Skeena Indigenous Typeface | Hacker News Reader

Skeena Indigenous Typeface

microsoft.github.io

72 pointsBogdanp12 comments

Some of the history of Unicode here is interesting, and addresses questions I've long had, for example in the sections "Precomposed vs decomposed" and "Greek vs Latin". Also, the fuller descriptions (than in Unicode's documentation) of 'confusable' characters.

This article went much deeper than I was expecting. Wow. I always wondered what native peoples alphabets looked like since the Latin alphabet was imposed on them by colonialists. Fascinating.

There were no alphabets in the Americas before European contact. Mayan had written mathematics and hieroglyphics, and some Quechuan speaking peoples had string that had symbolic knots that had some mathematical representation (I don't know if it allowed arithmetic or was just record keeping).

Sequoia developed the Cherokee syllabary (where symbols represent syllables instead of vowels/consonants) in the 1800s after seeing white men reading, and figuring out what they were doing (he spoke little English and could not read it). This is the first real written indigenous language in the Americas.

The Skeena characters shown here are obviously derived from European characters, as was the Cherokee syllabary. I think most written forms of native languages in the Americas are similar.

The Cree have a script which is far from European characters but was nonetheless developed for the Cree by a missionary in the 1800s. The Inuit have modified it for their language.

I don't know much about indigenous languages in the rest of the world.

The Maya script was not an alphabet because the word alphabet refers to a specific subcategory of scripts.

The Maya script is a logosyllabic script. Such a script combines symbols for whole words with symbols that represent syllables phonetically.

A modern example of logosyllabic script is japanese (kanji + kana)

In most cases, there was simply no native script to begin with. If you look at some examples of non-Latin-based scripts for native American languages (e.g. Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, Cherokee syllabary etc), they are all derived from newly introduced scripts. Mi'kmaw hieroglyphs are an interesting exception in that the glyphs themselves are indigenous, but their use as a full script was introduced from outside.

Latin-based alphabets discussed in the article have mostly been introduced in the 20th century to facilitate the revival of those languages. Although I find that Salishian languages in particular got a very lazy treatment - if you look at some of the examples in the article like "ʔaʔjɛčχʷot" or "ʔayʔaǰuθəm", that's pretty much the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation taken as is without much consideration for ease of use or typographic concerns (SENĆOŦEN is a notable exception to this). Kind of ironic, since many of the typographic issues the article addresses stem from this original decision.

Encoding typeface in the unicode prior to placement of diacritics either in Greek or German should assert apostrophe marks in the U+ variation.

Guess how many there are in a closed 64 bit ASCII language.

I stepped into this post unsure about what I would find. I am not an expert on Unicode, foreign languages, etc. but I've seen a lot of typefaces used on signage so I decided to see what this post offered as far as new knowledge.

I really enjoyed the depth of coverage. All the things that go into making a font that represents a language or culture and allows those who use that language to understand how to parse the characters into legible words.

I think the one thing missing here is to link some of the Unicode characters to spoken words so that the reader can understand how the character or sequence of letters is pronounced in normal conversation amongst native speakers. That would help clarify some of the differences between placement of diacriticals or other marks.

A long time ago (around 20 years) there was a radio program where one could tune in over the internet and listen to a short series called "Native Word of the Day". [0] A listener could hear native speakers pronounce words and use them in sentences so that the context of the exchange made sense. The website had a collection of words or phrases in quite a few indigenous languages and the reader could select a word from a list and hear similar content - the word itself, an example of how it is used in a sentence.

There were several west coast languages, Iroquoian languages, Alaska Native languages, southwestern tribes, etc so one could get a feel for how each group saw the world based on the words they used.

I used the site as a tool for teaching my kids how to pronounce unfamiliar words and to help them understand that there are many ways to look at the world. Seeing things through the lens of a foreign language can help bridge many gaps.

I still remember one of the words (maybe actually a phrase) that I became fond of though I would need to dig through old notebooks to find the source language. It is pronounced kinda like this - new-ahna-go-wab-me though I don't remember the exact spelling or source language. That's probably a crappy pronunciation example so good luck. Maybe someone can find it somewhere.

[0] https://www.knba.org/knba/2014-05-07/knba-re-introduces-nati...

One may find an online station using this list:[1]

[1] https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/station-affiliates/

Anyway, Thanks OP for jogging my memory.

> The form of the ogonek derives from a mediaeval scribal sign, the e caudata, and in European typography it follows the conventional writing of that sign in how it attaches to various vowel letters: [pic]

> In North American indigenous use, positioning of the ogonek is informed by typewriter output, in which the backspaced sign was centered below the preceding letter. This positioning is retained in the typography of these languages [...]

“We're so blinded by hate against Europeans we're going to repeat the limitation of another settler-originated technology just to make things different than everyone else.”

> “We're so blinded by hate against Europeans we're going to repeat the limitation of another settler-originated technology just to make things different than everyone else.”

Of all the ways to interpret the article, this is certainly one of them, but don't you think it's a bit of a stretch?

Maybe a bit. I just got triggered by the newspeak.

I don't see any "newspeak" in the part you quoted? (Jargon does not count)

Does this now hold the record for being the smallest thing possible that someone's been triggered by?

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