Re: How’s your Inuktitut?

[Pravin Jain]

Hi,

It is interesting to note that when I copy pasted from this email into
gedit on my Linux machine, it was rendered perfectly.
with no boxes. Seems to have a good support indeed.

Pravin Jain

On Wed, Jul 7, 2021 at 9:25 PM William_J_G Overington via Unicode
<unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
>
> Yesterday evening I received a private email with the title
>
> How’s your Inuktitut?
>
> I have permission from the sender to mention the email and to quote its
> content here.
>
> The email contained the following, and nothing else.
>
> ᐃᓄᐃᑦ ᑕᐱᕇᒃᑯᑦ ᑲᓇᑕᒥ ᐊᖏᔪᒻᒪᕆᐊᓗᖕᒥᒃ ᖁᕕᐊᓱᒍᔾᔨᕗᑦ ᒥᐊᕆ ᓴᐃᒪᓐᒥᒃ, ᑲᓇᑕᒥ ᓯᕗᓪᓕᖅᐸᐅᓪᓗᓂ
> ᓄᓇᖃᖅᑳᕐᓯᒪᔫᓪᓗᓂ ᑯᐃᓐᒧᑦ ᑭᒡᒐᖅᑐᕐᑎᒋᔭᐅᓕᕐᓂᖓᓄᑦ!
>
> All I knew about Inuktitut at that time was that it is to do with Canada
> and that I remembered that it had been mentioned in the Unicode public
> mailing list and that someone had mentioned producing a font to support
> Inuktitut.
>
> I searched on the web and found the following.
>
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/translator/blog/2021/01/27/inuktitut-is-now-available-in-microsoft-translator/
>
> So I went to
>
> https://www.bing.com/translator
>
> and, using copy and paste from the email to Bing Translator, I obtained
> the following translation.
>
> > Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami celebrates Mary Simon, Canada's first
> > Aboriginal Governor General!
>
> I found the following.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Simon
>
> I decided to try to reply in Inuktitut as follows, using the Bing
> Translator.
>
> Thank you. That is very interesting.
>
> I got the following.
>
> ᓇᑯᕐᒦᒃ. ᑕᒪᓐᓇ ᑐᓴᕈᒥᓇᖅᑐᒻᒪᕆᐅᕗᖅ.
>
> However, it is one thing to translate using machine translation from a
> language that I do not know into English, English being my native
> language, in the hope of getting an idea of the meaning, and I often do
> that, yet it is quite another thing to translate using machine
> translation from English into a language that I do not know, as I have
> no way to know if the translation is correct or uses an idiom wrongly.
>
> So I decided to then try to translate back to English.
>
> So I did a copy to the clipboard, then pasted as a new go into Bing
> Translator and got the following.
>
> Thank you. That's very good to hear.
>
> So, it had not round tripped exactly, but the message was fine so I
> replied to the sender of the email.
>
> Upon thinking of this today it occurred to me that the Inuktitut
> characters had all been displayed, there were no tofu boxes, so there
> seemed to be font support for Inuktitut on my computer.
>
> So I pasted the original message into WordPad to try to find out which
> font is being used.
>
> It appears to be named Gadugi.
>
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/gadugi
>
> As I have Windows 10 installed on my laptop computer, the font is
> available here.
>
> I have found this to be an interesting learning experience.
>
> William Overington
>
> Wednesday 7 July 2021
>
>


-- 
Pravin Jain
(M)+91-9426054269