Typed by Stanley Sakai - @stanographer on twitter and available for hire
JULIA: Next up we're going to have Nick who's going to push us from paradise, adding a remote island alphabet to Wikipedia.
NICK: Can you hear me okay? All right. Can you hear me all right again? All right. Thanks. Thanks for waiting for that.
Hi, my name is Nick Doiron and in real life I work for the Museum of Modern Art but I've done some other projects and this is some crazy project that I've gotten involved in for one laptop for child.
So I got started with this group, the Ministry of Education for the Marshall Islands. So Majuro Atoll is this group way out in Pacific, if you go from California to Hawaii and then out that distance again, you get there. And you get there, and it's this spaghetti string of land out in the middle of the Pacific and it's this island paradise. And at the same time this bizarre thing of nature which, I don't know enough about geology to tell you how this could exist but it definitely does exist and they sent me because they bought a thousand laptop per child laptops
And it's at this Delap Elementary School. And they had these laptops and they run Linux and they wanted to know how we could run Word, and PowerPoint, and Excel on them, which we cannot. So instead we had these different alternatives. We had some teacher training, we let the kids try them out? And it was really just set up at a few different schools and the kids really love them.
And they're in English, but especially with the younger kids you want to have some stuff in their local language. So I had to read up a little bit on their local language which is called Marshallese. So the thing about the Marshallese Language is that it has, like, this different alphabet that has been, kind of developed over the last hundred years and then they revised in the '80s. Anyways, some words that you can learn in Marshallese, Yokwe is like hello, or aloha, and then there are a couple of other phrases, “ejeeh ahm moore,” how are you doing, and “noonniep” is a mythical creature that eats snapper. I asked if it eats other fish and that was, like, the dumbest question. And then there's this other word, “konnoblok.” You'll notice that there are a lot of vowels and commas and other letters.
So there are all these different words that are very hard to encode and so they would ask me, we want to do a quiz on these laptops where kids would answer questions like, "What are these different kinds of fruits" and things like that and the problem was that everyone was getting all the answers wrong because there's actually two ways of writing the letters. If you think about how characters work, there's the letter and the accent and then there's the combined letter. So people were always getting them wrong and so I had to come up come up a string thing that would compare it to them, and then whichever answer they had would be correct. It would say that it was correct.
So these are all the letters in their alphabet. One of the issues, as I said in the '80s and the '90s, they had a linguist come over. They were using like the ene, the Spanish letter with the tilde -- and every letter they have an accent there was a secondary letter that was okay up until the '80s. So there was actually four different ways that you can type every single letter that has an accent in the Marshallese alphabet.
And the way this all comes together, this actually comes back to Unicode. So the thing about Unicode is it's kind of like our Rosetta Stone for computers. Every character that can be written from our own alphabet to really essential emoji like "kissing cat face" is really encoded in this Unicode spec. And someone yesterday talked about how time zones are this fascinating, detailed, nerdy political kind of thing that people talk about. And Unicode is very much that way, as well. There are all sorts of conflicts. North Korea tried to get Kim Jong Il's name in there. And they said no. And that's why everyone in North Korea doesn't like us.
But actually, the Marshal Islands have actually what I call the Latvia problem, which means that some of their comma letters, they didn't really make them, they appropriated them from Latvian. And so there was some debate over the last few years, should, the Marshallese language secede from Latvia, and use their own letters? So now, I have to add all these other letters because there's so many ways to type out these letters in the Marshallese alphabet.
And so I started to get emails from them when I started getting emails from the web, and I had things like “lxjy,” and there was no way that was a Marshallese word. And it turned out that they were using a font that would render if everyone were using the Marshallese font. So they weren't even using Unicode on their own internal stuff. They were using this special font, which I asked for it, and I asked, can it work on a Mac and they said I don't know. So really we need ways of putting these unusual alphabets onto the web and emails, and more compatible things.
And Wikipedia has this problem, too. I mean, I'm just doing is this in one place, but Wikipedia needs to be able to do this with every language ever or else someone will complain about them. So my question was, is there a solution to this problem that we're having. So Wikipedia has some really good language tools if you dig around and one thing that I latched onto was the jQuery IME, which was the jQuery plug in, which every time you go into the text area, there's a dropdown and it lets you select what language you want to type in. Some of them are completely different alphabets and this one is just a keyboard mapping where it would add the same letters as the Marshallese Marshallese letters, and you'll be able to type on Wikipedia, or you can actually have this as a Chrome extension, and you can type on the web the way that they're familiar with their font. And actually type it in the universally compatible Unicode system.
And so I went up and I did a pull request. And I'm sure there are people who haven't contributed to open source yet, it's a thrill, it's fascinating and it's an amazing feeling when you know that you've put some commits up there in GitHub or something and then they merge it into the system, so if you ever want to type in Marshallese, you can use this plug-in and it actually works.
And it was actually difficult to send stuff up to GitHub because I was on a remote island. When you're an ISP and you see something like this in your backyard, and you go, "Oh, no." I'm sending all this stuff off to space. They had a cable or something, but it was really slow, and expensive unless I was piggybacking on the Ministry of Education.
And why get people on the Internet if they're not on the Internet yet? I mean this is one region that's gone through a lot. World War II atomic bomb testing were performed on the Marshallese Islands. And global warming, their culture is in threat because their island can disappear, or other islands have already been irradiated, and it's just this one thing and it's this one island that's a problem. But there are so many countries that I don't even know about that this problem is a problem. So it's definitely worthwhile to go out there into the world and find these places that want to get online and want their language to be shared and, like, make it compatible, put it into Unicode and try to make it into more things. So yeah, thanks.