9 ms·

The Inuit agree on a common writing system

167 points by askl 7y ago

Pxtl 7y ago
I had no idea that Inuktitut had more than one writing system. For a language with such a small population, that's a surprising and serious pain-point. The Inuit are one of the few indigenous groups in Canada that managed to keep their culture relatively intact - most other groups have lost much of it through centuries of colonial rule and ultimately with residential schools, while the Inuit were comparatively neglected - both in positive and negative terms. Good to hear steps being taken to protect the language.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >The Inuit are one of the few indigenous groups in Canada that managed to keep their culture relatively intact Because they aren't wealthy enough to be worth a lot as taxable income and didn't control an area with dense/lucrative enough natural resources to be worth subjugating. Without money or something that could be converted to money there was no reason for the city slickers to go out of their way to impose/integrate (word choice depends on which side you're on) their culture. You can see this pattern more or less worldwide. On every continent there are people who live in the remote parts, nominally under some government but are mostly left to do their own thing because they have little to take and take little from the government. If you want to be left alone it's best to be someone not worth bothering. I agree that it's nice to see them become more of a defined culture (language and all) since being obviously delineated from the rest will help them maintain their own autonomy and culture.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    There is quite a lot of natural resources in the Far North--North Slope oil comes to mind. However, the environment is so inhospitable to getting resources out of the area, that it has for the most part been economically infeasible to exploit them, at least until the latter half of the 20th century.
- blahedo 7y ago
  > relatively intact Yes, although a mix of incentives and force has moved nearly all of the people into towns and cities at this point, and in fairly recent memory. I remember when Atanarjuat came out twenty years ago the talk was that the timing was good—there still were many people who personally remembered living in the traditional way, well enough to recreate it vividly and accurately on camera, but they had to be brought out from the towns to do so.
  - jjkaczor 7y ago
    Yes - was speaking to a co-worker about this in August - this happened only a generation ago (he knows people who remember this happening as children - his age), and the hurts, harm and overall levels mistrust that it caused as still rippling through communities and families.
__rvnykk 7y ago
Interesting, I thought they had already agreed on a standard a few years ago In any case, Syllabics are a very interesting writing system. I'm planning on doing an in-depth video about them at some point, but Tom Scott's introduction is great [1]. There are some major advantages to using Syllabics. Consider that the languages that use them are polysynthetic, meaning that the 'words' are quite large and encompass a lot of information, and that they mostly use a Consonant-Vowel syllable structure that is perfect for a syllabary, where one character represents both a consonant and its vowel [2], or an abugida, where the consonant is the important part of the character, and the vowel markings are secondary [3]. An alphabet creates large, unruly words. Qaliujaaqpait and Ojibwe also double their vowels to lengthen them, making romanized text very long. Look at this Ojibwe word for coffee: "makade-mashkiikiiwaaboo", in syllabics, it's the much less unruly "ᒪᑲᑌᒪᔥᑮᑮᐙᐴ". And Syllabics themselves are amazing, there are different shapes for the consonants, and their rotation determines the vowel sound [4]. Just awesome, and very easy to learn However, sadly, there are many disadvantages to the awesome system. For one, roman letters are everywhere, there's good software support, there's always going to be a need to know them as the new generation learns English and French. Not to mention rotation-based characters are no good for, say, someone with dyslexia. I'm not shocked at this decision, it was the right call. First Nations and Inuit languages need standardization, and more importantly, as much literature as possible, to compete. That's hard to do when everyone is writing in a different way. I'm writing syllabic converter software that should hopefully be more accurate than the current ones online today, if you're interested in helping or learning about it, feel free to send me an email 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW4hI_METac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW4hI_METac 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems#Ojibwe_syllabics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems#Ojibwe_...
- mc32 7y ago
  Hangul is an interesting hybrid with aspects of syllabary and alphabet and seems to work pretty well. Also lends itself well to typesetting. It’s also nice and compact.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mFixman 7y ago
I can't help but being sad for the official end of the Inuktitut syllabic: it was such a unique system or writing, and it seemed to fit Inuit languages well. Unicode can handle a zillion characters, and I don't remember having problems with missing fonts in any of my devices for at least half a decade. If the problem is people talking in English on their cellphones because of lack of input support, couldn't the government of Nunavut work in making iOS/Android keyboards with a good syllabic input method?
- tasogare 7y ago
  I feel a bit sad too. I looked at it last week, it was a really nicely designed syllabic alphabet and well suited to the phonology of the language. I planned to learn it this week for the fun. I don’t think developing a keyboard for it is too difficult. Actually I could try to do it myself. The problem is probably more about making users install it when it’s not preinstalled on the device and thus requires downloading an application. Heck, even languages such as Chinese or Japanese requires a (first party) download on Android. I found iOS handles better multilingual input and is less confusing to get started with new keyboards.
  - knolax 7y ago
    > I don’t think developing a keyboard for it is too difficult. I've made IBus input methods for conlangs before and it's literally as simple as making a plaintext table of physical keys and corresponding characters. I can't imagine it'd be any more difficult on IOS or Android. Despite this I can't find any Inuktitut keyboards on the Play Store.
    - tasogare 7y ago
      Well it’s depends. On desktop OS plain text file method has limitations, for example on macOS it may not work if the name is too long and it ignores leading 0 for conversion which is super annoying. Then there are third party middleware like Open Vanilla which are more customizable and finally there is the solution of using native frameworks which is hellish. On mobile OS, at least on iOS, developing a keyboard means also creating the layout keyboard and managing its state, so it’s a bit more work than a single mapping text file. > I can’t find any Inuktitut keyboards on the play Store I found my next side project haha. I need one for another app I planned to do.
jjkaczor 7y ago
Wow... It's very rare that a HN post intersects so closely with my current work... I say, as I look out the window into downtown Iqaluit. Interestingly enough newer versions of Windows allows users to easily add support for both Inuktitut Syllabic and Latin languages, I have yet to see a physical keyboard. What irks me the most, is the lack of server-side language support for cloud offerings, on-premise Enterprise products, etc. If Microsoft can support Klingon for translation purposes, then just maybe they could support Inuktitut a little better.
- aerovistae 7y ago
  Holy fuck I had to look that one up on the map....you are OUT there. I realized when I saw the map that I was just reading about that place the other day! That's incredible. I honestly never thought in my whole life I would ever meet someone who had been there, even on the internet. I would be super interested to hear ANYTHING you have to share about that place. What it's like getting there, being there, what you're doing there, the people, the life, anything.
  - jjkaczor 7y ago
    It's a very interesting place - the people are welcoming and friendly (well YMMV, but if you are willing to listen and understand the local challenges and culture - then you will have a good time). Food security is a challenge for people who do live here, due to the general high-costs. Interesting fact - at one point in time, Amazon Prime shipping to Iqaluit was 2-3 times the national average for Canada (and that probably increased with their purchase of Whole Foods - items, which may be most expensive through Amazon for the rest of Canada can often be cheaper than purchased 'locally') - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iqaluit-amazon-prime-1.4193665 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iqaluit-amazon-prime-1.... The landscape is beautiful (personally, I am a sucker for mountainous/rocky terrain and ocean) - it is above the Arctic circle, so - no trees! The weather is currently really nice - a little rainy today, but no snow - the big freeze hasn't happened yet. Myself, I find that even during winter months, the cold is not unworkable - as technically the local climate is considered a polar desert zone, so the reduced humidity helps. Myself, I don't live here - but I do come up every 2-3 months, primarily working on Microsoft-stack products and technologies. Most often, one gets here from a flight from Ottawa - almost 3-hours in duration. (And hey... you still get a hot meal in-flight!) However, it is possible that you might fly in from another territory or community - during the summer there are some flights to/from Greenland. All data/communications connectivity currently occurs over satellite connections (your flight lands, your phone connects to a local "LTE" network, but that is then bridged back over satellite automatically - no extra charges ;-)) - this can be challenging during weather events, heavy rain, snow or fog can often interfere. There are plans for undersea fiber, but that will take a few years - the upcoming newer LEO satellite networks will bridge the gap until that arrives.
WalterBright 7y ago
Being an programmer, I wonder if a simpler writing system could be devised that doesn't rely on special symbols. For example, one could dedicate Q as an escape character, and what follows could specify sounds that don't exist in English. Then, one could write the language using conventional ASCII.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Inuit languages are relatively restricted in their phonology. It's a three vowel system (6 if you count long/short separately), fourteen consonants (2 of which are unfamiliar to Germanic/Romance speakers), allows gemination of consonants (i.e., consonants can be short or long), and mostly follows a C?VC? syllable scheme. The only unfamiliar consonant without a general transliteration to ASCII text is the /ɬ/ sound; q is already familiar to people who transliterate the Arabic /q/, and ng is common for /ŋ/.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
emiliovesprini 7y ago
Unpaywalled text: https://outline.com/486wJ9 https://outline.com/486wJ9
neonate 7y ago
https://outline.com/486wJ9 https://outline.com/486wJ9
tehabe 7y ago
I wonder how far apart Inuktitut and Greenlandic are, could Greenlandic use the syllabic script w/o changing much?
phy6 7y ago
Yes, but tabs or spaces?
mmmrk 7y ago
Two observations without much substance: 1. I love the logo of the ITK. So joyful! (See https://www.itk.ca/itk-board-of-directors-adopts-inuktut-qaliujaaqpait-as-unified-orthography-for-inuktut/ https://www.itk.ca/itk-board-of-directors-adopts-inuktut-qal...) 2. The comments section of https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/national-inuit-org-approves-standard-roman-orthography-for-all-dialects/ https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/national-inuit-org-app... and https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/inuit-qaliujaaqpait-the-product-of-history-and-determination/ https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/inuit-qaliujaaqpait-th... contains considerable toxicity. I was expecting general upvoting among a people here but I guess I expected too much from a comments section of a newspaper.

167 points by askl 7y ago

Pxtl 7y ago

I had no idea that Inuktitut had more than one writing system. For a language with such a small population, that's a surprising and serious pain-point. The Inuit are one of the few indigenous groups in Canada that managed to keep their culture relatively intact - most other groups have lost much of it through centuries of colonial rule and ultimately with residential schools, while the Inuit were comparatively neglected - both in positive and negative terms. Good to hear steps being taken to protect the language.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>The Inuit are one of the few indigenous groups in Canada that managed to keep their culture relatively intact Because they aren't wealthy enough to be worth a lot as taxable income and didn't control an area with dense/lucrative enough natural resources to be worth subjugating. Without money or something that could be converted to money there was no reason for the city slickers to go out of their way to impose/integrate (word choice depends on which side you're on) their culture. You can see this pattern more or less worldwide. On every continent there are people who live in the remote parts, nominally under some government but are mostly left to do their own thing because they have little to take and take little from the government. If you want to be left alone it's best to be someone not worth bothering. I agree that it's nice to see them become more of a defined culture (language and all) since being obviously delineated from the rest will help them maintain their own autonomy and culture.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  There is quite a lot of natural resources in the Far North--North Slope oil comes to mind. However, the environment is so inhospitable to getting resources out of the area, that it has for the most part been economically infeasible to exploit them, at least until the latter half of the 20th century.
blahedo 7y ago
> relatively intact Yes, although a mix of incentives and force has moved nearly all of the people into towns and cities at this point, and in fairly recent memory. I remember when Atanarjuat came out twenty years ago the talk was that the timing was good—there still were many people who personally remembered living in the traditional way, well enough to recreate it vividly and accurately on camera, but they had to be brought out from the towns to do so.
- jjkaczor 7y ago
  Yes - was speaking to a co-worker about this in August - this happened only a generation ago (he knows people who remember this happening as children - his age), and the hurts, harm and overall levels mistrust that it caused as still rippling through communities and families.

__rvnykk 7y ago

Interesting, I thought they had already agreed on a standard a few years ago In any case, Syllabics are a very interesting writing system. I'm planning on doing an in-depth video about them at some point, but Tom Scott's introduction is great [1]. There are some major advantages to using Syllabics. Consider that the languages that use them are polysynthetic, meaning that the 'words' are quite large and encompass a lot of information, and that they mostly use a Consonant-Vowel syllable structure that is perfect for a syllabary, where one character represents both a consonant and its vowel [2], or an abugida, where the consonant is the important part of the character, and the vowel markings are secondary [3]. An alphabet creates large, unruly words. Qaliujaaqpait and Ojibwe also double their vowels to lengthen them, making romanized text very long. Look at this Ojibwe word for coffee: "makade-mashkiikiiwaaboo", in syllabics, it's the much less unruly "ᒪᑲᑌᒪᔥᑮᑮᐙᐴ". And Syllabics themselves are amazing, there are different shapes for the consonants, and their rotation determines the vowel sound [4]. Just awesome, and very easy to learn However, sadly, there are many disadvantages to the awesome system. For one, roman letters are everywhere, there's good software support, there's always going to be a need to know them as the new generation learns English and French. Not to mention rotation-based characters are no good for, say, someone with dyslexia. I'm not shocked at this decision, it was the right call. First Nations and Inuit languages need standardization, and more importantly, as much literature as possible, to compete. That's hard to do when everyone is writing in a different way. I'm writing syllabic converter software that should hopefully be more accurate than the current ones online today, if you're interested in helping or learning about it, feel free to send me an email 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW4hI_METac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW4hI_METac 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems#Ojibwe_syllabics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems#Ojibwe_...

mc32 7y ago
Hangul is an interesting hybrid with aspects of syllabary and alphabet and seems to work pretty well. Also lends itself well to typesetting. It’s also nice and compact.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mFixman 7y ago

I can't help but being sad for the official end of the Inuktitut syllabic: it was such a unique system or writing, and it seemed to fit Inuit languages well. Unicode can handle a zillion characters, and I don't remember having problems with missing fonts in any of my devices for at least half a decade. If the problem is people talking in English on their cellphones because of lack of input support, couldn't the government of Nunavut work in making iOS/Android keyboards with a good syllabic input method?

tasogare 7y ago
I feel a bit sad too. I looked at it last week, it was a really nicely designed syllabic alphabet and well suited to the phonology of the language. I planned to learn it this week for the fun. I don’t think developing a keyboard for it is too difficult. Actually I could try to do it myself. The problem is probably more about making users install it when it’s not preinstalled on the device and thus requires downloading an application. Heck, even languages such as Chinese or Japanese requires a (first party) download on Android. I found iOS handles better multilingual input and is less confusing to get started with new keyboards.
- knolax 7y ago
  > I don’t think developing a keyboard for it is too difficult. I've made IBus input methods for conlangs before and it's literally as simple as making a plaintext table of physical keys and corresponding characters. I can't imagine it'd be any more difficult on IOS or Android. Despite this I can't find any Inuktitut keyboards on the Play Store.
  - tasogare 7y ago
    Well it’s depends. On desktop OS plain text file method has limitations, for example on macOS it may not work if the name is too long and it ignores leading 0 for conversion which is super annoying. Then there are third party middleware like Open Vanilla which are more customizable and finally there is the solution of using native frameworks which is hellish. On mobile OS, at least on iOS, developing a keyboard means also creating the layout keyboard and managing its state, so it’s a bit more work than a single mapping text file. > I can’t find any Inuktitut keyboards on the play Store I found my next side project haha. I need one for another app I planned to do.

jjkaczor 7y ago

Wow... It's very rare that a HN post intersects so closely with my current work... I say, as I look out the window into downtown Iqaluit. Interestingly enough newer versions of Windows allows users to easily add support for both Inuktitut Syllabic and Latin languages, I have yet to see a physical keyboard. What irks me the most, is the lack of server-side language support for cloud offerings, on-premise Enterprise products, etc. If Microsoft can support Klingon for translation purposes, then just maybe they could support Inuktitut a little better.

aerovistae 7y ago
Holy fuck I had to look that one up on the map....you are OUT there. I realized when I saw the map that I was just reading about that place the other day! That's incredible. I honestly never thought in my whole life I would ever meet someone who had been there, even on the internet. I would be super interested to hear ANYTHING you have to share about that place. What it's like getting there, being there, what you're doing there, the people, the life, anything.
- jjkaczor 7y ago
  It's a very interesting place - the people are welcoming and friendly (well YMMV, but if you are willing to listen and understand the local challenges and culture - then you will have a good time). Food security is a challenge for people who do live here, due to the general high-costs. Interesting fact - at one point in time, Amazon Prime shipping to Iqaluit was 2-3 times the national average for Canada (and that probably increased with their purchase of Whole Foods - items, which may be most expensive through Amazon for the rest of Canada can often be cheaper than purchased 'locally') - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iqaluit-amazon-prime-1.4193665 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iqaluit-amazon-prime-1.... The landscape is beautiful (personally, I am a sucker for mountainous/rocky terrain and ocean) - it is above the Arctic circle, so - no trees! The weather is currently really nice - a little rainy today, but no snow - the big freeze hasn't happened yet. Myself, I find that even during winter months, the cold is not unworkable - as technically the local climate is considered a polar desert zone, so the reduced humidity helps. Myself, I don't live here - but I do come up every 2-3 months, primarily working on Microsoft-stack products and technologies. Most often, one gets here from a flight from Ottawa - almost 3-hours in duration. (And hey... you still get a hot meal in-flight!) However, it is possible that you might fly in from another territory or community - during the summer there are some flights to/from Greenland. All data/communications connectivity currently occurs over satellite connections (your flight lands, your phone connects to a local "LTE" network, but that is then bridged back over satellite automatically - no extra charges ;-)) - this can be challenging during weather events, heavy rain, snow or fog can often interfere. There are plans for undersea fiber, but that will take a few years - the upcoming newer LEO satellite networks will bridge the gap until that arrives.

WalterBright 7y ago

Being an programmer, I wonder if a simpler writing system could be devised that doesn't rely on special symbols. For example, one could dedicate Q as an escape character, and what follows could specify sounds that don't exist in English. Then, one could write the language using conventional ASCII.

jcranmer 7y ago
Inuit languages are relatively restricted in their phonology. It's a three vowel system (6 if you count long/short separately), fourteen consonants (2 of which are unfamiliar to Germanic/Romance speakers), allows gemination of consonants (i.e., consonants can be short or long), and mostly follows a C?VC? syllable scheme. The only unfamiliar consonant without a general transliteration to ASCII text is the /ɬ/ sound; q is already familiar to people who transliterate the Arabic /q/, and ng is common for /ŋ/.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

emiliovesprini 7y ago

Unpaywalled text: https://outline.com/486wJ9 https://outline.com/486wJ9

neonate 7y ago

https://outline.com/486wJ9 https://outline.com/486wJ9

tehabe 7y ago

I wonder how far apart Inuktitut and Greenlandic are, could Greenlandic use the syllabic script w/o changing much?

phy6 7y ago

Yes, but tabs or spaces?

mmmrk 7y ago

Two observations without much substance: 1. I love the logo of the ITK. So joyful! (See https://www.itk.ca/itk-board-of-directors-adopts-inuktut-qaliujaaqpait-as-unified-orthography-for-inuktut/ https://www.itk.ca/itk-board-of-directors-adopts-inuktut-qal...) 2. The comments section of https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/national-inuit-org-approves-standard-roman-orthography-for-all-dialects/ https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/national-inuit-org-app... and https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/inuit-qaliujaaqpait-the-product-of-history-and-determination/ https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/inuit-qaliujaaqpait-th... contains considerable toxicity. I was expecting general upvoting among a people here but I guess I expected too much from a comments section of a newspaper.