Subject: Re: Word division: SE Asian scripts

From: Alain LaBonté SCT <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 1997 10:44:50

A 04:14 97-08-05 -0400, Roderic Vassie a écrit :
>Word division means human intervention, as does prepositional prefix
>division, etc.
>Human intervention, if it is to be consistent, means years of training.
>Training is expensive.
>The resultant text will tend to be readily intelligeable only to a
>fraction of those familiar with the original script.
>That fraction would probably understand an un-word-divided transliteration
>just as readily, since they are able to understand un-word-divided texts
>in the original script.
>
>Roderic Vassie
>LoC, Cairo Office

[Alain] :
Ideally words should not be divided. But if one wants an algorithmically
derived method (using no dictionary), this exists in French. We only have 3
or 4 rules. Some might refine it to 6 or 7, but it is really not absolutely
necessary except for utmost elegance. 

That said, we suffer, these days, in those French-speaking newspapers that
have chosen English-language computer technology to edit their articles,
when words are encountered by the software that do not exist in
dictionaries. Words are then not divided on syllable boundaries at all and
this upsets the reader. This dictionary technology is very limiting and the
computer is left in limbo without an entry. That is bad technology to
assume that the whole world languages' words should be in English
dictionaries (;

Fortunately the rest of the world also makes software on other models, even
if the power of money and market is demographically favourable to English,
no question about it.

Alain LaBonté
Québec