--- Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@...>
wrote:

> 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.

In my experience, Google does have language-specific
features. In an English Google, diacritics are treated
as separate letters. In other European languages they
are treated as optional.

Searching for "senor" from English ignores "señor".
Searching for "senor" from Spanish includes "señor".

Compare:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=es&q=senor&lr=
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=senor&meta=

Also, Chinese searches conflate simplified and
traditional forms whereas this does not happen for
Japanese, not even for kyuujitai and shinjitai forms.

Andrew Dunbar.

> 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
>
>
>

=====
http://en.wiktionary.org -- http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl





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