Doug Ashbury
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Apr 02/01) - A linguist and software developer, engineer and marketing professional are working on a Northern project with meaning, literally.
The group, owners of Multilingual E-Data Solutions in Ontario, are currently working on the Inuktitut living dictionary project.
Prior to division in 1998, John Howse, who has the marketing background, talked to Dave Smith about a "living dictionary," which would have a database everyone could access.
Smith was then chief information officer for the Nunavut Interim Commissioner's Office, which was set up by the federal government to prepare for the creation of Nunavut.
One of the goals of the project is to handle the challenge of new terminology being created in Nunavut communities.
"It's a journey," said Howse during a recent visit to Iqaluit. Howse, along with linguist and software developer Jack Cain, and engineer Kit Pullen, whose background is in data encoding and transformation, work on the project from their homes in Ontario.
The Inuktitut living dictionary is "unique" but it's not "proprietary," Howse adds.
"I knew it would be difficult and complicated. Software companies didn't have a clue what they would be facing."
What makes an Inuktitut dictionary possible is technology that now has room for all the characters needed.
Older technology, simply "tricked" the computer into thinking one character meant something else. The problem was it limited character availability.
But newer technology means there's room for 250 times more characters -- plenty of space for Inuktitut, English, French, as well as english spelling and syllabics of Inuit words.
To illustrate the problem, Howse points to a page where some characters were hidden behind others leaving room for only 256 characters. Today, there's room for 64,000 characters on that same page without any overlay.
"We prepared the technology that allows (you) to flip back and forth," he said.
Canadian aboriginal syllabics was invented in 1840 by Wesleyan missionary James Evans and later adapted to the Inuit language and introduced to Northern communities.
The living dictionary Web site, found at www.livingdictionary.com, runs in three languages including Inuktitut, English and French. For Inuktitut, there are two scripts: roman orthography and syllabics. The living dictionary's potential market is circumpolar. Inuktitut is spoken from Russia to Greenland. In all, there are 17 dialects. "The challenge for Nunavut is to create terminology everybody agrees to," he said.
And it appears the challenges are far-reaching, according to a paper written by Cain: "Those who have worked on (the creation of the living dictionary) are hopeful it will provide an important new tool in support of an aboriginal language, which, just as with so many other such languages, is surrounded and threatened by English and French."
As well as the dictionary development, Multilingual E-Data Solutions is also working on a spell-checker based on structural rules of Inuktitut.
The company is currently identifying the rules with the next step being software development. A prototype is possible this year.
Whatever form an Inuktitut spell checker takes it will be different from the way English is checked for accuracy because of the structure of the language. Inuktitut is agglutinative which means suffixes are added, or glued, to a root word to build meaning.So getting a computer to check for correct spelling appears unsolvable .
"But we can check the structure of what you've typed," Howse said.
