forum

Fri Feb 15 03:33:33 UTC 2008

Hi Charles, 

You can go here: http://learningforpeople.us/MescChir-English.pdf
This is a nice piece from the actual dictionary, shows the textual rhythms.
All the forms are represented, although not all the individual letters. But
there is enough so that anyone familiar with the issues will understand
completely. 

There is a graphic of the little template I made here:
http://learningforpeople.us/FontsForTribes.htm
And, you can download both the template and two fonts, and nicely (I think)
there are instructions for doing both. If you page down a bit, you can see
the template installed in Word, and the way I used colors to separate the
different vowel types. 
I made the fonts . . .  :-) Wasn't too hard after I spent a year or so
figuring it all out. 

Mia 

-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Charles Riley
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 1:55 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] forum

Hi Mia,

It sounds like the glottal examples you describe 
would require submitting data to the CLDR project 
for the Athapascan locales.  There's a similar 
case in Afrikaans, where ['n] sorts independently after z.

Is there a page that shows the desired character 
behavior for rising tones over vowels?  I found this page:
http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/orthography.html

Under the Gwich'in section, the image link that 
would display some of the nasalized vowels is 
broken.  Is the rendering for the low tones acceptable?

Chuck Riley

At 03:12 PM 2/14/2008, you wrote:
>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. J
>
>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 
><mailto:keola at leoki.uhh.hawaii.edu>keola at leoki.uhh.hawaii.edu
>University of Hawai'i at 
>Hilo 
><http://www2.hawaii.edu/~donaghy/>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.
>========================================================================
>
>
>
>

Charles L. Riley,
Catalog Librarian,
Africana Project
Sterling Memorial Library
Yale University

(203) 773-0449 (H)
(203) 887-2947 (C)
(203) 432-1704 (W)