hello relatives
grant shangri is what they call me
and all of you I gladly take your hand
and shake it um
greetings everyone
today I'm going to talk about lakota
language and Emacs and how
free software and Emacs empowered me to
write on the computer in the language of
my ancestors
um start off the look with the story of
lakotiappi the lakota language
the lakota dakota dialect area
for those of you who you don't know
the lakota dakota people are also known
as the sioux
and the tribes cover an
area of roughly 10 us states and parts
of canada and so this language is
spoken over a wide range of of
area
however the us government policy
directly tried to silence this language
my father was taken to a boarding school
and was punished for speaking
his native language and so he didn't
teach it to his children
several generations of lakota and dakota
people
and other tribes all over the country
lost
lost their first language their native
language so today only around 2000
first first language native speakers are
speaking lakota
however there's language recovery
projects that are empowering
second language learners like myself to
teach it to the new generation of
children um
which brings me to my story um I grew up
without knowing
my heritage um I didn't know who my
father was
both my parents were white um
I discovered my biological family in
around 2015
was kind of a shock to me up until that
point probably the only time I'd heard
the lakota language was in
the movie dances with wolves possibly
some other times
around nebraska I'd heard it um but
even myself growing up you know pretty
close to
to lakota people and other native
american people
american indian people I kind of thought
it was just dead I thought the language
was not alive anymore um
but in 2016 my daughter began her
journey into this world and I
I was doing a lot of searching to find
out like what could I do
you know not knowing my family not
knowing my culture
what could I do to try to bring that
into our life
um and so I found out about these
lakota classes that were happening I
went up to standing rock
in north dakota and attended the lakota
summer institute for three weeks
and began my journey to learn the
language so I can
try to pass it on so
this brings us to Emacs
I could talk a lot more about my story
I'm sure there's a lot to say
but we're here to talk about Emacs um
I was already a free software user at
the time and at the lakota language
uh institute they they were they're
giving us software there's a dictionary
you could get on android
um there was a keyboard for android that
you could type with
they had keyboard input methods for mac
and windows but I'm a linux user free
software user
so I didn't have access to those things
as
as easily as I could and I do a lot of
my thinking and note taking in Emacs and
in org mode
and so being able to to write this
to to um to write things down to type
on my own computer uh was was pretty
important to me
and I wasn't much of an emax hacker yet
at the time I had
barely done anything mostly just you
know hacked on my
config file but this was a real
chance for me to experience
the the benefits of free software first
hand and not just to benefit myself but
to potentially benefit
everyone anyone interested in learning
this language
so Emacs and
that free software philosophy really
empowered me so I began digging in
um I looked I began reading the the
manual more closely
as an american I'm I'm sad to say
there's not a lot of
other languages spoken or written where
I'm from
so it's not common that I that I have to
think about this with computers
I know international people you know
have had to come up with
with interesting ways to to enter their
text
and Emacs is probably a pioneer in that
I I'd like to know more about the
history of this but
there's a whole section in the manual on
international Emacs
and I began reading this and I was
talking about
different input methods and and how many
different languages were supported and
how you could enter the text and how it
supports the different characters and so
on
um I even noticed a few languages
support several input methods
that became important for me later on as
I was working on this
many many languages are already
supported so
those of you who haven't looked into
this yet if you press
control backslash it will open up a
selection menu
for you to to select um
your input method and you can there's
207 listed here
that's including the two that I've
contributed
um so 205 on on a vanilla Emacs
so that's a lot of languages supported
by emac Emacs but there's so many more
that could be um and since Emacs is free
software and it is what it is I knew
that defining
a new input method was surely possible
um
unfortunately the the manual didn't
describe it directly or at least I
didn't pick it up so
um you know the new emax hacker that I
was I
I timidly dove down into the source code
and discovered the quail package
um so back in the day apparently there
was
mule which is like the
multi I don't I don't know it stood for
something about
language environments and and it has
evolved
and at some point um some japanese
uh coders created an input method called
tamago
which means egg in japanese and uh
tamago evolved into quail and they
in the comments you can see they talk
about how the quail egg is eaten in
japan it's a smaller thing and
the quail mode is like a nicer version
of tamago I guess and
there's a pun saying they hoped it would
egg people on to create more input modes
and quail is quite nice I looked into it
and there's basically two things you use
quail defined package and quail define
rules
so quail defined package
you can see here is a function it's
probably a macro that takes a name
a language a title and some optional
stuff which
I didn't really have to deal with
define name is a new quail package for
input language title is a string to be
split
at the mode line to indicate this
package
so I began trying to do lakota input now
this is a whole thing on its own because
the lakota language
was never written um
pre-contact and post contact
like there's several attempts at writing
it and different orthographies
and there's drama around all of this
stuff
it's pretty common to have drama going
on in any american indian stuff
going on so as I was doing this I
started with the suggested lakota
orthography which
is actually called by its authors the
the standard lakota orthography but its
authors are
um are european
um the main author is a man named jan
ulrich and I appreciate all his work and
I'm grateful for
the materials he's made available but um
it's a little bit problematic because
it's not an orthography created by
our people by lakota people so there's
another one called the white hat
orthography which is created by albert
whitehat who's a teacher
um from the chichanguk tribe so I
created two
and thankfully emax lets me do that so
it's pretty simple quail defined package
I just
say the package I want and then all
these nils and t's for options I don't
actually know what they mean but it
works
I could look it up and then quail define
rules just defines mappings from ascii
keys to
the the text you want to put in so
for this one there's a nasal n and then
a dot and a macron like a wedge shape
for marking up the consonants
so that one's pretty easy and then the
suggested lakota orthography is a little
bit more difficult
but still pretty easy I just map a
sequence of keys
a followed by the apostrophe makes the
accented vowels so all of those
and then again we have the hot checks
for the guttural sounds of the language
and the nasal end so that's it basically
these two
definitions allow me to type
lakota language in Emacs um
and it's great it works great publishing
it
is another problematic thing I wanted to
use free software to do that
so the first thing I did was I I posted
on sourcehut
which is great it's a good alternative
for a git forge
and I got it published on melba so the
lakota input
package is available if you'd like to
try it out
and bandali one of our hosts for the
conference is helping me now
through the process of committing the
code to Emacs
because I would like to do that I would
like it to be available to everyone
through Emacs itself so that anyone who
wants to use it just has to download
Emacs
and there you go you can type lakota
language
so uh pila maya thank you
all for listening and
I hope to see you around in our Emacs
community
uh day