Re: Handling Aboriginal Languages

On Jan 14, 2009, at 7:47 AM, Phillips, Addison wrote:

> I am not an expert on Canadian Aboriginal languages, so don't know  
> the full answer to your question, as I'm not familiar with the  
> specific languages and dialects in question.

I'm not an expert either--there likely are some on this list--but  
there is some more information on Tlicho at http://www.languagegeek.com/dene/tlicho/tlicho.html 
.  From the indications there, the orthography uses extended Latin,  
and is not particularly exotic; it requires some accents on vowels, L  
with stroke, and upper and lower case glottal stop (cf. e.g. http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0100.pdf 
  and http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0180.pdf).  Any font with a  
reasonable extended Latin repertoire should suffice--there shouldn't  
be any need to use specialized fonts with nonstandard encodings.   
Orthographic conventions may vary, so it would be necessary to consult  
with the clients, but it should certainly be possible to use UTF-8.   
As far as data entry goes, the site I mentioned has some keyboard  
layouts, but it should not be too difficult to construct others if  
those are not suitable.

Douglas Davidson

Received on Wednesday, 14 January 2009 17:17:59 UTC