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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

#61

Post by snthpy »

crazygringo wrote: post #28

I've visited all the links and honestly still don't have the slightest idea what this input method does, or exactly what problem it's trying to solve, or why it's a good solution to the problem. I found the video [1] but it has no audio or explanations at all. I also don't understand why you'd want phonetic input methods, rather than wanting to input your desired character directly. For languages like Chinese I under…

Great to see more support for African communities!

I have to concur with the previous comment though that I'm unclear as to what this adds.

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

#62

Post by inejge »

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.…

> Hot take

Uh yeah it is. A writing system needs a flat surface, a writing implement, and a mind prepared to learn. If enough people think that the new alphabet is a good idea, fonts and layout engines will follow. For Adlam, they did. (Another invented system which took off indigenously: Cherokee syllabary[1].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

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

#63

Post by vintermann »

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.

> but that intonation is not indicated in writing

Oh?

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

#64

Post by lelanthran »

pythonbrad wrote: post #56
teractiveodular wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> `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.

That's all good, but I am very curious about the use-case that motivated the creation of this project.

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

#65

Post by presentation »

ppseafield wrote: post #18
avodonosov wrote: post #8

Similar to other commenters, I am curious to know what is the problem with african languages? Can't you just make a button for each character in the alphabet? (The readme mentions it is a phonetic-based input method, so I assume African languages use alphabets, not some logograms, right?) What is common for African languages that allows solving the problem for all of them together in one software package? (How meanin…

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

Would these African abugidas be served well with a keyboard like the mobile 10-key Japanese swipe keyboards? [1] Japanese has much fewer sounds so it all fits in a pretty small package but it works so much better and faster than romaji in that context. Maybe it could be adapted with slightly more keys and complex swipe patterns, like up then right/left etc (it looks like for ge’ez at least, such patterns might actually be intuitive eyeballing the patterns in the characters, but someone native would know best).

[1] https://youtu.be/Q204SYyfEJY?si=KWe1sny93MeBScuT

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

#66

Post by pythonbrad »

I added a FAQ[1] to answer some common questions.

For more reading, there is an article[2] who have similarities with what we want to achieve.

Disclaimer: We discovered the article 01 year after the development.

[1]https://github.com/pythonbrad/afrim/blob/main/FAQ.md

[2]https://hughandbecky.us/Hugh-CV/talk/2015-africa-assessing-t...

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

#67

Post by the_g0d_f4ther »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #60
rafram wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s also related to the the layout of the first phone’s keyboards, where you had to type up to three times to select a letter ( it also was latin characters only)

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

#68

Post by rldjbpin »

saylisteins wrote: post #33
crazygringo wrote: post #28

I've visited all the links and honestly still don't have the slightest idea what this input method does, or exactly what problem it's trying to solve, or why it's a good solution to the problem. I found the video [1] but it has no audio or explanations at all. I also don't understand why you'd want phonetic input methods, rather than wanting to input your desired character directly. For languages like Chinese I under…

> 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…

very interesting approach! in south asia, due to similar exposure to tech (through qwerty), we too use a phonetic approach, but without touching the visual aspect of the script.

it gets a little ambiguous, however, because we have ~2x the symbols that latin allows (before you get into accents). the workaround is to combine multiple symbols to replicate the phonetic sound the target character is meant to capture.

curious to see if the tooling can be combined to use across languages that can work with similar approach as the OP.

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

#69

Post by whatjadat2 »

As a "african" myself, living and working in africa for the last 46 years, and speaking 4 different african languages. I am struggling to understand what "problem" this is trying to solve? It's never been an issue to type in an "african" language. And what is meant by "african" There is a big difference between for example zulu from south africa and arabic in morocco. And then we are not even touching on the thousands of languages in between that in the rest of africa.

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

#70

Post by specialist »

avodonosov wrote: post #10
DazWilkin wrote: post #5

I was intrigued by this and looked through the README for examples of Afrim being used and learn more about the problem it's solving and how but didn't find these.

This video linked from the HN post is an example, although I did't understand yet how it works. They type on a latin keyboard but get some other symbols in result. https://github.com/pythonbrad/afrim-keyboard/

Well spotted, I somehow missed that, thanks.

Noob me has no idea how editing is done. Delete and re-enter?

Have you ever used WordPerfect's reveal codes mode? It'd show both the actual input stream (characters you typed) and the formatted (rendered) output at the same time. (Here's the top hit showing the feature on Windows. https://youtu.be/LQOYYi2IHIY I used the DOS version, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth; I loved it.)

Should/Could there be a "reveal codes" mode for text input?

I've never used an IME, so please disregard this notion if it's not even wrong. :)

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