forum

[Charles Riley]

Hi Mia,

It sounds like the glottal examples you describe 
would require submitting data to the CLDR project 
for the Athapascan locales.  There's a similar 
case in Afrikaans, where ['n] sorts independently after z.

Is there a page that shows the desired character 
behavior for rising tones over vowels?  I found this page:
http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/orthography.html

Under the Gwich'in section, the image link that 
would display some of the nasalized vowels is 
broken.  Is the rendering for the low tones acceptable?

Chuck Riley


At 03:12 PM 2/14/2008, you wrote:
>Unicode works really well for most characters.
>
>It doesn’t work for rising tone, nasalized 
>Athapascan vowels, especially the “i”, because 
>you end up with a dot and a high tone mark, 
>which is incorrect. It doesn’t work well for the 
>glottal, either, because beyond representation, 
>you need to have the glottal function as a real 
>character. If you take a shortcut and use the 
>apostrophe, Word and sorting algorithms see it 
>as a punctuation mark, and represent the word incorrectly.
>
>Since there are So Many glottals in Southern 
>Athapascan, especially at the beginning of words, this is a real problem.
>
>Mia
>
>PS:
>Hi, Keola; nice to see you. J
>
>PPS: Happy Valentine’s day, everyone.
>
>
>----------
>From: Indigenous Languages and Technology 
>[mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU] On Behalf Of Keola Donaghy
>Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 2:58 PM
>To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
>Subject: Re: [ILAT] forum
>
>Aloha Ted, we've been using Unicode on our sites 
>for Hawaiian for many years. This is the CSS 
>code that I use in all of them and it seems to 
>work well on contemporary OS and browsers:
>
>font-family: Lucida Sans Unicode,Arial Unicode 
>MS,Lucida Grande,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
>
>Lucida Sans Unicode is the most ubiquitous of 
>the Windows fonts, Arial Unicode MS came with 
>some older installations, and Lucida Grande is 
>the best Macintosh font for viewing on the web 
>as I have been told it has the largest 
>collection of characters. The final two are 
>fallbacks. Arial on Windows has our Hawaiian 
>diacritics (not sure about how extensive the 
>rest of its character set is) and then Helvetica again for Mac users.
>
>If you're not familiar with the way CSS works 
>(my apologies if you do already), it will start 
>with the first font, and the browser will use 
>the first listed font which has the characters 
>you need. If none of them have the characters 
>you need, then you might get a square box or question mark.
>
>Most contemporary browsers seem to try to locate 
>a font that has a character missing from the 
>font that you have specified. For example, if 
>you specify Lucida Sans Unicode only and a Mac 
>user visits your site with Safari or Firefox, 
>the browser will compensate and use Lucida 
>Grande to display the unicode characters.
>
>It would be helpful if your users provided the 
>operating system and browser versions they are using.
>
>I noticed you're using Ning. Are you localizing 
>the site as well? I started a Hawaiian 
>translation of Ning a few weeks ago and got 
>sidetracked. Their localization tools are 
>impressive and very easy to use. I was going to 
>try to register to take a look at the site but 
>it asked "Band(s) of The Colville Tribes:" to 
>which I have no reply. You can customize the CSS 
>in Ning, though I haven't done so myself yet.
>
>Hope this helps,
>
>Keola
>
>
>On 12 Pep. 2008, at 10:30 AM, Ted Moomaw wrote:
>
>
>I work at the Omak language and cultural 
>preservation program for the Colville 
>confederated tribes.  My question is that I 
>would like to start a website for online lessons 
>and also a place to chat using our unicode 
>font.  Do you know of anyone who has started a 
>language chat forum that uses unicode, the font 
>we use is called lucida sans unicode.  I have a 
>few friends that read and write in our lang. and 
>I think many others would soon catch on w/ such 
>a place to visit online.  I was also thinking it 
>would be nice to have an interactive dictionary on the same site.
>
>There has recently been added a website called 
>oneheartforthepeople.com it is a locally started 
>website for general interest locally,  I started 
>an okanogan language group on there, and on my 
>home computer I can perfectly read everyones 
>font, but at my work computer where we almost 
>exclusively use unicode I cannot read the font 
>from that site, also many others are unable to 
>correctly recieve the font.  If you know of 
>anyone I might contact who has started a site 
>that is unicode supported would you please help.
>
>
>
>
>========================================================================
>Keola Donaghy
>Assistant Professor of Hawaiian Studies
>Ka Haka 'Ula O 
>Ke'elikolani 
><mailto:keola at leoki.uhh.hawaii.edu>keola at leoki.uhh.hawaii.edu
>University of Hawai'i at 
>Hilo 
><http://www2.hawaii.edu/~donaghy/>http://www2.hawaii.edu/~donaghy/
>
>"Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam."  (Irish Gaelic saying)
>A country without its language is a country without its soul.
>========================================================================
>
>
>
>


Charles L. Riley,
Catalog Librarian,
Africana Project
Sterling Memorial Library
Yale University

(203) 773-0449 (H)
(203) 887-2947 (C)
(203) 432-1704 (W)