forum

[Mia Kalish]

Unicode works really well for most characters. 

 

It doesn’t work for rising tone, nasalized Athapascan vowels, especially the
“i”, because you end up with a dot and a high tone mark, which is incorrect.
It doesn’t work well for the glottal, either, because beyond representation,
you need to have the glottal function as a real character. If you take a
shortcut and use the apostrophe, Word and sorting algorithms see it as a
punctuation mark, and represent the word incorrectly. 

 

Since there are So Many glottals in Southern Athapascan, especially at the
beginning of words, this is a real problem. 

 

Mia 

 

PS:

Hi, Keola; nice to see you. :-) 

 

PPS: Happy Valentine’s day, everyone.  

 

  _____  

From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Keola Donaghy
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 2:58 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] forum

 

Aloha Ted, we've been using Unicode on our sites for Hawaiian for many
years. This is the CSS code that I use in all of them and it seems to work
well on contemporary OS and browsers:

 

font-family: Lucida Sans Unicode,Arial Unicode MS,Lucida
Grande,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;

 

Lucida Sans Unicode is the most ubiquitous of the Windows fonts, Arial
Unicode MS came with some older installations, and Lucida Grande is the best
Macintosh font for viewing on the web as I have been told it has the largest
collection of characters. The final two are fallbacks. Arial on Windows has
our Hawaiian diacritics (not sure about how extensive the rest of its
character set is) and then Helvetica again for Mac users.

 

If you're not familiar with the way CSS works (my apologies if you do
already), it will start with the first font, and the browser will use the
first listed font which has the characters you need. If none of them have
the characters you need, then you might get a square box or question mark. 

 

Most contemporary browsers seem to try to locate a font that has a character
missing from the font that you have specified. For example, if you specify
Lucida Sans Unicode only and a Mac user visits your site with Safari or
Firefox, the browser will compensate and use Lucida Grande to display the
unicode characters.

 

It would be helpful if your users provided the operating system and browser
versions they are using.

 

I noticed you're using Ning. Are you localizing the site as well? I started
a Hawaiian translation of Ning a few weeks ago and got sidetracked. Their
localization tools are impressive and very easy to use. I was going to try
to register to take a look at the site but it asked "Band(s) of The Colville
Tribes:" to which I have no reply. You can customize the CSS in Ning, though
I haven't done so myself yet.

 

Hope this helps, 

 

Keola

 

 

On 12 Pep. 2008, at 10:30 AM, Ted Moomaw wrote:





I work at the Omak language and cultural preservation program for the
Colville confederated tribes.  My question is that I would like to start a
website for online lessons and also a place to chat using our unicode font.
Do you know of anyone who has started a language chat forum that uses
unicode, the font we use is called lucida sans unicode.  I have a few
friends that read and write in our lang. and I think many others would soon
catch on w/ such a place to visit online.  I was also thinking it would be
nice to have an interactive dictionary on the same site.

 

There has recently been added a website called oneheartforthepeople.com it
is a locally started website for general interest locally,  I started an
okanogan language group on there, and on my home computer I can perfectly
read everyones font, but at my work computer where we almost exclusively use
unicode I cannot read the font from that site, also many others are unable
to correctly recieve the font.  If you know of anyone I might contact who
has started a site that is unicode supported would you please help.

 

 

 

 

========================================================================

Keola Donaghy                                           

Assistant Professor of Hawaiian Studies 

Ka Haka 'Ula O Ke'elikolani             keola at leoki.uhh.hawaii.edu 

University of Hawai'i at Hilo           http://www2.hawaii.edu/~donaghy/

 

"Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam."  (Irish Gaelic saying)

A country without its language is a country without its soul.

========================================================================

 





 

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