Edited by author 08-02-2006 09:21 PM
Hi Don & Andrew,

Great collection of information and knowledge.

Don's questions:
To the best of my knowledge almost all the orthographies of native languages in southern Nigeria were developed using the sub-dot. But recently some people have been using the diaeresis because all the system default fonts do not have the sub-dot. From my research the alphabets I listed flows with other native languages in the area.

Andrew:
I agree that using the LAMBDA is not the ideal thing, but I guess until we have Latin script fonts with the right Unicode codepoint, we have to make do with that for now.

George

Hi George,

Using Latin Capital Letter Turned V rather then Greek capital Lambda would be preferred. Casing will be an issue. Much simplier to keep things in the same script. When appropraite fonts become available, it would be straight forward to create a short mapping file using TECKit or similar to convert teh Greek Lambda to a Latin Turned V.

I'll let everyone know when I fear back about font updates.

Edited by author 08-02-2006 10:58 AM
Hi George, Here's a quick attempt to understand the alphabet / character set for Ibibio.

According to what I see on the Ibibio website mentioned in /m2, specifically on page http://www.geocities.com/myibibio/dictionary/alphabets.html the alphabet including digraphs (2 letter pairs) is:

Aa Ää Bb Dd Ee Ëë Ff Gg GHgh Hh Ii Ïï Kk KPkp KWkw Mm Nn Ŋŋ ŊWŋw ŊYŋy Oo Ọọ Pp Rr Ss Tt Uu Üü Ww Yy

... and my understanding of what you posted in /m11 is:

Aa Ạạ Bb Dd Ee Ǝǝ Ff GHgh Ḣḣ Ii Ịị Kk KPkp Mm Nn NYny Ŋŋ ŊWŋw Oo Ọọ Λʌ Pp Ss Tt Uu Ụụ Ww Yy

I suspect the My Ibibio site may have intended "ny" as you have, rather than "ŋy", but that's just a supposition.

Other than that the observations, differences and questions I note are:

1. Choice between subdot and diaresis for the special a, i and u (maybe o too? the "My Ibibio" page uses the subdot like in your example)
2. Choice between e-diaresis or turned-e for the special e
3. "My Ibibio" shows a plain g but you do not
4. You have an acute accent on the h but no plain h; "My Ibibio" has the reverse. Are there 2 "h" sounds in Ibibio?
5. You have the turned-v (I used capital lambda for the display) but My Ibibio does not. Is this used for a particular "l" sound?
6. Neither of you have c (English "ch" sound), j, l, q, v, x or z
   

This is just an attempt to get a clearer picture of what appear to be two alternate transcriptions. Thanks in advance for any further clarification.

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

(NB- I set the font face to facilitate display of the alphabets, but put "Gentium" as the first in the list. If you need that font it can be downloaded for free at: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.ph...id=Gentium_download )

Edited by author 08-02-2006 09:12 AM
Hi Andrew,

Below is my best collection of the alphabets, do note that some people use the diaeresis instead of the sub-dot.

Aa Ạạ Bb Dd Ee (U+018E, U+01DD) Ff GHgh (U+1E22, U+1E23) Ii Ịị Kk KPkp Mm Nn NYny (U+014A, U+014B) (U+014A,W, U+014B,w) Oo Ọọ (U+0245, U+028C) Pp Ss Tt Uu Ụụ Ww Yy

Andrew, you can use the Greek capital letter LAMDA (U+039B) for the Latin capital letter Turned V. The latin small letter Turned v is available in Arial Unicode MS

George

Hi George,

you're welcome.

U+0245 is a new character in Unicode 5.0, so i doubt any fonts will have this character yet. Currently the Doulos SIL and Charis SIL fonts have this character as a PUA codepoint (U+F219). I'd assume that they'll update their fonts soon and move some of their PUA codepoint assignments to the new Unicode 5.0 codepoint assignments.

I'll check with Chris Harvey as well to see if its a likely addition to his fonts.

George, do you have a full alphabet statement for Ibibio?

Andrew

Edited by author 08-01-2006 08:56 PM
Hi Andrew, /m8

That is it, that is the Unicode points I was looking for.
Some orthographies of Ibibio I have seen included the: Latin Capital Letter Turned V (U+0245) and Latin Small Letter Turned v (U+028C)

http://www.rosettaproject.org/archive/nige...reement%20Confirmed


Thanks for the information Andrew

George

Hi Goerge,

re /m6,

do you mean the Unicode characters U+0245 and U+028C?

Andrew

Hi Don,

re /m5,

hopefully NITDA have dumped ther old keyboard in favour of KONYIN. It would make sense, since their keyboard layout was originally using the depreciated Vietnamese tone markers insead of the combining acute and grave characters.

Depending on what keyscan codes the KONYIN keyboard uses, it should be possible to create appropriate linux keyboard drivers to use it. Something i'll test in the future, once their african multilingual keyboard has been released.

Wrt the work Chinedu and I are doing, i'll send you a separate email since it is somewhat off topic for this forum.

Andrew

Hi Don,

You are actually right; the KONYIN keyboard is for windows only.

I don't know if NITDA is still developing another, but that will be a waste of time, unless they are trying to improve on the KONYIN. But knowing Nigeria for what we are, they will probably be trying to do a completely different one.

The font listed on the /m2 link seems to be correct, but there is an alphabet missing, that looks like an upside down V. I cannot find any Unicode code-point for it.

George

Edited by author 08-01-2006 09:33 AM
Hi George and Andrew,

Thanks for your messages and info re keyboards.

Nigeria has probably the most activity of any country in Africa concerning keyboards and keyboard layouts. This should be no surprise considering (1) the number of languages spoken in the country, (2) the fact that they generally use letters and diacritics beyond the ASCII character set, and (3) the fact that there has been writing in some of these languages for some time.

I think we need a good overview of where where everyone is with Nigerian keyboards. George is correct that Konyin is one standard and that it has an approval by NITDA (does this latter override NITDA's previous keyboard proposal?). It is the only physical keyboard plus keyboard driver that has been developed with a layout designed specifically for multilingual Nigerian needs. That said, it is mainly designed for Windows (more on that later).

Andrew, I'd be interested to know more about what you and Chinedu are working on and how it relates to other keyboards.

The website in /m2 gives an Ibibio orthography. I have no idea if it is the accepted standard, an emerging standard, or something proposed by the website creator.

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

Hi Don,

I've been doing some work on a keyboard layout with Chinedu, that will cover a range of Nigerian languages, both NFD and NFC output. Efik is in the list to support. It would be straight forward to add Ibibio and Anaag if they aren't already covered by teh character repetoire.

Are alphabet and orthography statements available for Ibibio and Anaang?

Andrew

Edited by author 07-29-2006 08:53 AM
Very interesting that Ibibio, Efik and Anaang is still asking for developing keyboards.

There has been a keyboard developed for all Nigerian languages, including Ibobio, Efik and Anaang, and the keyboard is on sale in Nigeria. The keyboard was approved by Nigeria's NITDA.

The keyboard is called KONYIN Nigeria Multilingual Keyboard. (http://www.konyin.com)

I think this board will be best utilized for discussing issues relating to electronic documentation of our language in the internet arena. And there is a lot of work going on in this area as referenced by Don.

My piece
George

A website on Ibibio called "My Ibibio" is at http://www.geocities.com/myibibio/index.html . It has information on the language (including writing) and culture.

Edited by author 07-29-2006 09:52 AM
This message board is intended for the discussion of topics related to the use of three closely related languages of Nigeria - Ibibio, Efik, and Anaang - on computers and the internet.

Its creation is prompted by a question received indirectly for help with fonts and developing keyboards for Ibibio. I have indluded Efik and Anaang as these are related and perhaps some of the work done on one or another can be shared by all.

This is one of several message boards specific to languages and countries of Africa - others are listed at http://www.quicktopic.com/share?s=QSpo . It is the fourth to deal with languages of Nigeria (there are already forums for Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo), and the first to deal with any of the so-called "millionaire" languages of the country. That is, the speakership of these languages is in the millions but not in the tens of millions like the largest three.

It is also the first message board in in this network to propose to deal with a set of closely related languages - in this case Ibibio, Efik, and Anaang. All the others deal either with specific languages individually - namely the "decamillionaire" languages of Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo - or with all languages of a given country on a country-by-country basis: Ghana, Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Senegal. So it is a bit of a new experiment in that regard.

Further information on the Ibibio, Efik, and Anaang languages can be read at http://www.panafril10n.org/wikidoc/pmwiki....oc/EfikIbibioAnaang .

See also the A12n-gateway page at http://www.bisharat.net/A12N for information on other forums for communicating about African languages and ICT.

Don Osborn, Ph.D. dzo@bisharat.net
*Bisharat! A language, technology & development initiative
*Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - développement
http://www.bisharat.net

*PanAfrican Localisation Project
*Projet panafricain sur la localisation
http://www.bisharat.net/PanAfrLoc (new domain coming)