a thought on microsoft...

[MiaKalish@LFP]

Jess, If you want me to help you with the font development, let me know. We
might also consider looking for some grant funding for this. I know how to
do fonts and make them accessible to spell-check. Grammar checking is more
work than I can handle at the moment, but I am working on solving that
problem for my dissertation.

Mia
----- Original Message -----
From: "jess tauber" <phonosemantics at EARTHLINK.NET>
To: <ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2004 2:19 PM
Subject: Re: a thought on microsoft...


> In the situation with Yahgan, which only has two fluent speakers
illiterate in the language, the issue of standardizing orthographies is a
vital one, for teaching, document creation, and computerization.
>
> Five different systems, of 20 or so used historically, are "in play". Most
of the existing documentation is in two very different versions of an
ideosyncratic phonetic orthography developed in the first half of the 19th
C. by a British phoneticist and modified twice by the missionary living with
the Yahgans. In this century there is an officially recognized standard
orthography (in Chile) developed on the basis of recent work with the last
speakers by Chilean linguists, an ad hoc system used by the rest of the
Yahgans to render words and phrases (since I'm told they don't like to use
the official system), and the one I came up with, which is just a
retranscription of the first missionary system into conventional
alphabetical symbols all of which can be found on a standard keyboard.
>
>
> Because I'm working with documentation in all 20 systems, I've had to
convert very often to the ones in play. These 5 are going to remain a
problem- the heirs of the missionary insist his two systems be used in any
publication (paper or electronic), the Chileans don't want multiple systems
(which has been a problem for them in the case of Mapuche/Mapudungan), and
the Yahgans themselves want to go their own way. I've only used my own
system on-line at the Yahgan language discussion on Yahoo (since I haven't
figured out how to get their system to take non-standard symbols, and they
haven't answered my queries).
>
> This is also an issue for data storage, since without some sort of
encoding the nonstandard symbols mean documents have to be stored as lumps,
and not strings. The Yahoo discussion limits the storage space. I've been
looking around for possibilities for font development to get around this
problem, but that's way beyond my rudimentary abilities.
>
> The Yahgan population itself is in the very low hundreds, and with only
two fluent speakers left it will be some time (if ever) enough of a base
exists to warrent the kind of work it would take to do the kind of things
being discussed in this thread. But danged if it doesn't sound interesting!
Maybe by the time things are actually moving on the ground the
technology/tools will have gotten to the point where much less effort is
necessary to throw something usable together. Hope springs eternal.
>
> Jess Tauber
> phonosemantics at earthlink.net
>
>