Wampum

How do you approach this?

... [m]any Native American languages remain unwritten ...

Its author is attempting to politically defeat public finance for social expression in languages other than English, in the United States, and is making the case that production of texts by adults, for the education of children, in "many (unidentified) Native American languages" is make work.

The underlying facts he's appealing to have context -- Alaska in the Carter years. It just so happens that I know something about this. I provided some of the support for a Unicode Consortium conference when I worked at Sun, and I spent a pleasent day sitting betweek Dirk Vermullen and Don Knuth. Dirk gave a talk on how Canadian Syllabics were being unified and Don gave a talk on how he was typesetting some religious texts. I spent my time thinking about the architecture of internationalization in Solaris.

What Dirk was doing was gathering the glyphs (characters or letters) of the pre- and early-typewritter period missionary texts, which with an interesting exception, were all artifacts of the early pink-collar "scientific speed writing" systems, of which the Gregg Shorthand is the now extinct dominant form. Basically, every missionary with an opinion on how to invent a writing system, or better extract the greatest profit from the systemic exploitation of women as poorly paid clerks, went off an invented one on his or her post-1850 allocation of Indians. Mercifully, most missionaries, while nominally mutually heretic, were in fact orthodox and unimaginative, so the task, 150 years later, of finding the common intersection and tossing out the exotic to form a bounded union of every ink blot used for the Crees, the Inuktituts, Siksika, Carrier, Slav, and Dené was ... attractive to a printer vendor, in the Canadian governmental market.

There are a lot of texts, bibles, psalters, catachisms, prayers, written in syllabics in every northern language, from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. There's plenty of orthographic variation within any particular sample, just as there is in 18th century English as written in England and its colonies in Asia and the Americas. Further, there is non-functional (except to distinguish between missionaries) variations within any sample of texts in a single language, and further non-functional (again, other than to distinguish between missionaries) variations within language families, and utterly non-functional (except because of the common culture of the missionaries) similarities between glyphs used to represent the written forms of different language families.

Now there are lots of things I've come to regard as "wrong" or misguided" in Dirk's work, and in the Unicode Consortium raison d'être:

1. characters are not glyphs, printer vendors can't sort, spell, or do much beyond decorate paper with ink, and their desire to fit all the markets of the world onto a small number of ROMs isn't an interesting alternative to or substitute for using computers to facilitate written communications between humans in languages other than ... binary,
   
2. "Canada" does not have jurisdiction over the Crees, the Inuktituts, Siksika, Carrier, Slav, and Dené, nor for that matter does the "United States" have jurisdiction over Carrier, Slav, and Dené in Alaska, or any other Indigenous language of the Americas. The Unicode Consortium (aka "Unicadettes") are glyph mavens employed by printer vendors, or vocationally "engaged" in the glyphs enjoyed by (or suffered with) in the written expression of other peoples' languages. As a group of private persons they've no business substituting indirect access to language workers (teachers, writers, editors) for direct participation of language authorities, or elevating colonial polities and subordinating indigenous polities. Canada, and the United States, are part of the problem, not part of the solution, and paying Dirk's wages isn't quite enough proaction,
   
3. a group of gnomes swotting away in basements in London really aren't the best, or brightest mob, to be doing the same violece to Chinese and the languages that use traditional (at several historical points of departure) Chinese (Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese) or Simplified (PRC) Chinese characters, see "subordination" above, this time of the polities which use Chinese for communications of record, by gnomes in basements in London,
   
4. a single source for characters (my point of divergence from Harald Alvestrand) by the IETF is both unnecessary, and counter-productive in the particular choice of the Unicode repetoires and encodings.
   

And that's just all the biggies I remembered between making eggs for the children and servicing the rest of my domestic interrupt stack. The nuances of each run to, yes, thousands of pages of gorp, and distract from the central issue of whether the author of the widely shopped op-ed piece I've snipped a fragment from, knows anything useful, or is simply a machine for the production of "English Good! Spanish (and Indian, for we are indeed just a cosmetic detour) Bad!" encoded within a limited universe of supporting rationals, for consumption by a colonial elite that, may fund education in the primary grades, but nothing more. No foreign talk in the Courts or Congress.

Jim Boulet Jr. is Executive Director of English First. He doesn't actually know enough to comment usefully about how "Indian" (and Hawai'ian) is constructed historically in Federal Indian Law, and he doesn't appear to know anything useful about Native Language loss, preservation and recovery. He appears to be an ignorant racist writing for a well-known publication of ignorant racists, and as I mentioned earlier, his real target is suppression of the men and women working in a strawberry field 100' feet from where we are camped, not the Diné Nation (Navajo) or the Cree Nations (of Canada), where we have enough speakers to possibly survive as languages. They speak Spanish, and keeping them down is what "English First" is all about.

His predecessors managed to kill German, and Yiddish, in the United States and most of Canada, after 1914. Remember that. Yiddish was a living language in North America. It is now a dead language in North America. Hitler wasn't the only Anti-Semite to stride the earth in the first half of the century. Jim Boulet Jr., is simply a polished Aryan, a skin head attempting to "pass" as something other than a savage in tats.

The extended entry is a piece I wrote in 2002 for the Indigenous Languages and Technology list. It may be more clear, or simply different. I concluded

A minor BIA note in 2050 may record that literacy "in Indian" was victim of the peacefull typewritter, and its successor, the computer, and no shots were fired by the government.