Re: Toki Pona Script
| From: | Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, July 25, 2006, 11:45 |
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Errm, what was that??? How did I manage to send that? I don't dare
to quote. I wrote a small, simple text with with the following words:
Herman Miller writes:
>...
> I like ? for "animal" -- how long did it take to find that one?
Yes, it took a while, but it was fun! :-)
I started out looking at dingbats, arrows, math symbols, etc. first
(there are quite a lot in Unicode). Then I remembered that Canadian
Aboriginal syllables might be well-suited, and indeed found a few
interesting pictures, too. And then I remembered that Ethiopic often
looks like people doing something funny, so I searched them, too, and
although it wasn't people I found, I found a cute little animal. :-)
(And then I looked at many, many other scripts, too.)
> There are some interesting creative uses of characters that
> otherwise don't seem very useful, like the snowman character =FE=FF&=03
> (who'd have thought there was a snowman character in Unicode?) for
> "cold". I'd like to know how "snowman" ended up with a nice spot in
> the BMP, while "musical symbol double sharp" (which seems far more
> useful to me) is in the barely supported Page 1, but I guess someone
> must have had a reason.
I would think that it is part of a standard symbol font that was felt
important for inclusion, so no selection took place, but the whole set
of symbols was used. The Zapf Dingbats U+2700 are also strange: there
are so many similar arrows and stars with only slightly different
decorations that it is surprising these occupy such a large portion of
the BMP. I suppose it was done to convince certain companies to
support the Unicode project at an early stage when the success was not
at all guaranteed otherwise.
> While the online converter is a nice thing to have, I thought it would
> be convenient to be able to type directly into a text editor, so I
> made a Keyman keyboard for it.
>
> ftp://ftp.io.com/pub/usr/hmiller/lang/TokiPona.kmx
>
> You can type "mi wile toki li toki pona" and end up with ...
> just like on the online converter page! You can even leave out the
> spaces: .... You'll need Tavultesoft Keyman, which is at
>
http://www.tavultesoft.com/keyman/ , but it's free for home use.