Technology leads to cool fonts in Native language (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Technology leads to cool fonts in Native language
Part of effort to preserve tribes’ culture and heritage

PABLO MT
Native American Times 9/14/2006
http://www.nativetimes.com/index.asp?action=displayarticle&article_id=8178

Members of the Salish and Kootenai Tribes now have their native language
at their fingertips. Literally.

With the help of various small grants and the donated time and effort of
an area resident, the tribes now have new keyboards and an easily
installed font to help in the creation of documents written in Salish
and Kootenai.

“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. “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.”

The new fonts work on both PC and Mac computer platforms. Word
processing programs can also spell check documents written in both
tribal languages. The new fonts also allow for use of teaching programs
like crossword puzzles and software that creates teacher user plans.

Jim Ereaux, a former employee at Salish Kootenai College, employed his
technical expertise to develop the two new fonts.

For many years the tribes’ cultural committee have used a variety of
computer fonts and applications for language development, publications
and historical documentation. The primary fonts in use were developed
at Salish Kootenai College about 15 years ago, but tribal officials say
it was only a partial solution because of limited technology to support
multi-language development. Members of the culture committee requested
that new resources be developed that fully support the languages, are
usable on both Windows and Macintosh OS X, work with various publishing
and language applications, and support the use of customized keyboards.

Work began on the project in late 2005 in close coordination with the
Culture Committees, several linguists, and the broader typographic
community on the Internet.

In April 2006 a small grant was written through Salish Kootenai College
to 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 grant also provides support to purchase desktop publishing
applications and distribute the customized keyboards to area schools on
the reservation.

The new fonts utilize two recent technologies called “Unicode” and
“OpenType.” Unicode is a worldwide standard for representing glyphs,
such as the letter ‘a’ or an accent symbol, for all modern languages
and supports over one million possible characters. Many languages
require several glyphs to compose one character, which the OpenType
standard manages. Both of these technologies allow documents created
with the fonts to be exchanged between PC Compatible and Macintosh OS X
computers. Not all computer operating systems or applications will
support these new technologies. The minimum requirements are Windows XP
and higher on the PC and OS 10.4 on the Macintosh.

The tribes are based in the Montana town of Pablo.