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Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

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Re: Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

#51

Post by teractiveodular »

yorwba wrote: post #23
firefoxd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is Adlam for Fulani [1]. Widely spoken in west Africa. However, I'm still trying to familiarize myself with the writing system. The word for "yes" in fulani does not translate in writing. The best way I can write it is HIiiII. Imagine the lowercase i goes down in tone. Then the last two uppercase i shoots up. I don't know if any writing system supports this. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adlam_script

If there are no two words that are only distinguished by tone, it might be unnecessary to mark it in writing, except as a learning aid for people who're not fluent enough in the language to predict this information from context. E.g. in English, questions are marked by rising pitch, but that intonation is not indicated in writing.

FWIW, Japanese has tonal minimal pairs (ha'shi chopsticks, hashi' bridge, hashi edge), but doesn't bother marking them in (kana) writing. Although the Chinese characters are obviously different.

Re: Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

#52

Post by teractiveodular »

filleduchaos wrote: post #47
lelanthran wrote: post #36

I'm wondering what problem you experienced that this is a solution for. "African languages" is not, in my experience, a single class of languages. There are large differences between the languages, with most of the northern languages borrowing heavily from Arabic, most of the central African/West African languages borrowing from French and the rest are different enough that they can't be considered dialects.

What does that have to do with an IME library/project?

IMEs are usually very narrowly targeted at a single language or script. Claiming that this one is somehow superior to existing solutions for an entire continent's worth of languages with wildly different phonologies is unusual.

Re: Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

#53

Post by teractiveodular »

avodonosov wrote: post #39
ppseafield wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ge'ez and its adaptations are abugidas, which means one symbol is a full syllable. For Amharic there are over 200 individual symbols. [0] That would be a big keyboard! It does seem that most in-use languages in Africa are alphabets or abjads, which could be adapted to keyboards. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%CA%BDez_script#Ge%CA%BDez_w... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_systems_of_Africa

Thanks. So probably the user on the video types in a phonetic approximation of the words using the latin alphabet, and the software translates it to the abugida symbols? Seems plausable, especially because he types several latin characters to get one symbol. Interesting to note that sometimes he also uses digits.

The demo video appears to show typing in Fe'fe', which uses a Latin alphabet.

The library apparently also supports Amharic/Ge'ez, which does use an abugida, but I can't find any videos of this.

Re: Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

#54

Post by teractiveodular »

notamy wrote: post #48
pythonbrad wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the phonetic representation (IPA), you can obtain a writing system similar to the pinyin. Hanyu Pinyin Hànyǔ Pīnyīn Fāng'àn Bopomofo ㄏㄢˋ ㄩˇ ㄆㄧㄣ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄤ ㄢˋ IPA [xân.ỳ pʰín.ín fáŋ.ân] Cameroonian dialect are written using the GACL who is similar to the IPA. Clafrica: Pookai2t peu2nze2e2 n*kut ! Shʉ̄pāpə̀m (Bamoun): Pookɛ́t pә́nzéé ŋkut !

> Cameroonian dialect are written using the GACL who is similar to the IPA. What exactly is the GACL? Trying to find information on it returns this HN comment as the top result, and a bunch of language-unrelated results after that.

From another comment, it's the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Alphabet_of_Cameroon_L...

Re: Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

#55

Post by pythonbrad »

teractiveodular wrote: post #49
beAbU wrote: post #15

It's interesting, having grown up in Africa, and lived there almost 35 years, reading, writing and speaking an African language, being surrounfed by at least 10 other African languages and seeing them written, that I have never ever in my entire life encountered this writing system. I think the product is a great technological achievement, but... I would warn against the generalisation of "African" in this context. I…

FWIW, the only languages supported appear to be Amharic (modern Ethiopian), Ge'ez (classic Ethiopian, basically only used in church liturgy today), and one rather obscure language (Nufi/Fefe, ~140k speakers) spoken in a small part of Cameroon. This is indeed a pretty long way from being a pan-African solution.

It’s true that we currently have few languages in our dataset, but by supporting Nufi, we are supporting all Cameroonian languages since their alphabets have been standardized under the General Alphabet of Cameroonian Languages (GACL). Additionally, we support the CLAFRICA code, which allows for typing in GACL. This GACL indirectly supports other African languages as well.

Regarding Geez and Amharic, the objective was to support a language distinct from Latin. Its implementation allows us to avoid being limited to Latin-based languages.

Re: Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

#56

Post by pythonbrad »

teractiveodular wrote: post #52
filleduchaos wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that have to do with an IME library/project?

IMEs are usually very narrowly targeted at a single language or script. Claiming that this one is somehow superior to existing solutions for an entire continent's worth of languages with wildly different phonologies is unusual.

`afrim` is not just an IME. It can be used as a library to develop another IME. It's an important point that I neglected in the README.

Re: Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

#57

Post by geenkeuse »

pythonbrad wrote: post #55
teractiveodular wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the only languages supported appear to be Amharic (modern Ethiopian), Ge'ez (classic Ethiopian, basically only used in church liturgy today), and one rather obscure language (Nufi/Fefe, ~140k speakers) spoken in a small part of Cameroon. This is indeed a pretty long way from being a pan-African solution.

It’s true that we currently have few languages in our dataset, but by supporting Nufi, we are supporting all Cameroonian languages since their alphabets have been standardized under the General Alphabet of Cameroonian Languages (GACL). Additionally, we support the CLAFRICA code, which allows for typing in GACL. This GACL indirectly supports other African languages as well. Regarding Geez and Amharic, the objective wa…

Can't wait for you to get started with the oldest languages on the planet, as spoken by the oldest people on Earth, the Khoisan languages. Hope that is in the pipeline, as the Khoi and San is almost eradicated in all of Africa and many of their languages are now extinct.

Khoekhoe is a nice start.

I think people will lose their minds if they see how it is written.

Fun fact - The Khoisan gave all the Bantu languages that have it, the click sound.

There are a lot of different clicks in the Khoisan languages. So many that they need exclamation marks and every other symbol on the keyboard to accommodate them.

Re: Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

#58

Post by pcdandy »

teractiveodular wrote: post #50
firefoxd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is Adlam for Fulani [1]. Widely spoken in west Africa. However, I'm still trying to familiarize myself with the writing system. The word for "yes" in fulani does not translate in writing. The best way I can write it is HIiiII. Imagine the lowercase i goes down in tone. Then the last two uppercase i shoots up. I don't know if any writing system supports this. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adlam_script

> While they were teenagers in the late 1980s, brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry devised the alphabetic script to transcribe the Fulani language.[3][6] One method they used involved them closing their eyes and drawing lines. After looking at their drawn shapes, they would pick which ones would look the most to them like a good glyph for a letter, and associate it with whatever sound they felt it would represent.…

> disappointed that so many people thought this was a good idea

Perhaps it's more that Fulani speakers truly appreciated having an alphabetic script that is able to adequately represent the distinct sounds of their language without ambiguities, which had not been the case with the Latin or Arabic scripts. Cultural pride also would have played a factor, there's a reason South Korea has a special holiday to commemorate the creation of Hangul script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Day

Re: Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

#59

Post by teractiveodular »

pcdandy wrote: post #58
teractiveodular wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While they were teenagers in the late 1980s, brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry devised the alphabetic script to transcribe the Fulani language.[3][6] One method they used involved them closing their eyes and drawing lines. After looking at their drawn shapes, they would pick which ones would look the most to them like a good glyph for a letter, and associate it with whatever sound they felt it would represent.…

> disappointed that so many people thought this was a good idea Perhaps it's more that Fulani speakers truly appreciated having an alphabetic script that is able to adequately represent the distinct sounds of their language without ambiguities, which had not been the case with the Latin or Arabic scripts. Cultural pride also would have played a factor, there's a reason South Korea has a special holiday to commemorate…

Hangul and the corresponding Japanese syllabaries made sense because Chinese characters are very poorly suited to writing Korean and Japanese.

Latin and Arabic, on the other hand, have a long history of being used for other languages and can be adapted to represent basically anything.

Re: Show HN: A modern way to type in African languages

#60

Post by lifthrasiir »

rafram wrote: post #43
saylisteins wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also don't understand why you'd want phonetic input methods I'm from Morocco, and most people here (myself included) are accustomed to typing on an AZERTY (or QWERTY) keyboard. Typing in Arabic using a standard keyboard layout can be quite cumbersome and slow for us (Most people never took the time to learn it), using latin alphabet for us is just more practical, and doesn't require you to learn a new way to type…

Really? That’s surprising to me. The Arabic keyboard layout is very simple to learn, and people in the Eastern Arabic-speaking world (Egypt, Jordan, etc.) seem to use it pretty universally. Obviously people write online with the “chat alphabet,” but I’ve never heard of anyone in the Levant actually using it to input Arabic characters.

The existence of direct keyboard layouts doesn't always imply that they would be popular though. I think this happens fairly regularly around the world and the only major exception I'm aware of is Korean where no phonetic input methods were widespread at any moment.
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