At Your Finger Tips

[Andre Cramblit]

http://leaderadvertiser.com/articles/2006/08/31/news/news02.txt

Tribal languages, at your fingertips
Posted: Thursday, Aug 31, 2006 - 03:08:16 pm PDT
By Nate Traylor
Leader Staff




Salish, Kootenai keyboards coming to a school near you

Students across the reservation will have the languages of the Salish  
and Kootenai tribes right at their finger tips.

Modified keyboards featuring unique characters will soon be available  
in area schools and will enable students to type in traditional  
Salish and Kootenai languages -- the result of hard work by a former  
SKC technology director.

Something that was once blamed for taking a toll on tribal languages  
and customs could actually help preserve the native tongue.

"When modern technology first arrived here, it started taking our  
language and culture away from us," said Tony Incashola, director of  
the Salish Pend d'Oreille Culture Committee, in a prepared statement.  
"But now we're learning how to take that same technology and turn it  
around, using it to teach our children our language and culture."

Using the newest creation of software, former Salish Kootenai College  
technology director Jim Ereaux has created two new fonts that will  
work on both PC and Mac platforms.

To have fonts that work on both Mac and PC was critical, he  
explained. While most of the world uses PCs, Macintosh computers are  
still used in many educational settings, and Ereaux said the program  
had to work with both operating systems to be effective.

"We needed to bring standardization to it," he said.

The keyboards are like any other, he explained, only the English  
letters have been replaced with either Salish characters or Kootenai  
characters. The Salish language has more characters than the English  
language so it doesn't quite fit on the standard English keyboard.  
The solution? Use the numerical buttons on top and replace them with  
Salish characters, Ereaux said.

Also, with the simple tap of the caps lock button, people can switch  
between writing in a native language or English. Plus, the keys are  
removable, allowing you to place more commonly used characters within  
comfortable reach of your fingers, allowing for more efficient typing.

But what really allows for quicker typing speed is the OpenType  
technology. Many languages use require several glyphs to compose one  
character. Rather than type two or three glyphs per character, one  
key stroke is all it will take for the glyphs to be assembled  
automatically, he explained. (However, if you're accustomed to  
punching each glyph, you will still have that option.)

Because the project largely aims to educate students in Salish and  
Kootenai Languages, the new fonts also allow for use of teaching  
programs like crossword puzzles and software that creates teacher  
user plans.

Native language fonts are nothing new, he explained, but what makes  
this program unique is that it can spellcheck documents written in  
both tribal languages. It also has a find /replace feature, which is  
also a new option for programs of this kind.

The new fonts were created using two new technologies called Unicode  
and OpenType. Unicode is the global standard for multi-language word  
processing and houses thousands of languages and is capable of  
supporting over one million possible characters.

The Salish and Kootenai Tribes have had access to a variety of  
computer fonts and applications in the past to produce publications  
and historical documents, but these programs are antiquated and  
becoming more and more obsolete as computer technology advances,  
Ereaux explained.

The Salish and Kootenai Culture Committees tapped Ereaux to help  
develop the new software last year. Since then, he estimates he has  
put in about 400 hours on the project. With the coordination of  
Culture Committees, several linguists and the typographic community  
on the Internet, the project was underway. Tony Incashola, Shirley  
Trahan and Thompson Smith provided guidance from the Salish Culture  
Committee while Vernon Finley and Dorothy Berney provided guidance  
from the Kootenai Culture Committee.

In April 2006, a grant was written through Salish Kootenai College,  
from both Blackfoot Telephone Cooperative and the Lower Flathead  
Valley Community Foundation to support the creation of customized  
keyboards for both languages. Both organizations donated nearly  
$6,000 to the project.

The idea behind this new word processor is that it will be compatible  
with more advanced systems. The minimum operating requirements are  
Windows XP and higher on the PC and OS 10.4 on the Macintosh.

"We knew there was this globalization with other processors and that  
is the direction we wanted to head," he said
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