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by nkurz 1544 days ago
For those less comfortable reading Oji-Cree, CBC has helpfully published a translation in English: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/first-person-roch...
3 comments

The CBC has never done this before: posted a complete article in an indigenous language on the main English site.

An awesome read that brings home the point of the people trying to keep their native languages alive.

technically only the language is indigenous, but the script you were reading here not. this is a syllabic script and was invented by an English missionary who wanted to teach the tribes the bible. so he (Evans) came up with these extremely simple phonetic symbols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems

Other missionaries and bible translators came up with their own writing systems also. the very first attempt 200 years earlier also looked interesting. and Larry Wall also had his ideas on this problem.

it is extremely simple, and reminds me on modern Hangul, but is probably more related to japanese. https://omniglot.com/writing/syllabaries.htm

Does an article in a non-English language belong on a site for an English-speaking audience? Just seems weird, like having an article about football in a basketry journal.

On a technical level, of course, it’s awesome that Unicode enables this kind of thing.

In this case, I would argue there isn't a problem with it - as there is an English translation available and the article itself is about the author learning her heritage language.
Yes as it introduces a larger audience to the language.
I like the representation pushes Canada achieves with some of their pre-colonial communities

There is almost no analog in the US

Its so different, from the bad things to the good things, but just right there up north

Really fascinating and inspiring for me about how much is possible given that there are so many cultures here that have almost nothing to do with each other, just grouped together as “indigenous”

Yeah, I was confused when first looking at this. But, the title of the English version is "Why I am reclaiming my mother's language before it's too late". So, pretty cool on CBC's part to put make a translation like this.
Perhaps we could get Google to add it to Translate.