American Indian / Native American language fonts

[cardinal]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Through the search, I've found one very useful discussion on this topic,
which is now 3 years old. https://typography.guru/forums/topic/26467-forwarding

It seems that the task was started, but when I search for these fonts (for purchase/for use) I am having trouble locating them.
I am also very interested in designing a few different fonts for these languages, beginning specifically with Ojibwe.

I am culling my research to hopefully write a grant to begin work on this. I appreciate all help the typophiles can provide!
cardinal

[jonathanhughes]

This might be useful:

http://action.attavik.ca/home/langcom/en_fonts.shtml?AA_EX_Session=94ad8...

[Si_Daniels]

Might want to drop Ross Mills a mail.

Cheers, Si

[Thomas Phinney]

Andrea, drop me a line as well.

[typerror]

You may want to explore Zapf's effort in the 70's with Chief Sequoya's alphabet of the Cherokee Indians (Native Americans).

I believe it was a Walbaum derivative cut by Walter Hamady with Zapf.

Michael

[jselig]

Depending on the languages you are looking for, you can ask John Hudson here as well. He's done some work on First Nations languages.

[will powers]

Andrea:

Check in with me some time re Ojibwe and Dakota/Lakota.

powers

[cardinal]

Thanks everyone! this is fantastic! Will be in touch soon.

Right now I am interning (in exhibitions, as a graphic designer) at the National Museum of the American Indian in NY and am shocked that even in our library, we have so few examples of Native written languages. Most translations are phonetic anglicizations, which are helpful for me to pronounce (but not really!), but are absolutely ugly when compared to the Native syllabary.

ps. I think the Cherokee font is one of the most developed, but the applications I've seen of it (probably not Zapf's!) are obv. roman character driven and therefore, leave something to be desired.

[Thomas Phinney]

What do you mean by "the Native syllabary"? Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary? I'm unaware of any singular and universal native American writing system developed by native Americans. (Even Sequoyah's system is clearly Latin-inspired.)

Of course, I'm no expert in this area, and would love to be enlightened.

My earlier comment about getting in touch offline was based primarily on assuming that you were looking at Latin-based systems of transcribing native languages. Even these have a very limited number of decent typefaces available....

Regards,

T

[charles_e]

Thomas

I don't think it is so much a matter of fonts, but a matter of software -- either in the font or in the applications programs. All my experience comes from typesetting books with some of these languages, primarily Apache, Kiowa, Lakota, Navajo, and just a little with Nahuatl, Maya, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Tabasco Chontal, Purepecha, Sierra Zapoteco, Isthmus Zapoteco, Mazateco, Ñahñu, Totonaco, and Huichol.

As far as I know, none of these languages had a written form other than using the Latin alphabet. The problem is the various orthographies, some dating back to people working long before laptop computers (e.g., Ella Deloria & Lakota), who would use marks easy to make with a pencil (dots at various places, for example; hard to typeset). Later, the problem was to adapt to the typewriter & to some extent print, so other marks were used -- sometimes needing a touch-up with a pen if you were limited to the typewriter.

Even here, there was no standardization across languages -- even ones with common roots, like Navajo, Apache, Kiowa, etc. (Athabaskan roots) so a nasalized vowel in one might be signaled by an ogonek, but with a macron below or underline in another. Long vowels can be denoted by doubling, or by a macron. Etc.

All these can be made up for any font, and it is much easier now with OpenType. The problem is that the Unicode Consortium will not encode new characters which contain only additional diacritics already encoded, but most fonts do not have the needed routines in any ccmp or mark feature so the characters can be easily accessed.

As to Cherokee, it is a bit political. The (at least Eastern) Cherokee have an official font; that it looks like a 1890s newspaper headline font doesn't bother them. There is some interest in making a font out of Sequoia's hand-written version of the syllabary, and it would make a nice script. Not too many Cherokees read or write Cherokee, so there is some movement to make it easier to learn by simplifying the syllabary -- by removing about half of it. The Cherokee are split on that one. Moreover, the few people at the Cherokee Museum who write Cherokee use the Linguist Software system predating Unicode, back when there were both PC and Mac formats (they use PC).

These are transitional times; we are moving from what could be easily rendered on a typewriter, or the old 126-character fonts, to what can be rendered with the possibilities with Unicode & applications programs that support it.

FWIW

[Thomas Phinney]

Charles,

I'm confused. In your first pararaph you say that fonts aren't the problem, but it seems to me that in your fourth paragraph you are saying the opposite.

These days, InDesign and the Windows version of MS Office support OpenType mark attachment and 'ccmp', so I don't see app support as being a major barrier (though support in Mac Office would be nice - it isn't there yet, is it?).

BTW, I've looked at the free (and official?) Cherokee font that's available. It's utter junk in both design and execution. Bizarrely irregular stroke weights, sidebearings chosen by rolling dice, extrema often ignored in point placement, non-Euclidean geometry of curves (oops, read too much H.P. Lovecraft!).... yes, I exaggerate, but only a little.

Cheers,

T

[Thomas Phinney]

Hmmm, it seems there are several Cherokee fonts available, all with pretty generic names like "Cherokee" making them hard to tell apart,

My scathing words above apply to the 1993 Cherokee font by Joseph LoCicero IV.

The 2005 official font by the Cherokee Nation and Tonia Williams, which I had looked at long ago, is not *as* bad, but still pretty awful. It can't decide whether it's monoline or if it's high-contrast Didone. No overshoots for the rounds. Inconsistent stroke weights. Inconsistent stress. Spacing needs to be thrown out and redone, because it's useless. But at least there are points at extrema.

If they're going to go to the trouble of providing keyboard drivers and such, you'd think they would/could use the proper encoding.

Cheers,

T

[charles_e]

I’m confused. In your first pararaph you say that fonts aren’t the problem, but it seems to me that in your fourth paragraph you are saying the opposite.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. Or precise . . . or both.

When I said "I don't think we need new fonts," I should have said I don't think we need new typefaces. I don't think there is anything wrong with setting Native American languages in Arno, or Quadraat, or any good font for the text. You shouldn't pick a font to try and make the text "look Native American" -- certainly not at the expense of that text. (I once worked with a designer who didn't want to use a "European looking" font for Lakota, so she picked Goudy Sans. Far as I'm concerned, that doesn't look good for anything.)

While the typefaces may be OK, the fonts aren't. If you don't use OpenType, you have to used hacked fonts. And even if you do use OpenType, you have to make up either characters or features; probably both. As it happens, I spent the afternoon working on Arno, so as to use it for a text with Nahuatl.

But typesetting isn't the only or most important issue. Unless there are text editors that allow the needed characters to be typed relatively easily and to appear close to correct, no one who writes will use them. I know one author who uses an ancient WordPerfect system because his manuscripts look better that way. Never mind that converting these files for typesetting is an hair-pulling, expensive chore.

And while Omniglot & Wikipedia & etc. don't get the details of Native American languages quite right, this just points up the problem. Nasalized vowels in Kiowa really shouldn't be underlined, they should have macrons below. The glottal stop in Apache is an apostrophe, but it is a "typographer" apostrophe (U+2019), not a ASCII apostrophe. Etc.

I'll allow that's a semi-elitist viewpoint. At some level, if people use underlines and ASCII apostrophes because they are there and relatively easy to use, maybe that will become the preferred orthography.

My guess is something like this is what's happening with Cherokee. The Cherokee Museum already owns, and will continue to use MS Word on a PC. For them, the cost of just one copy of InDesign would mean not doing something else, and I would guess they feel the time needed to learn InDesign would probably be better spent on something else as well. They have already bought Linguist Software Cherokee (hacked Type 1 font), and have learned to use it. Why change? Upgrades cost money. Most material isn't "typeset" anyway. (I'll not comment on the Official Cherokee font, though if you look at Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life you will notice that the Cherokee not supplied as art was set in a different typeface.)

So, there is this tension between those of us who care for the aesthetic presentation and those who are trying to increase the use -- hence ease of use -- of these languages.

[Chris_Harvey]

If your interested in Ojibway fonts (and Native language fonts/keyboard layouts in general), have a look at http://www.languagegeek.com

Chris

[kholvn]

Hey! I'm new to the board but if I may just say that back in the early to mid ninties, there was a man who developed a font for the Mac and it was so easy to use. All you had to do was type in the phonics and it would come up in Cherokee syllabary. It was the best! I believe that the western Cherokees now have something like this for the PC. I'm not sure if this helps any at all but I thought I'd just let you know.

[paul d hunt]

Jim Rimmer's Canadian Syllabics

It really is a shame that there are so few fonts for these languages. I am including support for Diné Bizaad (Navajo) in my typeface I am currently working on, and it is next to impossible to find any Diné text online. Of course some of this is due to the fact that it is such a little-spoken language. But I'm afraid that the lack of fonts compounds the problem of the language not being used more in print.

[Tom Gewecke]

Navajo just requires Latin script, so I don't see how lack of fonts could be a significant issue with that language. Also I think it is by far the most widely spoken native american language (probably over 100,000). The reason you don't see much text is due to the extremely low literacy rate in it, and perhaps also a certain cultural lack of interest. One example is

http://nv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Íiyisíí_Naaltsoos

[charles_e]

Navajo requires vowels with ogoneks. You might be amazed at how many fonts lack these -- Also, in the Wikipedia page you reference, the glottal stop is signaled by an ASCII apostrophe. Far be it from to tell Navajo's they are wrong, but the usual orthography for Navajo & most other Native American languages is the "typographer's" apostrophe, AKA raised comma (U+2019).

Note that Omniglot gets it wrong, too:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/apache.htm

At first glance on the Omniglot site, one might think that U+0027 is correct; then you notice that Omniglot uses 0027 for an apostrophe everywhere.

Does it matter? Well, probably. In Polynesian, the glottal stop is signaled by U+2018. I've also seen proposals that the apostrophe not be used for a glottal stop, since it is confusing -- and of course, in every case, that's where 0027 is used for the apostrophe.

FWIW

[Tom Gewecke]

If you look more closely at the Navajo wikipedia page, you will see that it uses a mixture of 0027 and 02BC. The latter is what is used in the English Wikipedia page on the Navajo Language. I'm not sure that the Navajo Nation has ever decided what is correct, but I think in any case you would want to avoid any "punctuation" mark to represent an actual character, and 02BC seems reasonable to me.

Navajo's requirement for ogoneks makes it no more disadvantaged with respect to fonts than Polish and Lithuanian. How great is that?

[paul d hunt]

Navajo requires ogoneks with acute marks, including O/o with ogonek, which are found rarely in any fonts. These characters could be composed if combining accents are supplied in the font (also found in few fonts), but using these would require sophisticated software, unless the typeface includes OpenType programming to do this for the user automatically (which is supported by few applications). Even the Wikipedia page you linked to has the problem of using the dotted iogonek together with the acute mark, unacceptable typography in my book. Native peoples deserve good type options as well.

[charles_e]

Paul is right. For some reason, O,o w/ ogoneks are found in Latin Extended B, and few fonts seems to include characters from this. I'm not sure whether or not the acute w/ ogonek are in Latin Extended additional, but few fonts have these, either.

If you are making fonts, it is valuable to think in terms of what languages your fonts can cover. Just a few extra glyphs get you Yoruba, transliterated Arabic, transliterated Devanagari & Tamil, and of course, some of the Native American written forms. You need not fill out all of Latin B & Extended additional to pick up the glyphs needed of a number of languages.

For OpenType application, using ccmp is one way to provide for Latin characters with diacriticals not precomposed in Unicode.

But until there is general support for these languages in both ordinary text editors & web fonts, the Native American languages will remain a problem.

My $0.02

[Thomas Phinney]

@Charles Ellertson:

The fundamental problem is that there are a *lot* of Latin-based languages which need "just a few extra glyphs."

Personally, I'd think Yoruba and Pilipino/Tagalog would seem to be high on the list for easy languages to cover that are not covered by, say, WGL-4. At least by sheer number of speakers....

(I'll be blogging on the general topic of extended Latin and drafts of future Adobe character sets shortly, btw.)

Cheers,

T

[Tom Gewecke]

It's all relative, but neither combining combining diacritics nor o-ogoneks seem terribly rare to me. My OS X comes with about a dozen fonts that contain the latter. I wonder what the comparable figure is for Vista?

Since the characters with ogonek plus acute are never going to be in Unicode in precomposed form, the quality of their display will inevitably depend on the smarts of the local software. As pointed out, having both a dot and an acute on an i is not at all good. A work-around for this with some fonts may be to encode the character as i-acute plus combining ogonek rather than vice-versa.

But no doubt a font designed specifically to display these things perfectly is the best solution. I'd welcome a chance to test Paul's font with my Navajo keyboard layouts when it is available.

[paul d hunt]

Tom, i can send you beta versions. Contact me off list: paul(a)pilcrowtype(dot)com

[cuttlefish]

I have included the Cherokee syllabary in my Agamemnon project. Those forms are based on what I could divine as correct from the "official" font, the Plantagenet Cherokee font included with Mac OS X, and a faded low resolution scan I somehow located of Sequoiyah's handwritten script. I would appreciate anyone with any degree of expertise commenting on it.

I have also covered a broad assortment of "rare" accented characters in the Latin alphabet. I have no idea if this is adequate for any Native American language, but some may have got caught up by chance.