[OLPC India] Languages covered by Devanagari

[Sameer Verma]

Arjun Sarwal wrote:
> Our idea is to document the languages covered by the various keyboard
> layouts and make that a part of the respective Keyboard Layouts wiki
> pages.
>
> Also
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Conventions#Keyboard_Layouts_page_naming.2Ftagging_proposal
> has been proposed by cjl.
>
> Please let us know your thoughts/suggestions.
>
>
> thanks
> Arjun
>
>
>   


The way I see it, there are three components: Language, Script and
Keyboard layout. As somebody pointed out to me offlist a few days ago,
Punjabi is written in Gurmukhi (literally - from the guru's mouth)
script. However, Punjabi *can* be written in Devanagari (and this
happens in some places in India) and some digging up led me to Shahmukhi
(literally - from the king's mouth) which uses Arabic script characters
to write Punjabi in western Punjab (in Pakistan). See links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurmukhi and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahmukhi

Then there is the keyboard layout preference as in the case of Nepali,
as Walter pointed out. So, we really need to look at all three variables
for classification. Perhaps if we use the geographical region as the
starting point instead of the script, we'll have better luck mapping the
localization and keyboards.

Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/