Richard Wordingham wrote:

> According to the Ethnologue entry for Naskapi at
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=NSK , there are no
> more than 70 speakers literate in the dialect (language by
> Ethnologue's reckoning). When do you think Google will get round to
> implementing searches that aren't thrown by these variations?

They'll never do that, of course! And I think that the world will survive
that: I doubt that 70 people will ever generate enough web content to make
it necessary to have Naskapi-language searches on Google...

BTW, I don't think Google has language-specific searches even for a language
such as Italian, spoken by 60 millions people. If you want to find all the
occurrences of "ob(b)iettivo", you must type "obiettivo OR obbiettivo".

But Google does have *script*-specific features for, e.g., the Latin script:
if you search for "cafe" you'll also find "café", "Cafe", "CAFÉ", etc.

And I think that it *could* be possible that something like that can be put
in place for Canadian Syllabics too. But someone (Unicode? ICU?) should
first publish a language-independent collation of the syllables where, e.g.,
the difference between pointed and unpointed syllables is ignored.

Thinking of that, considering that Qalam seems to have a couple of members
with a good working knowledge of Canadian Syllabics and languages which use
it, such a collation specification could be a nice contribution from the
Qalamites to the world...

> How did you eliminate YU-W as an alternative to YUU? Word finally,
> the examples showed Naskapi -YU-W corresponding to Eastern Cree -YUU.

I don't know a single word in Naskapi: I just spelled out the permutations
that Suzanne mentioned.

--
Marco