build a font for your endangered language...

[Heather Souter]

Taanshi all,

Actually, what I was hoping for was an <n> with a </> right through it.

Over twenty years ago (to be sure), an Elder from the Turtle Mountain
Reservation in North Dakota published a few resources using a character like
this.  From what I can tell, the backslash was added after the fact.  The
special 'n' was used as a character to mark nasalization of the vowel(s
immediately  before it.

Now, I realize that a tilde over a vowel is what is normally used.  However,
since Michif has quite a few French-origin elements (+/-50%?), many of our
Elders were (still are?) multilingual and familiar with French-spellings,
and many learners in Canada (at least) rely on French dictionaries to guess
at the meaning of some French-origin words,  a character like this could
help quite a few people recognize Michif cognates of French words.

One orthography we are presently using a modified  double-vowel system which
includes an n with a tilde over it to mark nasalization.  It  works quite
well but we had really wanted an <n> with a </> through it to mark the nasal
vowels in both French-origin and Cree-origin elements.  (Yes, we have nasal
vowels in Cree-origin elements of (almost ?)all  dialects of Michif!  Our
language is, in so many ways,  blend doing things that are not normally done
in its languages of origin!)

Anyhow, that is the story behind my desire to have this new character....

Kihchi-maarsii pur kakiyaw tii ziidii!

Eekoshi pitamaa.

Heather

PS: How do I get a tilde over an <n> when writing emails using a PC.  I can
do this on my MAC but haven't figured out how to do this on a PC....

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 7:35 PM, Andrew Cunningham <lang.support at gmail.com>
wrote:

> And on windows are available in core fonts.
>
> 2008/5/17 Richard Smith <rzs at wildblue.net>:
> > Heather,
> > are these the ones?
> >
> > ń  Ń
> > (n with a rising pitch sign above)
> >
> > i suppose your computer needs to have the right encoding
> > but i pulled these acute n's  off the Character Palette
> > on my  iMac10...and dropped them on this email (did they scramble?)
> > they are ready-mades ,ready to go
> >
> > Character Palette
> > under European Scripts
> > under Latin:
> > "Latin small letter n with acute"
> > "Latin capital letter n with acute"
> >
> >
> > -Richard
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On 5/16/08 4:30 PM, "Heather Souter" <hsouter at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > Taanshi,
> >
> > I am wondering how to go about creating a new character and how to go
> about
> > getting a unicode codepoint for it.  What I have in mind is is an <n>
> with
> > a</> over it....  Any advice or suggestions?
> >
> > Kihchi-maarsii!
> >
> > Eekoshi.
> > Heather Souter
> > Michif Language Activist and
> > Community Linguist
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Andrew Cunningham
> Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator
> State Library of Victoria
> Australia
>
> andrewc at vicnet.net.au
> lang.support at gmail.com
>
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