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I think the great work by Chris Harvey is more notable. http://www.languagegeek.com/ http://www.languagegeek.com/ He's been developing the Aboriginal fonts fo
by sinkasapa 6y ago
I think the great work by Chris Harvey is more notable.
http://www.languagegeek.com/ http://www.languagegeek.com/
He's been developing the Aboriginal fonts for decades, when many people working on language documentation were only vaguely aware of Unicode. He was very responsive to projects I worked on and added characters into the private use areas whene Unicode hadn't defined characters yet. This allowed school children as well as researchers to use orthographies they wouldn't otherwise be able to use electronically. Many language documentation projects have relied on his work.
The Noto fonts are nice but kind of late comers. Google has a history of making a brief noise about endangered language projects before abandoning them. This site was originally a Google project that was abandoned for years:
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/ http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/
The characterization on the site is that Google always intended to hand it off but the reality is that there was a big noise made by the company and then nothing more than an essentially empty web site sitting there for years until it was taken over by other groups.
Fonts don't go away but I would be very weary of trusting Google with data as important as endangered language documentation. You never know when they'll turn out the lights. They'd do a lot more good by helping to fund and support existing projects that have demonstrated long term commitments.