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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

#71

Post by marci »

max_ wrote: post #42
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…

You haven't seen Amharic on Ethiopian Airline planes? The project supports many other languages which justifies the use of "African".

The issue might be in the "About" section:

"This application allows you to type most of the characters in the african language in any text field."

Maybe it should say "in AN african language", rather than "in THE african language".

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

#72

Post by beAbU »

geenkeuse wrote: post #57
pythonbrad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Khoekhoe is one of the languages I referred to in my GP.

I've seen it written in ascii, is there an alternative alphabet?

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

#73

Post by kragen »

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…

this was the inspiration for http://canonical.org/~kragen/alphanumerenglish, in which i would write 'bro, ai dj7st wok 7p en h4d e s1k br3kfest', because it turns out that english also has a lot of specific sounds that don't have a direct equivalent in the latin script, and i think the solution people have been using for 1000 years in english is a lot worse than the solution arabic-speakers commonly use

(unfortunately i don't even speak enough arabic to know if you're actually writing in arabic or in a berber language like tamazight here)

(ai 4m ev k0rs w3l ew3r qet ref0rmi6 i6gl1c sp3l16 1z e fulz 3rend, qe d4wnfal ev m3ni en eks3ntr1k over qe sentceriz)

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

#74

Post by kragen »

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…

> aren't most or all African writing systems based on small alphabets?

well, perhaps the most famous african writing system has a fairly large inventory of over 1000 characters, but it hasn't been widely used for about 2000 years due to religious persecution

the writing systems that are most widely used in africa are the latin alphabet and the arabic abjad, but as i tiresomely repeat every time the subject comes up, africa is immensely diverse, to the point that generalizations about africa are only slightly more useful than generalizations about non-elephant mammals

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

#75

Post by MisterTea »

kragen wrote: post #74
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…

> aren't most or all African writing systems based on small alphabets? well, perhaps the most famous african writing system has a fairly large inventory of over 1000 characters, but it hasn't been widely used for about 2000 years due to religious persecution the writing systems that are most widely used in africa are the latin alphabet and the arabic abjad, but as i tiresomely repeat every time the subject comes up,…

> well, perhaps the most famous african writing system has a fairly large inventory of over 1000 characters, but it hasn't been widely used for about 2000 years due to religious persecution

Which is ...?

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

#76

Post by MrJohz »

MisterTea wrote: post #75
kragen wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> aren't most or all African writing systems based on small alphabets? well, perhaps the most famous african writing system has a fairly large inventory of over 1000 characters, but it hasn't been widely used for about 2000 years due to religious persecution the writing systems that are most widely used in africa are the latin alphabet and the arabic abjad, but as i tiresomely repeat every time the subject comes up,…

> well, perhaps the most famous african writing system has a fairly large inventory of over 1000 characters, but it hasn't been widely used for about 2000 years due to religious persecution Which is ...?

I believe they're referring to hieroglyphics, although I didn't know the story about religious persecution and would be interested in some context there.

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

#77

Post by crackalamoo »

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…

Urdu uses a QWERTY-based layout (so ق is where Q normally is, etc.), and adapts the shift key for additional characters. I find this much easier than the Arabic keyboard layout. I think non-Latin script alphabets should try to match QWERTY as much as possible.

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

#78

Post by mtalantikite »

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.

Yeah, it's the same in Algeria and Tunisa. I was working with a derja tutor for a while and on day one she gave me the phonetic map like the parent comment pointed out, as it's ubiquitous.

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

#79

Post by j16sdiz »

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.

Korean is phonetic.

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

#80

Post by samatman »

geenkeuse wrote: post #57
pythonbrad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> the oldest languages on the planet, as spoken by the oldest people

Begging your pardon, this is a nonsensical thing to say. One people are not older than another, and nor are their languages.

As it happens, the Khoisan show greater genetic divergence from the rest of the human race, indicating that as a population they have been relatively more isolated, for longer. This does not in any sense imply that they are in some way basal, such that it would be intelligible to call them older than other branches of the family tree.

This same objection applies to characterizing their languages in that way, we have no way of knowing if their languages are less or more prone to mutation than any other. We have rather less to work with, in fact, as the absence of literacy in their societies until modern times leaves us with no evidence at all. But it would be astonishing if their languages had no drift to them, and even "less drift" is a major and unsupportable claim, and these are the only ways in which it would be intelligible to say that those languages are older than another.

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