Ojibwe Dictionary Online Project

[William J Poser]

Heather,

You're welcome. Yes, by "linguistically adequate" for this purpose
I just mean unambiguous and consistent. The crucial thing is that,
when converting from system to another, you can lose information but
you can't insert it. Some practical writing systems are defective
(in a technical sense) in not marking some distinctions (English,
for example, does not distinguish the voiceless interdental fricative
of "thin" from its voiced counterpart in "this"). If your database
uses an unambiguous system, you can convert it to the defective system,
but if you use the defective system in the database, you won't be
able to convert it to any non-defective system.

The conversion from one writing system to another would be done
by means of a computer program. This may be very simple, or it may be
complicated, depending on the pair of writing systems. Exactly
what you'll need to do depends both on the writing systems you
need to convert and on how your database and publication system is
set up. Most writing system conversions that I am familiar with
are pretty simple and will not take a programmer long to write.

I have written a tool called Xlit for facilitating writing
system conversions that may be of help. It runs on all major
platforms and can be obtained at http://billposer.org/Software/xlit.html.

Oh, one further little point: the writing system that you use
internally need not be the same as ANY of the practical writing.
For example, even now it is often most convenient to enter data
in plain ASCII so as not to have to worry about character encodings
and keyboards. Some people therefore use a slight variant on a practical
system that avoids non-ASCII characters. For example, the dominant
writing system for Carrier uses underscores on certain letters.
The lexical databases have the underscores preceding the letter
they go with (e.g. yu_s "snow on the ground"). To generate output
in the usual writing system the underscores are combined with the
following letter. We usually print using the Carrier Linguistic
Committee writing system, but we have produced versions in
(something approximating - too complicated to explain) the writing
system of the 1938 Roman Catholic Prayerbook, which some elders
know, and in the International Phonetic Alphabet. We have
the capability of printing in syllabics too, though there 
hasn't been demand for that yet.

Bill