Lack of Character (or her many horses)

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine]

Oki && kwai folks,

So I was at HP's Cupertino Operating System Lab (COSL), slogging away on a
contract to working on about one hundred programmer utilities -- coding in
C on HP-UX 10.x, for HP-UX 10.x and 11.x, adding code to handle characters
encoded using Extended Unix enCoding (EUC) around the existing code for an
earlier HP encoding that used 15 bits in two bytes for Asian languages.

A co-worker dropped a then-current HP Labs journal off at my desk, cause it
had a piece on how some kids were using fancy HP boxes with graphic monitors
to send mail to each other using syllabics. Nanook got email. Nice bit of
corporate right-thinking to donate some boxes, but it is really hard to sort
or collate or even scale bitmaps that look like characters, but really are
just bimaps. By a quirk of fate, at the time I'd typing elements for an IBM
Selectric for Inuktitut Syllabics. Still got em. Lost the Selectric though.

I'd seen photos of Siksika missionary schools with school marms and school
kids and on the walls syllabic tables and syllabics on the chalkboards, but
everything current is in roman, and diacritically simplified roman at that,
so ASCII suited me fine.

The kids in the HP Journal were using HP-UX and X11 and bitmapped displays
as digital scissors-and-glue to cut-and-paste pictures of characters. It was
a step back from an IBM Selectric and a syllabic type ball and paper. Ten HP
systems at $5,000 each -- a whole school budget sized "gift" wasted on very
inappropriate tech. I'm running for school board -- bigger school, under 10%
Tribal, and I don't want gifts like this from corporations -- like laptops
at a discount for the 8th graders -- CDs and the net -- all show, no song.

Literacy can be based upon caligraphy -- glyphs-as-art.

The invention of wood-block printing caused a tendency towards orderings
of Han characters, and _much_ later, Latin characters.

To sort/compare/search/... to do the things text editors and text formatters
do, the stuff that makes the computer a useful tool for writers and readers,
a character model is required.

Anyone got any characters?

To put it another way, my wife has 256 horses (8 bits worth), and suggested
I brand them usefully. Half of them (7 bits worth) I brand with the English
brands, because our horses must run with American horses. I brand a few with
the French and Spanish marks, becuase our horses must run with Quebec horses
and others may want to run our horses with Spanish horses. That leaves some
horses unbranded.

        A "barred-l" would be good, and an "a-cedille"  (Navajo)

My only hard criteria is "must be used in a community-based language program",
cause if I let linguistic anthropologists slip into the corral, I'd have to
get a larger herd of horses, most of whom would be dead or looking forward to
the inside of a can.

Of course, people can continue to use ASCII or one of the European 8-bit
character sets and work around the limitations. We've gotten this far on
borrowed horses, maybe this is as far as we get. A minor BIA note in 2050
may record that literacy "in Indian" was victim of the peacefull typewritter,
and its successor, the computer, and no shots were fired by the government.

kitakitamatsino (it does look nicer in syllabics)
Eric
        "J'ai perdu quelque chose... quelque part...  dans mes reves,
        les gens ont commence a parler ... en anglais."
                              Caroline Ennis, Walastakwaik (Maleseet)