Wakashan List & Wiki and NA Fonts

[Benjamin Barrett]

1. I would like to announce the (re)creation of a list for Wakashan 
languages. The Wakashan family comprises the Northern Wakashan languages 
of Haisla-Henaksiala, Heiltsuk, Kwakwala, and Oowekyala, and the 
Southern of Nuuchahnulth, Ditidaht, and Makah.

To subscribe to the group, send a blank e-mail to

wakashan-subscribe at googlegroups.com

If you have (or want to create) a Google account, you can also sign up 
via the Web interface at

http://groups.google.com/group/wakashan

2. Additionally, a test wiki has been created at 
http://wikihost.org/wikis/wakashan/wiki/start. This is a collaborative 
meeting spot for people interested in Wakashan to contribute and discuss 
issues related to the Wakashan languages. The ease of creating and 
editing wiki pages, the clean presentation for reading them, and the 
collaborative nature of wiki software are all advantages that I hope 
Wakashanists and others will take advantage of.

3. Finally, I would like to point out Christopher Harvey's font page at 
http://www.languagegeek.com/font/generalfont.html. Although Unicode in 
general provides a means to create the characters in many languages, the 
presentation of diacritics required for many Native American and other 
languages is poor. As he additionally notes, many languages with 
syllabaries are not yet supported. He has graciously created two fonts 
that enable an aesthetic pleasing presentation of languages in the 
Americas and elsewhere. He also indicates that if someone reports a 
glyph (character) missing, he will add it.

I have tested these out and pasted a few fairly difficult characters at 
http://wikihost.org/wikis/wakashan/wiki/fonts. These should be viewable 
for people who have downloaded and installed Harvey's fonts, but I 
cannot get them to work with Explorer. I recommend Mozilla 
(www.mozilla.com) or Netscape as browsers that support his fonts.

Ben Barrett
a cyberbreath for language life
livinglanguages.wordpress.com