Talk:N'Ko script (version 2)

message: :moved from User talk:Guaka
Guaka,
Could you please explain the meaning of these comments since it seems you wrote them ?
" In 2004 a proposition presented by the Irish delegation was approved by the working group (WG2). The Technical Unicode committees was blocked by Canada, declaring that the Kamasere accents and three old characters, "Old Ja", "Cha" and "Ra" should be removed — a decision considered political by the other WG members. "
You may email me at patrick.andries<à>xcential.com. I'm one of the Canadian members and I'm astounded by the comments hereabove...
:Patrick, you shouldn't be astounded. The discussions on the Unicode-Afrique list have gone far and wide. When I was in Mali, I was interviewed for television, and one of the questions they asked me was about "the Canadian problem". The N'Ko community is bitterly opposed with Canada's opposition to the encoding of N'Ko, and rejects the technical suggestions Canada has made, in favour of the encoding as it stands. As you have been told a number of times. Evertype 06:58, 2005 Jun 24 (UTC)
::I have had a discussion with some people at the multilingualism conference in Bamako. They weren't really happy with the situation. Later I was bold and wrote down something in the article, either collecting information from Google searches or from a paper (Which I don't have near me right now). Guaka 12:02, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  N'ko (strange comments on Unicode) 

message: The ballotting period is over (for technical changes) and the "controversy" is over too, since the Canadian objections were overruled and their suggestions were not accepted. Should the text be revised now accordingly? Evertype 20:32, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think so, but it would be best to cite a source. I don't know how you feel about citing yourself :). — mark ✎ 20:52, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The controversy is not dead, I'm just learning of it! Controversies may start well after something has been approved by a few interested parties in a room. People still complain about other decisions made by a standards body well after its standardization. The Canadian objections about the Old Variants are linguistically and typographiccaly valid. Indeed they are even validated by a Russian specialist of the language and script! On the other hand, Mr Everson comparison between thse Old Forms and the long s seems very poor (it is therefore understandable Mr Everson wants to remove any criticism from the N'ko page and initiated this discussion). The decision to bypass the concerns were therefore apparently taken because of political considerations (knowning personally how some decisions are made in other ISO working groups, it is not at all impossible). If encoding must be discussed, it would be best to explain in an historical subsection how the encoding evolved and present both sides of the question. Otherwise, it is of very little interest to discuss the encoding except to be able to quote Mr. Everson (which I'm sure he agrees with). Remove links to Mr Everson or mention the alternatives, much more instructive.207.195.241.106 20:10, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, anonymous poster, the standardization process is an open one. Arguments for different interpretations of the data and different encodings were heard by WG2 and by the UTC. The solution chosen, which is preferred by the user community, was not the one proposedby the Canadians. The cumulative weight of a great many arguments for the users' preferred encoding won the day. Nit-picking at whether any single one of them was a perfect analogy failed the opponants of the encoding. N'Ko has been encoded. I am preparing fonts which follow that encoding, and will make them freely-available to the user community in due course. Do let's move on. Evertype 17:47, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Encoding controversy 

message: Once the Unicode people have sorted themselves out... is there anyone able and willing to create some kind of automated conversion system for Latin to N'Ko and vice versa so that the (currently very small) Wikipedias in the relevant languages will be accessible to the N'Ko users. I don't know if this is even possible (I suppose it depends on how the letters correspond) but the Chinese and I believe some other Wikipedias have managed conversion systems, so if anyone is looking for a programming project...! 86.136.88.200 15:16, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Automated conversion

message: Mr Conradi, why did you remove this category? -- Evertype·✆ 12:04, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Most of the entries in that category do not point to the alphabet. Rather they usually go to an article about the day, or if there is no such article they point to a page named for the day which then redirects to the alphabet. There is also one instance of going directly to the alphabet (in addition to a separate page for the day). Some sort of consistency of practice there would probably be a good idea. Logically, I'd think that all pages in an 'alphabet day' category should be... days. With the redirects if there is insufficient info on a particular celebration to justify a separate article. --CBD 12:50, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It had been set up with redirects to the script page. I don't see how it makes sense not to have the tag on the article which refers to the holiday, even if that is not a page dedicaed to the holiday. I will look into this and try to make sense of it. -- Evertype·✆ 17:31, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  N'Ko alphabet day 

message: Administrators do not rule on 'which presentation of content is correct'. We are supposed to have no more say in that than any other user, and admins who act differently are abusing their positions.
Which to me seems Roozbeh did. 
*http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=N%27Ko
It is multiple abuse of rights and violation of WP rules. Deleting page, moving page, protecting page.
Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:52, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Admins abusing their position: Admin User:Roozbeh

message: At some point we may want to look at the reinstating of separate articles on the alphabet and on the Manding-based language-standardization/sociocultural movement. Like any alphabet, N'Ko can be used for other languages, but more importantly this apparently is happening not only in other Mande languages (just heard of work in Soninke) but also in at least one language of another family - the Pular of Guinea (I have sample pages of a book describing this use). This is not a proposal yet but a heads-up. If there is info on its practical use for still other languages (beyond experiments or demonstrations), that would be of interest. --A12n 18:35, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  N'Ko article(s) II 

message: :It obligatorily marks both tone and vowels.
How are tones marked?  Widsith (talk) 13:05, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a good point. All the controversies aside, this article seems incomplete. 76.167.253.199 (talk) 01:20, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  tone 

message: It seems to me that there needs to be a review of the use of Mande languages and Manding languages in the article. In my understanding, the former is a larger set of linguistically related but not necessarily interintelligible languages. The latter is a subset of the former, including the largely interintelligible languages that are the primary focus of N'Ko.--A12n (talk) 11:38, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mande & Manding in the article 

message: I now realize that Evertype and others had a long discussion of whether this article should be only about the script or should also include discussion of a language. I regret that I had not read the old history on this before my deletion of information on a language. Sorry about that.
However, I would point out a couple of points in favor of making the script exclusively about the script. First of all,  Solomana Kante invented no N'ko language, rather he invented the N'ko script. Secondly, the script has been used to write several languages, not just one. Third, there are many Wikipedia articles that are about specific scripts, separate from the languages they are used to write, such as Mandombe script. Also, even when there are scripts that have the same name as the language, there are still separate articles for each, such as Mende language and Mende script. Fourthly, the N'ko language has now been registered with its own ISO number: ISO 639-3: nqo. The Ethnologue describes it as "A mixture of Mande languages... Second language only." Sure sounds like this language deserves its own separate article.  Peaceably, Pete unseth (talk) 00:32, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Kante standardized the literary language which is a sort of compromise between the dialects. There is no other orthography which represents this literary language. The dialects per se are not really written in N'Ko... the literary standard is instead. There need not be two separate articles even if for some languages such a configuration exists. For the present, I favour a single article. When it gets so long and complicated that it deserves to be split, we can talk about it. Until then, a one-stop-shop is better. By the way, I am the person who registered both the language and the script code. -- Evertype·✆ 13:43, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

text: By the way, if the Ethnologue says "a mixture of languages" then it is really imprecise linguistically. Kante did not "mix" languages in devising a literary compromise dialect. -- Evertype·✆ 13:45, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Script or language?