a claim that _no_ other script can
make!

Well, of course I might be plain wrong, and probably I just need more
practice in order to appreciate the script aesthetically.


Has it been directly computerized from manuscript characters,
or something?

Did you bother to investigate? Not long ago I downloaded a completely
serviceable Amharic font and IME, from a website gathering links to
all sorts of Unicode-related fonts. Type C and then V, and the correct
letter appears.

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/index.html

Thank you. I'll have a look at that.

.

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