Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!world!peter
From: peter@world.std.com (Peter Salus)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Navajo?  (was: universality of Latin-1)
Message-ID: <1991Apr30.130515.5049@world.std.com>
Date: 30 Apr 91 13:05:15 GMT
References: <1991Apr12.123302.17817@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <1991Apr24.181121.6212@parc.xerox.com> <22694@lanl.gov>
Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die
Lines: 28

In article <22694@lanl.gov> jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>In article <1991Apr24.181121.6212@parc.xerox.com>, daniels@parc.xerox.com (Andy Daniels) writes:
>|> [...]
>|> Sufficient for you, perhaps, but not for me. By your criteria, DIS
>|> 10646 doesn't support Rhade, a close neighbor of Vietnamese, nor does
>|> it support Navajo. Moving away from Latin, where's Tamil? where's
>|> Tibetan?
>              ^^^^^^
>
>Could you be more specific?  The Navajo never had their own writing
>(the only indian tribe that did are the Cheyenne).  To be sure, the
>linguists have special symbols for phonemes of indian languages, but
>they have that for all languages and I doubt there's any advantage
>trying to include them all in a character set.  For the most part,
>all Navajo I've seen written was in the ordinary Latin alphabet.
>
>J. Giles

Navaho is written in roman, using a number of accent marks and 
does not use a special script.  Cherokee uses the complex 
but brilliant script invented by Sequoyah in 1825.  

Peter H. Salus

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