Wampum

I've worked on language preservation for over a decade. This poster reflects the work of some of my peers in the technical community, work that had some flaws, but generally more flowers than failures.

One weakness is defining a single unified glyph repitoire for 100 years of scripts, which makes the representation of the archaic characters more difficult than the non-unified practice, and it complicates the use of glyphs as characters, having sort orderings and casing rules, in different character repitoires, which from a glyph comparison standpoint, are identical, or differ only by some glyphs. This is the same problem imposed upon the Asian languages which use Han (Chinese) characters -- Japan's based on the repitoire current circa 1000 AD, Korea's, based on a less archaic repitoire, Viet Nam's, based on an even less archaic repitoire, Taiwan's, based on "classical" modern Chinese, and China's, which was simplified and moderinzed in the latter half of the 20th century. A group of Europeans decided to "unify" all Han and treat glyphs as if they had no historic context in character sets, simply because to their eyes, some glyphs used in different character sets all looked alike. Eng1j2h w00d be very djHerent jf the 2ame ru1e2 were app1jed t0 the r0manjzed ph0necjn a1phabet, and writting collation and sorting would be wicked difficult.

This issue was the basis for my second working trip to Beijing in 2001 at the request of the Chinese Academy of Science and the China/Japan/Korea Joint Engineering Taskforce, as the IETF appeared to be dangerously set on adopting the European experts "Han Unification" for Asian character sets used in network standards.

A second weakness is that the Canadian National Standards Organization brought this proposal to the International Standards Organization, a defect in two parts. The first part is that the ISO will not accept technical submissions by the standards organization of Tribal Governments, which can result in inaccuracies, and the second is that the ISO is part of the UN, and it is the UN that cannot bear to have Indians define how Indians write.

As it happens, the US dominated and mostly North American and Western European IETF cannot bear to have Asians define how Asians write either.

Turning to another aspect of the problem, tags to identify language, like "en" for "English". The International Standards Organisation defined two-letter language tags in ISO 639, which contains a total of four (4) codes for all the indigenous languagesof the Americas, north and south. The situation is not greatly improved in the larger three letter version of ISO 639.

Klingon is not the national language, or the language of a protected national minority, of any UN member state, and so there is no two-letter, or three-letter ISO 639 code for a Klingon language tag.

The IETF created its own registry for language tags, and the tag for Klingon is i-klingon.

There is also a tag for Diné, the tag is i-navajo. The textual source(s) offered in support of the application for the i-tag is Analytical Lexicon of Navajo by Robert Young and William Morgan, published by the University of New Mexico in 1992.

The Center for Diné Teacher Education at Diné Collete (formerly "Navajo College"), an institution of higher learning of the Diné Nation, has no place in the IETF's scheme of how Diné is represented. The girls in the photo above are learning Diné as a first language.

The IESG just chartered a working group to update its language tags registry. The first working group draft can be found here. I've been attempting to educate these people for over a decade, but on the key points they are beyond reach. Hobbists, not user communities, properly manage languages. In so far as they are able, and displacing the Chinese National Standards for Chinese is no small feat, no standard offered by Government(s), particularly not Tribal Government(s), shall be an International Standard. Voyerism by remote Anglo-Americans (aka "global transparency and interoperability") trumps delivery of literacy as a design goal. Etc.

Homeric Greek is taught at every Land Grant and Ivy League college in the United States, there is always some money and some prestigue for Classics, but there is no money for Indian languages, either in municipal Adult Ed, pre-school Head Start, or anywhere in between, and less prestige.

Something as simple as the nemitôkusena is still illegal to recite as a language text in any school in Abenaki Maine.

nemitôkusena spemkik aian,
sôgmôwalmegwadets aliwizian,
amanta pachiwawittoak ketebaldamuawôganek;
ali kittôgwak kedelanldamuôgan spemkik dali io nôbi dali kik,
ali kiktôgwadets.
mômilina alemikisgak nedatasigiskwa abônemena;
ioba achi anhaldamawiago kagôwiulakeban,
ainiuna anhaldamauak kagôwihuhakedebanik;
muzak dali chigittawikkak tômôppa uji saagi-unemihinamega wôwalha dakki saagu azuômina mamajigek.
nialach.

The Republican and Democratic Americas have no interest in, or money for, the preservation and recovery of Indian languages, and the corrosive and controlling effect of the majority culture silences consonants, vowels, and voices.