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The Internet Technology

Aboriginal Languages Now Easier on the Web 30

Posted by michael from the internets dept.
orkz writes "The BBC reports that Canada's Inuit can now publish to the web in their native language of Inuktitut, as well as more easily view websites that contain their syllabic font, thanks to a system a developed by a unique ASP, Web Networks that provides services to socially committed organizations."
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Aboriginal Languages Now Easier on the Web More

Aboriginal Languages Now Easier on the Web

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  • Sounds great! (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by zaqattack911 ( 532040 )
    Now all the villagers can crowd around the one internet connected PC in a 6,000 Mile radius to blog about some whale blubber :)

    Ouch.. just kidding.. err I'm clutured. I promise.

    Love,
    Zaq
    • It's easy to make jokes when it's not your tax dollars paying for this

      • Re:Sounds great! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by zaqattack911 ( 532040 )
        Oh grow up.

        There are a million and one non-profit orgs just like this one that use your tax money. It's a fact of life. If you don't like it, move to Rawanda.

        Second, since I'm Canadian.. these are my tax dollars too.

        Love,
        Zaq
        P.S. Since you are probably 12 years old, this is all a moot point.
        • That is the problem. There are too many non-profit organiztions, each taking a larger and larger piece of the pie. And what does the average person get? Nothing. If a culture can't support itself, natural selection states that it should die.
          If you want to support this with your own money/time, great for you. I am sick of the government spending money on things that have little/no effect on the populace.

          PS Since you are probably in your 30's or 40's you are probably used to haveing the government spend
          • Indeed, what is occuring is enslavement. By accumulating enough public debt, the leadership can enforce universal total taxation, at which point you are a chattel slave. In the mean time, you are being enslaved incrementally. It's all good. Canadians are even worse than USAns, in that they their vast open spaces and shallow history make them think they can grow their way out of misery. Sorry, ain't gonna happen. You're being pushed into two tiny cities, for sheering and subsequent slaughter.

        • Second, since I'm Canadian.. these are my tax dollars too

          Typical Canadian attitide: "I'm being robbed blind, so I'll be damned if you aren't as well."

          How long will it be before Canadians realize just how badly their government is robbing and murdering (taking tax $ for "healthcare" and then not providing it in life and death situations despite more having been paid in taxes that the cost to pay for lifesaving surgery required) them?

          Canadian culture is all about identifying with an impoverished group u

          • Sounds good to me. All us communist liberals can move up North, and if you don't like it, you can come down here!
            • Sounds good to me too. :-) All together now: "Good Riddance!" Though, you'll find Canadians generally find Democrats too far to the right (yes, "the right" ?!) for their liking.

              Saw a comical map of U.S.A. and Canada with the post-election democratic States combined with Canada to form the "United States of Canada", and the (religeous right) republican areas labeled "Jesusland".

                • Well, as a libertarian, if pressed, I'd generally lean Republican instead of Democrat, if those were my only two options.

                  However, as of late, Republicans have lost all sense of small government and fiscal restraing, while moving dangerously toward a theocracy.

                  I'dve preferred a Democrat President just to move the Administration at odds with the House and Senate and provide some room for reflection (Stalemated governments do little good, but can't do much bad either).

                  Of course, I can't vote in U.S. ele

  • ...technology allow for something like this

  • This is? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @01:10PM (#10725191) Journal
    So, this is using server-side font specification to display Pigiarniq glyphs without the user having the font installed, right? I hadn't realized you could do that (What exactly is being sent over the wire?) but it doesn't seem like any great technical advance has been made.

    Good for the Inuit, though! I'm curious to see if they can really implement Inuktitut as the language of government in Nunavut.

    • Re:This is? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by CtrlPhreak ( 226872 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @01:29PM (#10725490) Homepage
      Well if you look at the page, what's sent over the wire is an image of the glyphs, kinda like the tex format to image converters. The server must read the code, translate it then convert the output into an image and shove it in the page where it should be before sending it out to the user. Really cool.

      Doesn't seem like a huge innovation, but it's a great thing for the intuit people. The large advances for people seem to be taking something that's developed and applying it in a new way. Good work.
      • Really cool, I remember using Shodouka [lfw.org] - a proxy server that used the same technique to read Japanese webpages back in 1995 (long before browsers supported foreign languages). It was certainly a huge innovation back then, though with processor power as it is today, generating images on the fly like that might seem more trivial.
      • I dunno about you, but I'd find it much, much cooler if the TTF itself was just sent down the pipe, rather than converting to an image. Converting to an image seems like a cheap (but needed) hack, where as having a TTF or other font file your browser could apply would make a lot more sense, be more flexible and stay truer to the document (text, not graphics). I've had a handful of designers ask if there was any way to do that, as they'll have nice, neato fonts on their machines but that aren't on the majori
    • It looks like GIF is what's actually being sent, although with a .fd extension instead of .gif.
  • I don't get it. Canadian Aboriginal is already in Unicode (U+1400-U-167F) as of 3.0. Hell, I think Mac OS X even comes with a font covering it.

    Where's the magic? The translation to graphics on the fly for people with old browers?

  • Ummm...So what? (Score:4, Informative)

    by sepluv ( 641107 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <yelsekalb>> on Thursday November 04, 2004 @02:15PM (#10726112)
    I don't see what this achieves except a quick buck for the company concerned as Unicode has supported canadian syllabalics for ages. One can view Inuktitut pages fine if you install an appropriate font [travelphrases.info]. (It must be a slow news day on /.--or maybe /. gets brown envelopes for these company press-release/ad stories)

    Also how much do these guys know about character sets? The Attavik website uses "latin1" (a non existent charset--should be "ISO-8859-1"--and why not UTF-8 so they don't need images) and is content-free giving no one any real idea what they do. From what it says I think they sell proprietary software to Inuktitut organisations (that they probs don't need) though.

    Also, the companies homepage [web.net] (which sucks) doesn't have a charset (and is not UTF-8/ASCII) [w3.org] and is very invalid even when you do work the charset out [w3.org].

  • Living Dictionary (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Hellvetica ( 170451 )
    The previous company [macadamian.com] I worked for had a part in developing The Living Dictionary [livingdictionary.com] at least three years ago now. Sun's site has a short piece [sun.com] on it.
  • In Australia, indig. lang's are all too quickly going out of use & human memory...

    Arabunna (no longer spoken, but originating north of Marree, in South Australia) has been preserved - as best as a non-indigenous research-educator can do - to date, in a massive loose-leaf binder (published, in 2004, by SA's Education Dep't), soon to be supplemented with an audio CD of people reading and/or speaking this language.

    In the Marree Aboriginal School, we heard kids being encouraged to sing non-indigenous kids
  • It looks suspiciously like the kind of garbage you get when you load up a page that your browser doesn't have language support for! :)
  • It's a strange solution. Embedded font support has been integrated into internet explorer for years, and although they seem to have stripped it out of Mozilla, netscape used to be compatible with trueDoc. Links: (Microsoft Font Embedding [microsoft.com]) and truedoc [truedoc.com])
    • Embedded font support has been integrated into internet explorer for years, and although they seem to have stripped it out of Mozilla, netscape used to be compatible with trueDoc

      The TrueDoc technology involves DRM to "prevent users from stealing your fonts". I imagine the software is proprietary, and not open source compatible. This must be one of those bits of proprietary software that Netscape ripped out before releasing the Navigator source code.

      Doug Moen

  • we've had language support for KLINGON for, oh, how many star dates now? I can't wait to see how Babelfish mangles it: cruising for chicks becomes !@#@@#!!@@$##@#@ (kayaking for baby terns.)
  • ...rendering the character set as graphics means that unless you have Opera, which scales graphics as well as text when you set the zoom. Not to mention that blind Inuit are SOL--does Canada have an equivalent of the Americans with Disabilities Act?

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