Talk:Gwich’in

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Contents 1 Apostrophe 2 Font 3 Gwich’in Apostrophe 3.1 Observation 1 3.2 Observation 2 3.3 Observation 3 3.4 Conclusions 4 Requested move 4.1 Survey 4.2 Discussion 5 Dene

[edit] Apostrophe

The Gwichʼin language and Gwich'in articles use a different kind of apostrophe. If they look the same look at the URL bar of your browser, they will encoded to URL safe characters which are quite different. Should these two articles use the same apostrophe for both? Qutezuce 10:11, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea. I'm in favor of using the ' apostrophe in Native languages because it is harder to confuse with the ‘ and ’ quotation marks. On Wikipedia there are some problems with markup, but I've used it successfully in Tlingit language articles without too much trouble. — Jéioosh 20:45, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

There is a problem here. U+0027 APOSTROPHE and U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK are punctuation marks, and neither is the real Gwichʼin character. The correct character to use is U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE (see http://www.languagegeek.com/dene/gwichin/gwichin.html). For the article titles, we have to choose between U+0027 and U+2019, however, and we should use the same character for both articles. Evertype 08:49, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

We should be able to use the correct character in the article name, shouldn't we? We can create redirects so that anybody typing with simpler characters will still be able to link to the article without any extra effort. Qutezuce 09:04, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Shall I make the change? Let's test it with the language article, since fewer things link to it. Evertype 09:10, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Change to Gwichʼin language made, with redirects. Everyone happy? If so, I'll do this article as well. Evertype 09:40, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to join this discussion so late. I think the U+2019 idea is not so helpful, for several reasons,

1. Standards bodies such as Alaska Native Language Center and Yukon Native Language Center use plain old apostrophe.
2. The apostrophe occurs not only in the logonym, but throughout the language to indicate ejectives and glottal stops. Thus the U+2019 will create problems when we expand page to include additional Gwich'in texts and links to texts.
3. It will create many problems for users of the orthography, thereby oppressing an already endangered language.
4. The apostrophe is consistent with other Athabaskan languages.

I thus recommend returning to plain apostrophe, perhaps including an orthographic note regarding the unicode character. If this is not acceptable, an alternative proposal would be to split the article into two, one for NWT Gwich'in and one for the rest of Gwich'in. --Gholton 15:49, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Neither U+0027 APOSTROPHE and U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK should be used for Gwichʼin, as they are punctuation characters. As noted above, I take my source for the use of U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE from Chris Harvey's web site. Chris works with aboriginal communities in Canada and I accept his judgement on orthography. I don't use U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK for Gwichʼin, though it is certainly preferable to U+0027 APOSTROPHE, which is a typewriter character. Evertype 08:19, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, my bad. I meant to say U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE. While I appreciate Chris' work, wouldn't it be better to consult more official sources. There are many official language bodies for Gwich'in and Dene/Athabaskan across NTW, Yukon, BC, and Alaska. I would be happy to research this, if you like. But as I noted, both the Alaska Native Language Center and Yukon Native Language Centre use a regular apostrophe for Gwich'in (i.e., U+0027). I agree that this is not necessarily pretty (yes, it's a typewriter character). But it is empowering for Gwich'in people to be able to type easily (as on a typewriter) rather than having to look for characters in the upper code pages. Again, I would emphasize that this issue goes way beyond just the name Gwich'in. Ejective consants appear all over the Athbaskan/Dene world, and if we want to add in more language information, we will need to tediously add in the U+02BC charcter in many places in order to be consistent. Moreoever, I have checked these pages with the U+02BC from a number of computer in couple locations in Alaska, and I can report that in many cases the character does not display properly or does not display at all. Yes, it's true. Many people are still using browsers which do not support unicode. It would indeed be ironic if our quest for correct characters were to end up disenfranchising the very people whose language we are representing here. --Gholton 17:50, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Font

If the display font is set to something other than Helvetica or Arial I get an unpleasant full-width glyph for this character which makes it appear to be two words. I’m not sure what font is contributing this, but I’m running on Mac OS X 10.4. I have no idea what sort of CSS hacks I’d need to fix this problem. — Jéioosh 03:52, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm using Safari and have Times set as the display font, but in my Wikipedia settings I'm using the MonoBook skin, and Wikipedia text seems to be displayed in Lucida Grande. No problems with Lucida. Evertype 08:48, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

I have encountered similar problems, and also found workarounds, as pointed out by Evertype. However, my experience has been that most users will not go to this extra effort. I have been working with computer users in rural Alaska for about 10 years now, and my experience has been that most people want to do a minimal amount of browser configuration. Actually, they don't want to do any configuration. There are many cool cutting-edge implementations which we can make work, but these implementations run the risk of disenfranchising other users. I think the use the U+02BC character is a case in point. But there are other reasons to favor a plain old apostrophe as well.

As I noted on Evertype's user talk page and in my post above, it's not just the font rendering issue which is a problem. We can optimistically hope that these rendering issues will evenutally be sorted out. The larger issue is one of consistency across other Gwich'in and Athbaskan/Dene entries. The plain old apostrophe (U+0027) is the standard way of indicating ejective consonants across the Athbaskan/Dene world. Using U+02BC in the Gwich'in is thus potentially confusing for users comparing across different Athabaskan (and other) languages. It also puts a heavy burden on those (including myself) who would like to be able to enrich Athbaskan articles with samples of Athabaskan language data. To convert from U+0027 to U+02BC is tricky, since the apostrophe is used for many things, not all of which can be represented by U+02BC. So these conversions must usually be done by hand, tediously.

I thus recommend that we return to the use of U+0027 is the word Gwich'in and in other references to ejective consonants in Athabaskan languages. What do you think? --Gholton 17:45, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

The dumb apostrophe is never recommended for any natural orthography. either the MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE is used or the RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is. Which one differs depending on language. I propose we bring Chris Harvey in on this discussion. What you find on a tribe's website may not be best practice, either, but only evidence of some HTML software they are using. Evertype 19:10, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

It would be great to hear from someone like Chris Harvey. He might also be able to supply some references for some of these best practice recommendations. Still, we would need to consider whether to follow best practice or accepted current practice. I showed this to some Gwich'in people today, and they asked me why there was a space in Gwich 'in. Again, I empathise with the unicode question for correct character semantics, but I worry more about the end result in a reference document such as Wiki. And (sorry to beat a nearly dead horse) what about all the other apostrophes in other Athabaskan languages, such as Deg Hit'an and Tsuut’ina (each with a different apostrophe)? What about language data excerps such as on the Tanacross page? Will we have to change all of these, or does this issue apply only to Gwich'in? I fear we may be opening Pandora's box. --Gholton 07:33, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gwich’in Apostrophe

I’d like to thank Evertype for inviting me to this discussion. First, I would like to make a few comments about what has been written in this discussion already.

Observation 1

From Gholton: Standards bodies such as Alaska Native Language Center and Yukon Native Language Center use plain old apostrophe.

The Alaska Native Language Center and other language bodies in the region, in their publications, very often use the curly apostrophe. The same goes for languages in Yukon Territory. For publications which use the curly apostrophe, see

Ahtna: Kari 1986. Tatl’ahwt’aenn nenn’ = The headwaters people's country : narratives of the Upper Ahtna Athabaskans ISBN 1555000002

Gwich’in: Frank 1995. Neerihiinjìk : we traveled from place to place ISBN 1555000541

Gwich’in: Belle 1992. Shandaa in my lifetime ISBN 0933769016

Kaska: Moore 2002. Point of View in Kaska Historical Narratives

And perhaps most importantly for our discussion, Thompson 1984. Athabskan languages and the schools: a handbook for teachers. This publication contains pages which show all the orthographies for the Alaskan languages. In all cases (Ahtna, Deg Hit’an, Han, Holikachuk, Koyukon, Gwich’in, Tanacross, Tanaina, Tanana, Upper Kuskokwim, Upper Tanana) the curly apostrophe is used. These pages were scanned and added to the Alaska Native Language Center’s website http://www.uaf.edu/anic/orthographies.html . The scans show the original curly apostrophe, but whoever did the web page used the dumb quote in the html versions of the scans.
I think that these sources make it pretty clear that there is certainly a tradition for using the curly apostrophe in Dene languages. For better or for worse, the dumb quote and curly apostrophe have been, for practical “real world” purposes, essentially interchangeable, as they are in English. Thus we cannot use “common practice” to help us here.

Observation 2

From Evertype: Neither U+0027 APOSTROPHE and U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK should be used for Gwichʼin, as they are punctuation characters. As noted above, I take my source for the use of U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE from Chris Harvey's web site. Chris works with aboriginal communities in Canada and I accept his judgement on orthography. I don't use U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK for Gwichʼin, though it is certainly preferable to U+0027 APOSTROPHE, which is a typewriter character

I’d like to apologise now for not keeping all of my website pages up to date. In fact, the Gwich’in keyboards from languagegeek.com use U+2019 for the apostrophe (for reasons why, see below). I’ve now updated those pages.

Observation 3

From Gholton: But it is empowering for Gwich'in people to be able to type easily (as on a typewriter) rather than having to look for characters in the upper code pages.

This isn’t really an issue for Dene languages. There are many other non-English characters in their orthographies which require special keyboard layouts (or searching through character maps) to access. The ł letter is a good example, common to all Dene languages. Other languages, such as Hän, require such combinations as ą̈̂. There is really nothing more convenient, from a text input perspective, between the dumb quote and the curly apostrophe.

Conclusions

We are left with three choices for the glottal/ejective: U+2019, U+02BC, and U+0027.

a) U+02BC is not a good choice because most Native language material contains English/French words, sentences, and paragraphs. In English and French, the apostrophe in words like “can’t” is not U+02BC. Also, there are many English language materials which contain Gwich’in (and other languages). It is unreasonable to expect people to distinguish between the English apostrophe U+2019 and a Gwich’in apostrophe U+02BC.

b) That said, we are left with either U+0027~U+2019. At the moment, many language communities and language/education organisations in Canada and the US will be implementing (or have implemented) keyboard technology which uses U+2019. For our discussion, some of the most relevant are: Hän (Yukon), Southern Tutchone (Yukon), Tagish (Yukon), Kaska (Yukon, B.C.), Sekeni (B.C.), Chipewyan (NWT and Alta), South Slavey (Alta), and I guess, most importantly, Gwich’in (NWT). The decision to go with U+2019 was based on personal discussion with elders and language teachers. In virtually all cases, there was no awareness that there was an issue, but once explained that there was a choice, the curly apostrophe was preferred.

c) The dumb quote isn’t stable in the sense that word-processors are set to “curly quotes” by default. The effects of this can be seen in languages — like Carrier — where the glottal stop is written word initially. If the typist is inputting the U+0027 apostrophe, a word like /ʔink’ez/ ends up looking like ‘ink’ez which is clearly wrong. If the typist is inputting the U+2019 apostrophe, the word is correctly displayed ’ink’ez.

Based on all this, I would suggest using U+2019 for the Athapaskan apostrophe. - Friday, July 14, 2006 Chris Harvey Languagegeek 15:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree. Evertype 16:22, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree that U+2019 is better than U+02BC. But in my Tlingit work I differentiate between U+0027 and U+2019. The former is the orthographic apostrophe used for ejectives, and the latter is the “printer’s” apostrophe used for quotation, etc. People rarely notice the difference in use, however. — Jéioosh 21:48, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Please see Conclusion c) above for discussion on how U+0027 is not a stable character. At some point in the life of a document on its way to publication, there is a good chance that all U+0027s will be changed into curly quotes (left or right depending on word spacing). I think we might agree that the difference “in the mind of the reader” between the dumb quote and the curly apostrophe is tenuous at best. Even in Jéioosh’s comment above, the word “printer’s” is using the curly apostrophe when not quotation punctuation. It is unrealistic to expect people to differentiate between one kind of apostrophe in English and another in Tlingit when they see them as variations of the same thing, especially in bilingual text. I fully agree that, for languages which use the curly apostrophe, there can be some confusion with closing single quotes – which in North American usage are rare anyway. In any case, we survive in English with sentences like “That car is my parents’” (Double quote style) or ‘That car is my parents’’ (Single quote style). Why not use «Guillemets»? Languagegeek 02:28, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dene

Do they call themselves Dene or Dine? It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere in the article. I thought all Athabascans of the Artic Circle region used that term to refer to themselves, translating as "human beings." Badagnani 06:10, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

The following is taken from the book Gwichya Gwich’in Googwandak: The History and Stories of the Gwichya Gwich’in. One People, Many Names:

Gwich’in: Common name now applied to all the groups of the Gwich’in taken together. It became popular during the land claims negotiations. In the Gwich’in language itself, this word can only be used in combination with a term describing a region or area where a person, or a group of people live.

Loucheux: This name was introduced by fur traders and missionaries. It was applied to those regional groups, mainly on the Canadian side, who had contact with missionaries after the 1860s. This name is still used by some elders, and also by speakers of other Dene languages.

Dinjii Zhuh: This is the traditional name used to refer to all of the Gwich’in taken together—without referring to the regions where the different groups lived.

Dene: This is a Slavey word used to refer to all the aboriginal cultures of the Northwest Territories except the Inuit and Metis. Translating into English as, “the people,” it was important during the recent political struggles.

Athapaskan: Name for the aboriginal hunter-gatherer cultures of northern Canada south of Inuit territory. This name is taken from the Wood Cree language. It was introduced by anthropologists. It is rarely used by Gwich’in elders on the Canadian side, but is more common among people on the Alaskan side.

So, to answer your question, Dene is a Slavey word, and Diné is a Navajo word, each meaning “person”. The Gwich’in cognate is Dinjii. Languagegeek (talk) 21:41, 3 January 2008 (UTC)