Mark Williamson wrote:
"No-brainer" is a sort of idiom. Paradoxically, it means "the obvious choice".
Mark
On 26/10/06, Toira venomens@yahoo.fr wrote:
Neil Harris <usenet@...> writes:
Given your arguments above, it looks like a no-brainer to start the Kabyle wiki in the Latin script.
However, if there is, as you say, a deterministic transformation to/from Tifinagh, we could easily later use a variant of the multi-script software currently used to handle the different Chinese scripts on the Chinese Wikipedia to implement a dual-script interface, or at the least an alternative Tifinagh display mode for the Latin-based text.
Do you have any references for Tifinagh <-> Latin transliteration?
You mean no-brainer to start it in Tifinagh? (you've written latin), Yeah I guess so.
The link to the transliteration of tifinagh could be found in wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifinagh
But there is a probleme with the transliteration in latin, it's not the one used to write Kabyle (we actually use a modified latin alphabet).
I'll try to add do it here :
Toira,
Please accept my apologies for the confusion: yes, Mark is right, "no-brainer" is an English idiom which means "something about which you don't even need to engage your brain in order to know that it is right".
Yes, Latin is the obvious way to go, with transliteration to<->from Tifinagh as a later add-on, using the multi-script software.
Thanks for the link in the [[Berber alphabet]] article: given that reference, this Latinized version of the Berber alphabet looks like it should be able to be round-tripped to/from the Tifinagh script.
I'm only confused by one thing: the article says that the two non-Latin characters are Cyrillic, but both of the characters listed in the tables themselves appear at first sight to be Greek letters (epsilon and gamma respectively).
(See also http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/natlang/berber/tifinagh/tifinagh-ircam.html)
However, I think they might be intended to be
U+025B LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E (which looks like an epsilon)
and
U+0263 LATIN SMALL LETTER GAMMA (which looks like a gamma)
respectively. This would also have the effect of making the Latinized Berber alphabet much easier to work with, since every character in it would then be within either the Unicode Latin or IPA extensions ranges, and thus fall entirely within the Latin writing system.
-- Neil