Re: [gutvol-d] jeroen's even-handed analysis
The village schoolmaster in a third world village, who has two hours of electricity a day, one cellular phone for the entire village, and an obsolete laptop donated to him by a first world company with a connection from the phone to the laptop cobbled together by a gadget-minded Peace Corps volunteer or church or UN aid worker, doesn't give a squiddly about umlauts and grave accents.
Of course he does. How on Earth can he teach German or French, or expect his students to read a book in a language they are familiar with (in large parts of Africa, that would be French), without the proper umlauts and grave accents? -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
D. Starner wrote:
Of course he does. How on Earth can he teach German or French, or expect his students to read a book in a language they are familiar with (in large parts of Africa, that would be French), without the proper umlauts and grave accents?
Even worse, many African languages are written with the Latin alphabet, but using additional letters, such as an F with a curl, which, until very recently weren't supported by most computers or typewriters, and thus conveniently replaced by their nearest counterparts. You could have a look at this nice page on the Gentium font, which is really nice, and was developed with support for african languages in mind. (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium) Support for most Indian languages is only widely available since Windows and Office XP, and many less widely used languages are still not supported, let alone on the old hardware we donate (I decided recently to increase my bottom line from Pentium 90 to Pentium II 266 for machines I donate to schools in the Philippines, the latter can just run windows 2000 with Unicode support.) Jeroen.
Jeroen Hellingman wrote:
Support for most Indian languages is only widely available since Windows and Office XP, and many less widely used languages are still not supported, let alone on the old hardware we donate (I decided recently to increase my bottom line from Pentium 90 to Pentium II 266 for machines I donate to schools in the Philippines, the latter can just run windows 2000 with Unicode support.)
Then Linux should run just fine. It has also the advantage of not tying those countries into harmful financial dependencies. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
participants (3)
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D. Starner -
Jeroen Hellingman -
Marcello Perathoner