Richmond's Winter Project

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richmond62
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Richmond's Winter Project

Post by richmond62 »

Over the next few months I shall be building an OXT Lite program to allow end-users to input text in Ge'ez: the ancient, classical Ethiopian language used in extant Jewish texts such as the Books of Enoch, and Jubilees.

https://archive.org/details/EthiopicBoo ... 7/mode/2up
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Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 12.56.32.png
Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 12.56.32.png (725.71 KiB) Viewed 2466 times
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For this you will NOT need to know the language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%CA%BDez

But you will need to understand something of the way an abugida works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%CA%BDez_script

as well as access to a unicode compliant Ge'ez font:

https://github.com/geezorg/legally-free-geez-fonts

I shall use: AbyssinicaSIL-Regular

Although I should state that I disapprove of SIL's activities (especially in Papua New Guinea), one does have to admit their fonts rock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_International

You will also need these Unicode charts to understand the Unicode address of the glyphs of the Ge'ez abugida.

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1200.pdf
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

Post by richmond62 »

An alphabetic system has individual symbols and/or digraphs for individual consonants and vowels.

An abugida system normally contains symbols that consist of a consonant with an inherent vowel sound.

The English variant of the Latin alphabet only consists of alphabetic symbols.

The Bulgarian variant of the Cyrillic 'alphabet' contains both alphabetic symbols and abugida symbols.

The Devanagari writing system used for Hindi consists of abugida symbols.

The Ge'ez script for classical Ethiopic texts consists of abugida symbols amounting to a vast number of glyphs: something that makes
life relatively difficult for computer keyboard input, as it is extremely clumsy to assign many levels of keyboard levels (via dead keys)
with one key combination for each abugida symbol (e.g. SHIFT-ALT-CTRL-Q for glyph Hex 1310).

In terms of usability it is much more practical if one can build a abugida symbol cumulatively: Unicode Hex 1310 is the Ge'ez glyph for 'GWA'
so it has to be easier for end-users to type G+W+a and the interface to deliver Hex 1310.

This is something that OXT lends itself to extremely well.
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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So: to get started with actual programming, here's a 2-card stack that we can use as our template to build our program with:
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Title.jpg
Title.jpg (239.68 KiB) Viewed 2455 times
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ACTION.jpg
ACTION.jpg (236.48 KiB) Viewed 2455 times
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You will find that I have already added action 'buttons' to navigate between these 2 cards.

There are NOT buttons, but snapshots of buttons (images) to guarantee cross-platform consistency.
Attachments
Sheba.oxtstack.zip
(2.19 MiB) Downloaded 56 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Before we proceed any further please:

1. Install the Ge'ez font in your system.

2. Download the stack and 'play' with it.

3. Either print out, or in some other way make sure you have access to the Ethiopic Unicode chart.
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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It is a good idea to "get your head around" the basic consonantal glyphs:
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Geez_annotated.png
Geez_annotated.png (118.54 KiB) Viewed 2454 times
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I apologise for those of you who are not cognisant with modern Hebrew, but I have written (in blue) an ALEF and an AIN as those vowels cannot really be adequately represented using some sort of Latinate letter (and I should add that my use of 2 modern Hebrew letters in no way demonstartes support for the Modern state of Israel, Hamas, or Hezbollah).

It is not really necessary to learn the numerical forms, although we will try to integrate them into our program.
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geez_numbers.gif
geez_numbers.gif (9.95 KiB) Viewed 2452 times
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HOWEVER, I will have to hack that font come the time as it does NOT contain Ethiopic numerical glyphs in the Unicode allotted paces.
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Here are the basic consonantals with their Unicode addresses which I have converted from Hexadecimal into Decimal:
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Geez_Unicodes.png
Geez_Unicodes.png (279.32 KiB) Viewed 2446 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Now we can use my Key Generator stack to generate Key Buttons:
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KeyGenerator.png
KeyGenerator.png (150.96 KiB) Viewed 2446 times
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Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 16.18.54.png
Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 16.18.54.png (149.99 KiB) Viewed 2446 times
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Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 16.21.00.png
Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 16.21.00.png (144.83 KiB) Viewed 2446 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Now you can CUT that 'button' and place it on the keyboard map on the Main stack:
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Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 16.25.39.png
Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 16.25.39.png (1.18 MiB) Viewed 2445 times
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Now you will require 2 fields called "fBUILDER" and "fOUTPUT" respectively.
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Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 16.30.06.png
Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 16.30.06.png (958.7 KiB) Viewed 2445 times
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Let's add some code to our 'button':
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Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 16.38.04.png
Screenshot 2024-09-28 at 16.38.04.png (964.88 KiB) Viewed 2444 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Now clever people, instead of being lazy and waiting for me, can generate all the other consonantals and put them in place. :lol:
Attachments
Key Generator.oxtstack.zip
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Geez_AfroAsiatic.png
Geez_AfroAsiatic.png (236.46 KiB) Viewed 2424 times
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For consonantal entry you'll need 'buttons' for all the signs in this table except for the 'Alif' and the 'Ayin' (shaded in orange) [people who are familiar with Afro-Asiatic languages (previously called 'Semitic') will recognise these as what might be best termed 'vowel place markers'].
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Arabic.png
Arabic.png (9.27 KiB) Viewed 2421 times
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Arabic alif and ayn.
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 10.54.10.png
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 10.54.10.png (85.83 KiB) Viewed 2423 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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stack2.jpg
stack2.jpg (235.19 KiB) Viewed 2422 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Before we go any further let's add some code to the ' ሀ' button (so we can repeat this script across all our base consonantal glyphs), so end-users are prompted when their mouse is over the button:
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 11.56.27.png
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.00.05.png
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.00.05.png (128.2 KiB) Viewed 2417 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Placing the buttons is a relatively easy process (although a bit boring):
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.15.18.png
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.15.18.png (546.57 KiB) Viewed 2416 times
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Now if, like me, you are ever so slightly unsure of the phonetic values of those "funny" letters it would seem a good idea to have
a built-in system to report them.

So let's place a field here:
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.20.36.png
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.20.36.png (178.97 KiB) Viewed 2415 times
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This is where we can display the phonetic values of each Ethiopic glyph.
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.23.51.jpg
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.23.51.jpg (259.58 KiB) Viewed 2414 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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We can now copy the script from button 'ሀ' to all the other buttons, ONLY adjusting the value for the phonetic transcription field.
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.33.38.jpg
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.40.25.jpg
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.40.25.jpg (245.42 KiB) Viewed 2411 times
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I used Shapecatcher to find the Unicode values for transcription letters with diacritics:

https://shapecatcher.com/
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 13.06.11.png
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 13.06.11.png (233.94 KiB) Viewed 2408 times
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This is a wonderful resource I cannot recommend too strongly.
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Let's have a CLEAR button in case we make a mistake:
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.59.42.jpg
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 12.59.42.jpg (257.75 KiB) Viewed 2409 times
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So: To Summarise . . .

We have built something that allows us to enter single Ethiopic base consonantal glyphs into a field called 'fBUILDER".
https://richmondmathewson.owlstown.net/
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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As we are going to CONSTRUCT consonantal clusters like this:
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 13.26.55.png
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 13.26.55.png (42.02 KiB) Viewed 2405 times
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We might like to modify the scripts in all our input buttons:
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 13.44.50.png
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 13.44.50.png (382.79 KiB) Viewed 2403 times
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 13.44.17.jpg
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 13.44.17.jpg (177.31 KiB) Viewed 2403 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Here is the source stack so far.
Attachments
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

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Now we need to provide buttons for the Labio-velar variant consonantals:
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Labials.jpg
Labials.jpg (99.68 KiB) Viewed 2400 times
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LabioVelars_Unicode.png
LabioVelars_Unicode.png (158.79 KiB) Viewed 2400 times
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KW.jpg
KW.jpg (159.02 KiB) Viewed 2399 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

Post by richmond62 »

Making a program of this sort is a long drawn-out process, and, as you should have worked out from the way buttons use repetitive code, a fairly tedious process that involves a lot of cutting and pasting of code. I have used for many years a series of gamepads on the left side of my keyboard to minimise repetitive stress injury and write-pronation:
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Z26572_166558.png
Z26572_166558.png (108.66 KiB) Viewed 2396 times
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Re: Richmond's Winter Project

Post by richmond62 »

We also need to consider Ethiopic punctuation symbols:
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 15.14.38.png
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 15.14.38.png (225.36 KiB) Viewed 2394 times
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The numbers supplied by the Unicode consortium are in Hexadecimal, so, for instance the Hex 1360 is 4960 for those of us who only have 10 fingers.

As I generally work on Macintosh computers I use the Mac built-in calculator to convert Hex into Decimal numbers:
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 15.19.46.png
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 15.19.46.png (262.05 KiB) Viewed 2394 times
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Ethiopic also features 2 series of number symbols:
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Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 15.14.57.png
Screenshot 2024-09-29 at 15.14.57.png (207.3 KiB) Viewed 2394 times
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