Making the Tibetan language a first-class citizen in the digital world
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[0] https://www.mcall.com/1993/10/08/new-hope-man-computer-guru-...
For a decade, Woolsey has worked with the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharmshala, India, to put the Tibetan language on computer.
The free-lance computer whiz has compiled a source book of Tibetan literature and also has worked to create a Tibetan computer keyboard for the exiles from that ancient Asian kingdom. In the course of his work, he’s met the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese political leader since placed under house arrest in that country.
Both leaders are recent Nobel Peace Prize winners, the Dalai Lama in 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991.
“If the Tibetan language isn’t put on computers — because of the fact that there are fewer than 1,000 Tibetan typewriters in the world and they’re more expensive than computers –the Tibetan language might not be saved from being put on the shelf with all those other dusty, musty languages of the scholars,” said Woolsey. “This is its only hope.”
Woolsey’s work with the Tibetan Buddhist government-in-exile in India began with an interest in Tibetan literature.
Formerly a technician with various rock’n’roll groups in the 1970s, he would read anything he could lay his hands on concerning Tibet, then enter the titles of the books in a bibliography he kept. He was traveling both for work and pleasure, and decided it was time to journey to one of the farthest corners of the globe.
“I booked a 120-day round-trip ticket to India,” he said. “I threw on my backpack and went to India. I was coming in from the airport in New Delhi at 3 o’clock in the morning and passed a camel pulling a cart down the street. I said, ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore.'”
He saw a sign for Tibet House in Dharmshala and decided to go there, even though he had no idea what Dharmshala was like or what awaited him there. His first trip to the Tibetan exiles’ home was a short one, and he later traveled to Kashmir, Darjeeling and Nepal.
By the time he returned to Dharmshala in 1983, the Tibetans knew him.
“Before I left, the Office of Tibet in New York asked me if they could have a copy of the notes that I had been keeping on my computer about Tibetan studies, mainly my reading list,” he explained. “I looked at it and it was a mess. I thought I had better clean it up. I wrote a couple computer programs to make it an organized matter. I printed it up and gave them a copy.”
A friend who was learning word processing wanted a copy and Woolsey also gave him one.
“He sent a copy to the Dalai Lama,” said Woolsey. “The Dalai Lama must have figured it was going to be published, so he wrote a forward to it.
“By the time I got back to the library in Dharmshala, I didn’t know anything about this. I got to the Western reference section and they said to me, ‘Oh, we’ve been wanting to meet you.'”
They asked Woolsey at the library what his background was and he answered rock’n’roll. They asked who his teacher was and he told them he didn’t have one. They asked if he was a Tibetan Buddhist and he said no. They asked if he wanted to become one, and he again answered no.
“I was raised a Quaker, and that was close enough,” he said. “They meditate, but they don’t call it that.”
At the Tibetans’ request, Woolsey settled down to begin work organizing by computer the chaos that was the Dharmshala Library.
Realizing the power of the age of information had fallen into their laps, the Tibetans decided he was to be their computer guru, and designated him as such.
They told him he could consider them his affiliation in the academic world.
The chaos inflicted on the Tibetans by the Chinese invasion of the late 1950s had not yet been alleviated. Books and manuscripts lay in unsorted piles in the library, so Woolsey’s computer was the perfect tool to help put things in order.
“Later on, in 1984, they sent me a list of letters to all the high lamas in the United States, from the director of the library, telling them that I was their computer guy, and would they please aid and abet me in my endeavors,” said Woolsey. “Of course, they sent them the letters before they sent me one asking me if I wanted to do it, which makes it a little strange.”
Woolsey returned to India several times at the invitation of the Tibetans. He had discovered in the United States that no one was working on computerizing the Tibetan language with much interest.
By 1985, he was acting as the consultant to the library in developing the language on computer.
Once he was given the assignment, he was besieged with students, one of whom was the abbot of the Mahayana Buddhist Temple in St. Petersburg, Russia. Tenzing Samaev was visiting Dharmshala in 1990, and Woolsey had arrived just after Tibetan New Year.
“This Tibetan brought over a monk and said ‘He wants to know something about computers,'” said Woolsey. “I said, ‘OK.’ I answered his question.”
The monk returned after the New Year with two more questions, and then the next day with two more, and then two more the next morning, and two more by that noon.
This went on for four days.
“Tenzing, in the true Tibetan tradition, formally presented himself and requested me to become his teacher, to accept him as a student,” said Woolsey.
The abbot came to this country in 1991 and went home with a computer and laser printer. With Woolsey’s help he set up the computer to work in Cyrillic, the alphabet used in Russia, and is now publishing the temple’s newsletters and other proclamations on it.
Norbu Chompel, director of book sales for the Office of Tibet in New York City, said, “Jim has done quite a lot. He’s the main person responsible for introducing computers to the Tibetan administration … He came with a lap-top and talked computers to several staff members. That’s how computers came.
“Before, we used to use typewriters,” Chompel said. “He taught computers, and then everybody got into buying computers.” With all the work he was doing for the Tibetans becoming known, perhaps it was inevitable that the Dalai Lama take more notice of him.
The Tibetan spiritual leader wanted to know what was going on with the development of Tibetan on computer, Woolsey said.
“A couple years ago, I was given the opportunity to brief the Dalai Lama about what’s going on,” said Woolsey. “We had some interesting conversation, but I feel that he’s got better things to do.”
The Dalai Lama had the pursuits of freeing his country from Chinese domination and leading his people in their exile as more pressing problems.
Aung San Suu Kyi also had more important pursuits to consider.
Woolsey met her in Dharmshala, prior to her house arrest in Burma (now officially called the Union of Myanmar) as a political dissident.
She’s been detained by the Burmese government for the last four years because of her political activities and her great personal power. Her father, Aung San, founded modern Burma and was assassinated in 1947.
She has followed in his footsteps in an attempt to free her people from military rule.
Woolsey recounted an incident at a rally in which Aung San Suu Kyi prevented a slaughter by the army of an unarmed crowd of 20,000 people. The army approached to smash the rally, Aung San Suu Kyi positioned herself between the crowd and the soldiers and halted the military with her words.
“She told 20,000 people to sit down and be quiet and they sat down and were quiet,” said Woolsey. “She out-positioned the army and did it non-violently. That’s the key, non-violence.
“She’s a very, very learned person,” continued Woolsey. “She really has the rights of her people in her heart more than worries about herself.”
As is the case with Woolsey and the Tibetans.
Woolsey’s source book of Tibetan literature is under consideration for Internet, the international computer-user network.
With his help, Tibetan might go from being an endangered language to one available to everyone who can hook up a computer to a phone line.
And that might bring an ancient kingdom into today’s electronic age.
“I feel that you should be able to leapfrog over the industrial age into the information age as an agricultural society, and perhaps be farther ahead than where we in the West are trying to get to,” said Woolsey.
Push a few computer keys and it might happen.
Originally Published: October 8, 1993 at 4:00 a.m.
The main legal difference between pasting the text here and sites such as archive.?? is that the latter creates centralized targets for legal destruction xor capital intermediation depending on whether such sites achieve "success". Either way once they get popular enough, we lose.
The sheer majority of the web would be better off if entire pages/sites were shared by value instead of by reference. The main problem with pasting whole articles here is that it makes a big wall of text. But still, I applaud it.
“the typographical notion of the paragraph does not really exist in a Tibetan text the way it does in European languages. As a result, Tibetan texts often need to be processed as a long stream of uninterrupted text with no forced line breaks, sometimes over hundreds or thousands of pages. “
But hundreds? Thousands?
Do they not have the concepts of headers? Sections? Chapters?
Both in non-fiction and fiction, there are a lot more means of content separation than just paragraphs.
That kind of organization takes time, editing, multiple revisions to get right, etc.
And a mindset that it is useful. In many cases (like if you’re a religious caste), having a giant wall of text that requires skill to identify elements from, is a plus.
Do you want your ciphertexts formatted into paragraphs too?
I’m saying that different societies have different priorities/expectations/motivations, and there is clearly a reason they don’t do it, or it wouldn’t be so consistent eh?
It’s not like white space isn’t the default on a writing surface.
Do you have any alternative theories?
I could also imagine scrolls being expensive, so ‘fluff’ like white space is discouraged, and not easily re-used or overwritten based on the inks, so re-editing or the like doesn’t actually work.
But I’m just speculating here.
Edit: the scripta continua link above had a good reference to Greek/roman examples where they were transcriptions by slaves of spoken monologues. They didn’t have paragraphs or the like because people don’t speak in paragraphs.
They also don’t edit their words when they speak, and rarely do ‘chapters’.
Footnotes, bibliographic references, etc. also don’t really make sense in the way we might think if it’s ’a record of spoken words’ vs ‘words representing ideas on their own’.
So writing used more like transcriptions of famous speeches or lectures, less as standalone and independent works.
And I assume every culture has the equivalent of 2 hour long speeches that could have been a one page email.
“Before and after the advent of the codex, Latin and Greek script was written on scrolls by slave scribes. The role of the scribes was to simply record everything they heard to create documentation. Because speech is continuous, there was no need to add spaces.”
I mean, we kind of do. We use an especially low "final" intonation when we finish explaining an idea, and an especially high "intro" intonation when we start. Kind of the same way we do with individual sentences, but more exaggerated. And we take longer pauses. When you transcribe someone talking for 10 minutes on a podcast, for example, you don't invent paragraphs out of thin air. They're generally pretty clear.
> and rarely do ‘chapters’.
Again, we do. People rarely talk for 20 hours straight; rather they give hour-long lectures delivered across 20 days. Each one is a chapter.
Even an hour-long speech is generally clearly divided into sections. The speaker concludes the section, changes their intonation, "asks" the audience what that leads to, takes a long pause while the audience contemplates, then presents the "answer" which is the start of the new section.
The reason you might not think we use this organization when speaking is because it's encoded is intonation and timing -- prosody. And we don't directly represent prosody in writing systems. But that doesn't mean it's not there when spoken. Indeed, a major part of being an effective speaker of the written word is in "restoring" this prosody that is missing on the page. And things like paragraphs and sections are major clues towards that end.
I have no evidence and also very little contextual knowledge of Tibetan language and culture. Anything I said would likely turn out to be worthless and, worse, false.
What is that based on?
It makes it possible to support the language as it was used historically and as I understand it is used presently. Even if it were to change presently, there are still historical documents which should be supported.
It sounds like you want to force change (and specifically change in the direction of what more common languages do), as opposed to "accomodate" it.
i would say that making software more flexible to handle more unusual things actually "accomodates innovation" in all languages the software supports. The more things you can support, instead of requiring everything to work the same, the more you are actually accommodating innovation.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God>
In this story from Clarke, the sentiment you just portrayed is acknowledged, and the point of the whole story.
The two westerners cannot understand not only the grand project being undertaken by the monks, but also what "god" even is to them. Before they can really understand, their project is completed and reality changes.
In tibetan Buddhism, god in the sense of an almighty individual that has influence over what happens is refuted explicitly.
-the vendors can't see the point in this 'fruitless' endeavor to build a database of their god's names for some godly/spiritual reason.
-The buddhists can't understand and importantly have no need to understand why the vendors need to "understand" their task, which, they never clarify to us.
That said, obviousley CLarke probably had no idea about proper bhuddist theology. But I like to hope that the idea is still proper?
Buddhists would really like everyone to understand their task. There is no trace of Buddhism in that story really.
That being said, i am not sure i understand your question. What is supposed to be proper?
To add to the confusion, the same word is used for the so-called mundane gods like elementals and supramundane gods, i.e. beings who transcended subject-object dychotomy and can manifest also under a form of a god, whatever it may be. An inspiration for Clarke could be the famous Mañjuśrīnāmasamgīti or "Chanting the names of Manjushri".
To add even more confusion, if instead of gods we consider God and identify that being with characteristics such as omnipresence, all-pervasiveness, being beyond ordinary mind and so on - then one could attempt do identify it with the central topic of all Tibetan Buddhist tradition that exists under various names (primordial wisdom, the union of appearance and emptiness, self-existing wisdom and so on).
I love things like this that just shows me how much I view the world from a certain perspective. I don't think I've ever had a paragraph even on one page! The closest I know is that some writer, that I forgot the name of, had several pages of stream of consciousness that I think was without paragraphs and punctuations.
Random recent example:
Does anyone know?
Pretty short change for reducing O(n^2) impact with a cache.
This change includes the following scalability improvements for documents containing extremely large paragraphs:
- Reduces the size of layout contexts to account for LF control chars.
- Due to typical access patterns while laying out paragraphs, VCL was making O(n^2) calls to vcl::ScriptRun::next(). VCL now uses an existing global LRU cache for script runs, avoiding much of this overhead.
I lack the context - are they still layong out the widths of characters when wrapping?
... by the LibreOffice devs in Indo-European-speaking countries.
So long as LibreOffice could not handle long paragraphs there was essentially no free tool to publish Tibetan.
When I (bengali speaker) visited Bhutan where they speak a language that is 50% mutually intelligble with Tibetan I didn't understand anything. I was surprised because I thought they might use a number of buddhist loan words, but even the words for dharma, karma, etc. sound completely different in tibetan
I mean, a highly technical subject will have highly technical jargon. but I am not convinced that the amount of subtle nuance in the language has a relationship to the complexity of ideas you can express in that language.
Most bugs we encounter and report in LibreOffice are more general, and aren't script specific (e.g. code which forgets that the content may be right-to-left resulting in wrong behavior in those cases); and a lot of the script-specific bugs are about the most popular script, which is Arabic (that is also used for Farsi, Urdu, Javanese etc.)
But we do have some issues regarding less-commonly-used scripts, like Tibetan or Mongolian. Here:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115607
is the meta-bug which tracks issues with: Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Zhuang,Kazak, Xibo, Dai, Yi, Miao, Jingpo, Lisu, Lahu, Wa, etc.
We don't know if there are really very few issues specific to those languages (which is quite possible), or whether it's just that they're not used so much and the users aren't motivated enough to file bugs.
Still, as Jonathan's recent fix demonstrates, there is certainly the interest to address them when developer-time-resources become available.
I would like to encourage everyone who cares about these scripts, and "document editing fairness" across countries and cultures, to consider:
1. Try using LibreOffice with such languages which you know at least a little bit of - and if you find any bugs, file them at our BugZilla: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/
2. Consider supproting The Document Foundation, which manages the LibreOffice project, financially:
https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/
We are one of the larger FOSS projects in the world, with tens of Millions of regular users (if not > 100 Million) and a board of trustees with members from dozens of countries; but - we don't have large corporations investing money nor time in the project. While a few commercial companies do contribute to LibreOffice (like Collabora and Allotropia) - many fundamental issues are not close enough to their customers' needs - which is why it was decided to hire Jonathan directly to give RTL-CTL-CJK support a boost. Individual user donations are what enables this work.
I did give a talk on the state of Right-to-Left language support at the annual LibreOffice conference, a few days ago:
https://events.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-conference...
Thanks for the link!
But at the same time, if it's an actively used script, don't you think current users should consider changing its conventions?
My point was that all writing systems change, especially when the medium changes. Modern punctuation was invented at some point simply because the previous form of writing words one glued to the other was not ideal.
I mean, they're too busy adding emojis over there to work on support for human scripts any more...
What makes you say that there are human scripts being left out, or which nobody is working on (or that the work is displaced by emoji support)?
One challenge of large projects is that what's essential for some users is not even within the experience of other users. Sometimes humans make the fundemental error of thinking the range of their own experience defines the range of everyone's experiences, when the truth is that each of us sees only a tiny portion of an enormous canvas.
Did they add anything from Atari to Unicode? Wikipedia says the focus of the current name owner is "licensing and blockchain".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_Peo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization_of_Tibet
This is one of the great injustices of the world, and unfortunately the Tibetan leader (the real Dalai Lama) had to flee and live in exile in India.
Realism. Movements without a realistic goal tend to become quite niche, unless there's another hook to keep them going. With the rise of China as an economic and nuclear power, and one with no interest in even talking about Tibet as something other than a part of their empire, a populist movement to pressure politicians to "Free Tibet" is about as useful as a populist movement to get politicians to conquer the concept of entropy.
People, even very passionate and politically active people, moved on to causes with at least some hope, or at least the perception of hope.
By the time it became clear that things wouldn't have gone that way, the west had bound itself to China too much to be able to do something about Tibet (without reshoring the manufacturing).
The Tibetan issue used to be felt very strongly, even in America, I believe.
It probably largely still is, but it's much less on the forefront, and probably seen as too hard to solve.
And maybe the younger generations don't know it well.
Anyway, if it became more feasible to improve the situation, I think there would be a lot of support and pressure to do it.
Sure, probably not to the point of entering into a war with a nuclear country, but that wouldn't be needed.
The support for Tibet was due to the fascination for the culture, the people and the places, I imagine.
People so peaceful, places so beautiful, and a culture so fascinating, violated in this way. It's just outrageous, and very hard to comprehend.
Of course anyhow, a reshoring anytime soon is extremely unlikely.
I'm not sure what you meant with the racial animus in the Middle East, by the way
The US could have conditioned most favored nation trade status for China on improving its behavior in Tibet, could have kept them out of the WTO, etc. That would have cost the wrong people money.
For example, people can support increased representation of the Welsh language without wanting Wales to secede from the UK.