 From facts...
“Indigenous communities and their languages are threatened around the world”.
International Symposium on the World's|
Indigenous Languages|
2005|
“Canada’s Aboriginal languages are among the most endangered in the world.”
UNESCO|
Atlas of the World’s Languages|
in Danger of Disappearing|
1996|
“The typewriters and computers don´t carry the first column of our writing system anymore and I had to conform to their programs. It is unfortunate that our traditional way of writing had to disappear. How I wish it could be retrieved.”
Taamusi Qumaq|
Introduction to his dictionary in syllabic|
1990|
“Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons.”
United Nations|
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples|
Draft, Article 14|
1994-95| |
... to acts 
So, unless we missed something, we observe that:
a) Aboriginal languages are endangered globally;
b) Technology poorly integrates them, if at all;
c) Technology has an increasing weight in our societies; and
d) This increase gets sharper and quicker every day.
And we dare formulate this hypothesis:
“Aboriginal languages will be increasingly endangered, and quicker.”
So: act we must, and act we do!
We're taking those facts very seriously. From facts to acts... Here's the big picture of what we've done, are doing and will do:
@ Preservation and revitalization of languages: we help Communities and Nations to protect their language, through our original process, fruit of 4 years of research, combining coaching, culture, language and technology. We read your mind: yes, our process is especially well thought for small-budget projects...
@ Input of Aboriginal languages into computers:
Language |
Hardware
keyboard |
Software
keyboard |
Transliterator |
| Blackfoot |
Done |
In progress |
Planned 2008 |
| Cherokee |
Done |
In progress |
Planned 2008 |
| Cree |
Done |
In progress |
Planned 2008 |
| Dene |
In progress |
In progress |
Planned 2008 |
| Inuktitut |
Done |
Done |
Done |
| Ojibwe |
In progress |
In progress |
Planned 2008 |
@ Recovery of a monolingual Aboriginal dictionary for which software, font, file format and encoding had been lost (we recovered 99.97% of the author's work: 21,239 definitions; the remaining 0.03% were recovered manually, though)
@ Transcoding of an Aboriginal arts database for which the legacy font became unavailable (we recovered 100% of the 1,261 artist's works: 18,392 words)
@ Creation of a trilingual Inuktitut dictionary by merging two bilingual dictionaries (automatic, semi-automatic and manual merging, resulting in a database of 26.041 entries)
@ Transliteration of an Aboriginal book (still in progress... but we're confident we'll achieve 100% as well)
NunaBlog will tell you more. If you feel like talking about or joining our projects, please do so. |
