Comments | aadroma: [Multilingual Monday] Computers and Native Languages

aadroma

[Multilingual Monday] Computers and Native Languages

Aug 03, 2009 23:54

I'm part of several groups on Yahoo that focus on the Cherokee language, and while a lot of it pertains to people learning the basics (the syllabary, numbers, arguments as to who created the Cherokee script, etc.), sometimes there's pure gold and it reminds me why I'm on said lists. Recently a gentleman had started asking about computer ( Read more... )

tsalagi, ᏣᎳᎩ, multilingual monday, cherokee

Comments 7

muckefuck August 4 2009, 13:45:35 UTC

It's interesting to note that this concept of "normalisation" is quite a recent one, generally tied (as in the Catalan case) to the growth of nationalism. Before the emergence of national vernaculars in the early modern period, it was taken for granted that certain domains were linked to certain languages. If you wanted to write troubadour poetry, you learned Occitan, just as if you wanted to study law, you learned Latin; there was no expectation that you should be able to discuss verse genres in Latin or jurisdictional disputes in Occitan.

aadroma August 4 2009, 16:22:50 UTC

But you can, of course, see why it isn't like this anymore. For starters English is "the language" for pretty much everything -- business, science, technology, law, entertainment, music, commerce, etc (and yes, while there are exceptions to this rule, you have to admit that the use of English is overwhelming!). It's one of the keys to linguistic SURVIVAL -- to not NEED to switch to English when even discussing the above areas of interest.

donncha22 August 4 2009, 15:05:47 UTC

Any of those "speakers" competent to vet your translation of the Three Monks? The academic fortress remains impassibly silent on that matter. Bunch of jerks that they are.

aadroma August 4 2009, 16:23:32 UTC

No, they haven't, and it annoys me greatly. I'm half-tempted to go to Oklahoma and flag down native speakers at this rate!

donncha22 August 6 2009, 04:30:19 UTC

http://www.lowlands-l.net/anniversary/tsalagi.php

I just found this Cherokee translation. What do you think? I never knew this project existed until tonight.

bluebear2 August 4 2009, 17:22:28 UTC

Well, Quechua is spoken by 10 million people so is a currently used language.

I agree that there needs to be words for modern things instead of just borrowing words from some other one. In the early days of the Apple Macintosh, Apple actually made a point of making sure that the word for "mouse" and other terms used in a GUI were equivalents.

Putting Cherokee into Ubuntu would be nice... ext_230433 April 7 2010, 01:40:49 UTC

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+lang/chr