Ojibwe and Cree are both spoken in Manitoba, but it's too far south for Inuktitut.
I read through your other comment on this post and read about the work you're doing. I didn't quite understand –I think it's hard to explain a lot of these linguistics tools briefly without uploading a lot of context– but it seemed up my alley as well.
> It's interesting to have such a niche tech challenge associated with your ethnic group of languages.
That's true, I think it can be a lot of fun and rewarding for technologists. Kevin King is a font designer who was tasked with making a new font for syllabics, then found that some syllabics had never been adopted into Unicode and set about getting them approved[1]. He worked with the communities and the Unicode committee and got them into Unicode, and that must have been really rewarding.
There's difficulty in approaching from the outside, though. I'm trying to be careful to provide value and not overstep. The Inuit especially can be defensive, because you see a lot of people online who sort of fetishize the culture, or people (certainly linguists) whose work can seem extractive to the tight-knit Northern communities.
I've always wanted to build tools working with text that people use on a day-to-day, but I also worry that this will be just another project I spend months on that will not see any use. I'm trying to make connections so that I can build value without seeming extractive. It's hard to know where to start, however.
I wouldn't consider your months spent on it in any way wasted, even if you have native critics, it's a kind of ad-hoc anthropological resource that you add to the pool of tools available in the web, and on the long run I think it will have a good impact.
Thanks for your review also and yes it's still early days, tons to do but of the fun type. I'll look into Manitoba as I have relatives which may be related to the cultures you mentioned, thank you!
When you say syllabics it reminds me of syllabaries (?) of mesopotamian languages and hieroglyphs, but I guess it's just the terms sounding alike.
I read through your other comment on this post and read about the work you're doing. I didn't quite understand –I think it's hard to explain a lot of these linguistics tools briefly without uploading a lot of context– but it seemed up my alley as well.
> It's interesting to have such a niche tech challenge associated with your ethnic group of languages.
That's true, I think it can be a lot of fun and rewarding for technologists. Kevin King is a font designer who was tasked with making a new font for syllabics, then found that some syllabics had never been adopted into Unicode and set about getting them approved[1]. He worked with the communities and the Unicode committee and got them into Unicode, and that must have been really rewarding.
There's difficulty in approaching from the outside, though. I'm trying to be careful to provide value and not overstep. The Inuit especially can be defensive, because you see a lot of people online who sort of fetishize the culture, or people (certainly linguists) whose work can seem extractive to the tight-knit Northern communities.
I've always wanted to build tools working with text that people use on a day-to-day, but I also worry that this will be just another project I spend months on that will not see any use. I'm trying to make connections so that I can build value without seeming extractive. It's hard to know where to start, however.
1. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20255-ucas-adds.pdf