[LINK] Still marginally OT: Re: NSW Election Multilingual information is not accessible
Roger Clarke
Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
Wed Mar 9 21:49:42 AEDT 2011
I'm loving this thread about the all-but-intractability of language
representations.
I'm nowhere near Ash or Marg(h)anita's levels, but I do have a
half-second language (German), and a one-tenth-third language
(Schwyyzertueuetsch).
German-speakers call Swiss German a Halskrankheit - throat disease.
They have a point. Oh and by the way, Swiss German has only become a
written language in the last 50 years. Think through the
implications of that.
Added to that, I delighted in my struggle to teach Hong Kong Masters
students why the representation of Chinese characters requires 2-byte
Unicode, and how it does it, and why glyphs are significant, even in
e-communications. They nodded their approval that I'd more-or-less
got the point that needed to be made. (But they're polite people, so
can I be *sure* I'd got it??).
I can even recognise a Chinese character.
Precisely one.
But a significant one.
It's the doughnut with a vertical line through the middle of it.
It's the single-character-rarity that represents the location on Hong
Kong Island called in English, but well, I guess also in Cantonese,
'Central'.
It's also 'central' to the notion of Chung man / Zhong wen or 'Middle
[Kingdom] Writing' (or mother tongue) - which is one of the crude
devices that was used to subjugate Chinese for the odd millennium or
two.
And until then I thought 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' was romantic??
I was delighted to get on top of the notion of 'glyph', because it's
very difficult to grasp, and to convey, when you and they are English
readers/writers. The 'Goedel / Escher / Bach' page on 'The Quality
of A-Ness' is the only time I've ever seen the job done properly.
... And yes, I acknolwedge that I'm a hold-out for 7-bit ASCII email.
But who ever promised to not be a hypocrite (%-)}
At 20:51 +1100 9/3/11, Ash Nallawalla wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Marghanita da Cruz [mailto:marghanita at ramin.com.au]
>
>> > I wouldn't mind knowing how many Indians on the electoral roll in
>> > Australia can't read English.
>> <snip>
>
>I wrote to the NSW elections website about their accessibility
>statement and got an autoresponder but no human reply so far.
>
>> There may be some dependents, who have an obligation to vote, who may
>> not speak english. However, the next question is whether they can read the
>> devanagri script or Hindi.
>
>True, but how many dependents are young enough for the compulsory
>vote and citizens to boot? I hope they survey some migrant
>associations to find that out. When I sponsored my parents, they
>were too old to vote and never became citizens. Given the exam they
>have to pass these days, I suspect the number would be very low.
>
>> Isn't Urdu written in Arabic?
>
>No. "Marghanita" (assuming silent h) can't be written in Arabic
>(«-ëÊÍ «) with enough precision compared to Urdu («-¯«Ê? «), so
>the next Arabic reader will not be able to render it correctly if
>they see it written down.
>
>Urdu is closer to Farsi but with many unique glyphs to render Urdu
>sounds more accurately. While both Farsi and Urdu are based on
>Arabic, they contain sounds that don't exist in Arabic e.g. ch, p, g
>etc. This is why you hear random Arabs on TV say "beace" instead of
>"peace". Anyway, Urdu can be transliterated in other scripts;
>therefore, the Hindi used by the Govt of India elections website
>includes Urdu words.
>
>> Tamil and a few other Indian languages have their own script.
>>
>> Under the Arabs it was probably written in Arabic, under the Portuguese,
>> Konkani was written in the Roman Script, and it is now written in the
>> DevanA"?garA"? script and apparently several others...
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konkani_Script>
>
>Konkani is a dialect rather than a language - a common point of
>debate - http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/konkani.php - my
>mother's Konkani from Karwar sounds different from the one spoken by
>Goans. As a child I didn't see written Konkani (in Devanagari) other
>than the Goan newspapers and books.
>
>> With the "Chinese" there is also the issue of the simplified vs the complex
>> character set and then the language - cantonese, hokien, mandarin....
>
>The spoken dialects use the same written logograms, so it is a
>delight to watch (say, Malaysian) Chinese conversing in English and
>reverting to the Chinese script when the other person speaks a
>different dialect. I used to know a group with Hokkein and Hakka
>speakers who did this when they had to explain something that they
>could not in English.
>
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--
Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au http://www.xamax.com.au/
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University
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