WEBVTT

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hello relatives

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grant shangri is what they call me

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and all of you I gladly take your hand

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and shake it um

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greetings everyone

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today I'm going to talk about lakota

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language and Emacs and how

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free software and Emacs empowered me to

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write on the computer in the language of

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my ancestors

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um start off the look with the story of

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lakotiappi the lakota language

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the lakota dakota dialect area

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for those of you who you don't know

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the lakota dakota people are also known

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as the sioux

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and the tribes cover an

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area of roughly 10 us states and parts

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of canada and so this language is

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spoken over a wide range of of

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area

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however the us government policy

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directly tried to silence this language

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my father was taken to a boarding school

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and was punished for speaking

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his native language and so he didn't

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teach it to his children

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several generations of lakota and dakota

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people

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and other tribes all over the country

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lost

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lost their first language their native

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language so today only around 2000

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first first language native speakers are

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speaking lakota

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however there's language recovery

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projects that are empowering

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second language learners like myself to

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teach it to the new generation of

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children um

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which brings me to my story um I grew up

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without knowing

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my heritage um I didn't know who my

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father was

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both my parents were white um

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I discovered my biological family in

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around 2015

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was kind of a shock to me up until that

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point probably the only time I'd heard

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the lakota language was in

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the movie dances with wolves possibly

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some other times

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around nebraska I'd heard it um but

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even myself growing up you know pretty

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close to

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to lakota people and other native

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american people

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american indian people I kind of thought

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it was just dead I thought the language

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was not alive anymore um

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but in 2016 my daughter began her

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journey into this world and I

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I was doing a lot of searching to find

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out like what could I do

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you know not knowing my family not

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knowing my culture

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what could I do to try to bring that

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into our life

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um and so I found out about these

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lakota classes that were happening I

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went up to standing rock

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in north dakota and attended the lakota

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summer institute for three weeks

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and began my journey to learn the

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language so I can

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try to pass it on so

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this brings us to Emacs

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I could talk a lot more about my story

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I'm sure there's a lot to say

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but we're here to talk about Emacs um

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I was already a free software user at

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the time and at the lakota language

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uh institute they they were they're

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giving us software there's a dictionary

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you could get on android

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um there was a keyboard for android that

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you could type with

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they had keyboard input methods for mac

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and windows but I'm a linux user free

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software user

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so I didn't have access to those things

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as

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as easily as I could and I do a lot of

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my thinking and note taking in Emacs and

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in org mode

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and so being able to to write this

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to to um to write things down to type

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on my own computer uh was was pretty

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important to me

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and I wasn't much of an emax hacker yet

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at the time I had

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barely done anything mostly just you

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know hacked on my

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config file but this was a real

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chance for me to experience

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the the benefits of free software first

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hand and not just to benefit myself but

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to potentially benefit

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everyone anyone interested in learning

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this language

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so Emacs and

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that free software philosophy really

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empowered me so I began digging in

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um I looked I began reading the the

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manual more closely

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as an american I'm I'm sad to say

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there's not a lot of

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other languages spoken or written where

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I'm from

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so it's not common that I that I have to

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think about this with computers

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I know international people you know

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have had to come up with

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with interesting ways to to enter their

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text

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and Emacs is probably a pioneer in that

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I I'd like to know more about the

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history of this but

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there's a whole section in the manual on

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international Emacs

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and I began reading this and I was

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talking about

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different input methods and and how many

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different languages were supported and

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how you could enter the text and how it

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supports the different characters and so

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on

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um I even noticed a few languages

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support several input methods

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that became important for me later on as

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I was working on this

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many many languages are already

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supported so

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those of you who haven't looked into

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this yet if you press

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control backslash it will open up a

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selection menu

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for you to to select um

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your input method and you can there's

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207 listed here

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that's including the two that I've

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contributed

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um so 205 on on a vanilla Emacs

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so that's a lot of languages supported

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by emac Emacs but there's so many more

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that could be um and since Emacs is free

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software and it is what it is I knew

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that defining

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a new input method was surely possible

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um

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unfortunately the the manual didn't

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describe it directly or at least I

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didn't pick it up so

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um you know the new emax hacker that I

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was I

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I timidly dove down into the source code

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and discovered the quail package

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um so back in the day apparently there

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was

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mule which is like the

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multi I don't I don't know it stood for

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something about

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language environments and and it has

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evolved

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and at some point um some japanese

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uh coders created an input method called

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tamago

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which means egg in japanese and uh

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tamago evolved into quail and they

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in the comments you can see they talk

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about how the quail egg is eaten in

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japan it's a smaller thing and

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the quail mode is like a nicer version

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of tamago I guess and

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there's a pun saying they hoped it would

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egg people on to create more input modes

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and quail is quite nice I looked into it

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and there's basically two things you use

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quail defined package and quail define

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rules

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so quail defined package

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you can see here is a function it's

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probably a macro that takes a name

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a language a title and some optional

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stuff which

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I didn't really have to deal with

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define name is a new quail package for

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input language title is a string to be

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split

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at the mode line to indicate this

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package

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so I began trying to do lakota input now

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this is a whole thing on its own because

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the lakota language

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was never written um

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pre-contact and post contact

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like there's several attempts at writing

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it and different orthographies

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and there's drama around all of this

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stuff

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it's pretty common to have drama going

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on in any american indian stuff

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going on so as I was doing this I

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started with the suggested lakota

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orthography which

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is actually called by its authors the

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the standard lakota orthography but its

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authors are

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um are european

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um the main author is a man named jan

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ulrich and I appreciate all his work and

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I'm grateful for

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the materials he's made available but um

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it's a little bit problematic because

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it's not an orthography created by

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our people by lakota people so there's

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another one called the white hat

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orthography which is created by albert

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whitehat who's a teacher

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um from the chichanguk tribe so I

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created two

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and thankfully emax lets me do that so

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it's pretty simple quail defined package

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I just

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say the package I want and then all

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these nils and t's for options I don't

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actually know what they mean but it

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works

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I could look it up and then quail define

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rules just defines mappings from ascii

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keys to

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the the text you want to put in so

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for this one there's a nasal n and then

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a dot and a macron like a wedge shape

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for marking up the consonants

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so that one's pretty easy and then the

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suggested lakota orthography is a little

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bit more difficult

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but still pretty easy I just map a

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sequence of keys

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a followed by the apostrophe makes the

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accented vowels so all of those

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and then again we have the hot checks

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for the guttural sounds of the language

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and the nasal end so that's it basically

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these two

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definitions allow me to type

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lakota language in Emacs um

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and it's great it works great publishing

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it

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is another problematic thing I wanted to

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use free software to do that

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so the first thing I did was I I posted

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on sourcehut

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which is great it's a good alternative

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for a git forge

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and I got it published on melba so the

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lakota input

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package is available if you'd like to

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try it out

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and bandali one of our hosts for the

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conference is helping me now

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through the process of committing the

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code to Emacs

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because I would like to do that I would

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like it to be available to everyone

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through Emacs itself so that anyone who

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wants to use it just has to download

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Emacs

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and there you go you can type lakota

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language

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so uh pila maya thank you

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all for listening and

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I hope to see you around in our Emacs

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community

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uh day