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Aboriginal Languages Now Easier on the Web
orkz writes "The BBC reports that Canada's Inuit can now publish to the web in their native language of Inuktitut, as well as more easily view websites that contain their syllabic font, thanks to a system a developed by a unique ASP, Web Networks that provides services to socially committed organizations."
Now all the villagers can crowd around the one internet connected PC in a 6,000 Mile radius to blog about some whale blubber :)
Ouch.. just kidding.. err I'm clutured. I promise.
Love,
Zaq
...technology allow for something like this
--- Why rant when you can rave?
Good for the Inuit, though! I'm curious to see if they can really implement Inuktitut as the language of government in Nunavut.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I don't get it. Canadian Aboriginal is already in Unicode (U+1400-U-167F) as of 3.0. Hell, I think Mac OS X even comes with a font covering it.
Where's the magic? The translation to graphics on the fly for people with old browers?
Also how much do these guys know about character sets? The Attavik website uses "latin1" (a non existent charset--should be "ISO-8859-1"--and why not UTF-8 so they don't need images) and is content-free giving no one any real idea what they do. From what it says I think they sell proprietary software to Inuktitut organisations (that they probs don't need) though.
Also, the companies homepage (which sucks) doesn't have a charset (and is not UTF-8/ASCII) and is very invalid even when you do work the charset out.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
The previous company I worked for had a part in developing The Living Dictionary at least three years ago now. Sun's site has a short piece on it.
In Australia, indig. lang's are all too quickly going out of use & human memory...
Arabunna (no longer spoken, but originating north of Marree, in South Australia) has been preserved - as best as a non-indigenous research-educator can do - to date, in a massive loose-leaf binder (published, in 2004, by SA's Education Dep't), soon to be supplemented with an audio CD of people reading and/or speaking this language.
In the Marree Aboriginal School, we heard kids being encouraged to sing non-indigenous kids' songs, with lyrics translated to Arabunna.
A multimedia version of a simple kids story (written for the purpose) was also translated into Arabunna & read (& recorded) by one of the few surviving people (a woman living far south of the original Arabunna lands) & blended with colorful drawings of scenes for the story.
When money is available research records, documents & analyses some of the languages... but few urban (or, as here, "urbanised") indigenous young people seem to be speaking them, except when they wish to pass small "secrets" while others are present, who do not know any of the language (as all kids will do...).
There are festivals (eg, "Croc Festival 2004") around Austraila that attempts to celebrate local indigenous culture (or that from around the states or territories in which they are held), again while funding is available.
I haven't see any signs of a re-birth of at least the Arabunna language... Indeed several of the Marree kids are said to be using more broadly known words from other indigenous languages.
I have not, for myself, decided whether this cultural recording & (to some degree) encouragement is geniune for - God forbid! - just to develop more plausible content to offer or refer to when tourists come around...
Contrast this with the re-birth of Hebrew into modern Hebrew (which, of course, is actually used in Israel).
The former seems to be to be encouraged by external government funding bodies, while the latter seems to have come from the people itself, by way of preparing to create the State of Israel.
Would that our indigenous peoples were as highly motivated in re-creating their cultures, as they seem to be in sports, so that they were leading their own projects & not simply being lead by others, eg, who may wish to have some "show communities" to point to, when international guests or dignataries come to SA.
For, side by side, the well-funded but externally lead academic projects (staffed, I would suggest, mostly by non-indigenous people) that seem to be happening in a town of under 100 people are the all too typical social problems, for which South Australia has recently been known:
- addiction to recently permitted Poker Machines,
- alcoholism, &
- all that comes from the above
The most recent Commonwealth Government contribution:
Funding for the construction of a large, empty shed - a "youth shed."
Nothing to put inside it, no shade for it... just a space, behind the Telecentre (where computers can he used, a bit like an Internet cafe).
No one seems to be addressing the social issues... and the resulting gambling & alcohol use contributes only to non-indigenous business operators' wealth.
A recent proposal (from another state's indigenous leader) was that gov't and/or corporations should pay to send indigenous students to private schools, as they are not getting enough from the public schools to give them skills to manage & improve their own communities, generally speaking.
A radio program (Bush Telegraph or Country Breakfast) told of a "technical advancement" - an software that displays outputs from a community's accounting program with icons representing where money goes & possibly where it comes from...
(Dumbing down or approprate to the people who need to manage their own affairs?)
We read that Canadian & US indigenous peoples' health statistics run -much- closer to non-in
It looks suspiciously like the kind of garbage you get when you load up a page that your browser doesn't have language support for! :)
It's a strange solution. Embedded font support has been integrated into internet explorer for years, and although they seem to have stripped it out of Mozilla, netscape used to be compatible with trueDoc. Links: (Microsoft Font Embedding) and truedoc)
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
Ya, I use that program for my financial records.
we've had language support for KLINGON for, oh, how many star dates now? I can't wait to see how Babelfish mangles it: cruising for chicks becomes !@#@@#!!@@$##@#@ (kayaking for baby terns.)
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
The TrueDoc technology involves DRM to "prevent users from stealing your fonts". I imagine the software is proprietary, and not open source compatible. This must be one of those bits of proprietary software that Netscape ripped out before releasing the Navigator source code.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
...rendering the character set as graphics means that unless you have Opera, which scales graphics as well as text when you set the zoom. Not to mention that blind Inuit are SOL--does Canada have an equivalent of the Americans with Disabilities Act?