 Today, among Native American tribes, the issue of language preservation is foremost in their priorities of what they want to accomplish. And the reason for that is that language is very closely tied to culture. And if you lose a language entirely, you lose certain elements of that culture. So I wanted to start this talk by sharing with you what I mean when I say culture. And that's a definition that works for this particular area. So it has to do with how you live your life, but it also connects you with the past, and it also connects you with the future. Lyshutseid is a language of the Pacific Northwest, the area of Puget Sound, which is where present-day Seattle is. And if you've ever been camping up there or camping anywhere where there's a deep forest and sort of a gentle shore, you will recognize some of the sounds in the language. It sounds very much like the place where the language was created. It's a language of the Pacific Northwest, the area of Puget Sound, where present-day Seattle is. It's a language of the Pacific Northwest, the area of Puget Sound, where present-day Seattle is. Cultural knowledge is connected to place, not just because it sounds like the place where it exists, but because all the knowledge of how to survive in that place was actually very specific. And this is a picture of a sculpture by a present-day sculptor of the Tulalip tribes. But it's not done in a traditional art style, and it's actually taken from his memories of his grandfather teaching him how to survive in the waters around the place where they grew up. So today, Native American tribes are in general protectors of the environment, and they advocate for environmental protection. You can see by all these headlines from the Tulalip News that they are preserving salmon habitat. They made a deal with the U.S. Forest Service to take care of the lands where they do traditional gathering of berries and roots that they use, and they're fighting offshore drilling most recently. So they protect the place where they are, because that place is extremely closely related to protecting their culture. So today I'd like to share one word with you from your language, your birthright, for you to take home and think about, and it has to do with the notion of giving. In English we talk about giving something, giving a thing, and the grammar and our thoughts are all centered on what it is that's going to pass from the giver to the giftee. In the shoot seed, it's not possible to even talk that way. Your ancestors never thought about giving anything to anybody. And I can hear you thinking, what do you mean? They had these great gatherings and they were giving on a massive scale long ago, but that's not how they thought about it. And I can show you in this one word that they used to talk about that, how their minds worked in a very good way that we need to keep in our minds today. The word they used for this is ab yid, it's easy to say, ab yid, and it's made up of three different parts. The first part, ab, means to reach out toward somebody, to make an effort toward them. So it's all about a relationship between people, not about a thing, but the people. The second part is ye, and it means for somebody's benefit. So you're reaching out, you're taking thought, you're caring about somebody for their benefit. And the last part, the final d, lets you talk about the person that you're reaching out to, to benefit. So in this whole word, there is not one thing about any material object that's passing from one person to another. It's all about the relationship. So when people say language is culture, culture is language, that's what we mean. The teachings are right in there, in the language, in the grammar. And this is your birthright. This ab yid is your word that belongs to you that we want you to know about and be able to take home today. That was Tobi Lengen, she was involved in making the, the, some of the early deciphering the patterns in some of the early Lyshutzi texts and also in creating the first Lyshutzi dictionary. And she has been teaching Lyshutzi since then. And she, here she was being honored at a ceremony up at the Tulalip tribes. So the question is, if they didn't have a writing system, which they didn't until the 1960s or so, how did they actually preserve all this culture without writing? And they considered their tribal storytellers to be making living records. So instead of a library of books, you have people who pass on the art of storytelling from generation to generation. And the position of a storyteller was based on a meritocracy. It was who knew the story and how to tell it in a way that would capture everybody's attention. And that way, and the stories actually are morality tales. So the values and ethics of the culture are passed down through the repetition of these stories. The other thing that functioned as a library in oral culture was the artwork. And you'll know, if you've looked at Native American art, that it's very conservative in terms of its visual themes. And this is not because anybody has run out of ideas for what to do. It's because those visual themes are records of those stories, which are the records of the teachings of the culture. And so anyone looks at these story polls and they know and are reminded of what each character did in a certain story and of what that story was teaching you about how to live. When I started this project in 2008, this was the most recent information and it actually preceded the project by several years. So Lusci was on the edge of becoming extinct as a language. There were more Native speakers than five back then, and a Native speaker would be somebody who spoke it as a first language when they were born. But a lot of people were not going to admit that they were Native speakers there then because there was kind of a legacy of punishment for speaking the language, and I'll talk about that. So a very, very brief walk through the history of government policy towards Native Americans. By the time the westward expansion and the constant warfare sort of died down in the mid-1800s, the status of Indians is that they were considered wards of the government, which meant they were like children of the government, whatever the government decided would be their benefits is what they were entitled to, and they had no control over their own fate. In our part of the world on the west coast, the most significant treaty was the Treaty of 1855, which established a reservation around Tulalip Bay, and several tribes ceded their land rights in our area and moved to this reservation. So when you talk about the Tulalip tribes, you're actually talking about several different tribes, and the word Tulalip refers to their location on this bay. It's not actually the name of the Indian tribe. In 1893, when compulsory education was established for Indian children, it was actually the beginning of a policy of forced assimilation, and it involved eventually removing Indian children from their families, putting them in boarding schools. These were at first run by missionaries and later by the US government or the state, and in those boarding schools, they were forbidden to speak their native tongue. They were there was corporal punishment for doing so, and the schools were kind of run almost like on a military basis. It wasn't until 1924 that Native Americans were granted automatic US citizenship, but at that point they did not have full voting rights. And in the 1930s, which is sort of called the Indian New Deal, the government decided that the Indians were no longer wards of the US government, that they were sovereign nations within the US, and therefore they sort of gained a degree of control over their own fate that way. In the 1940s and until the 1960s, when President Kennedy ended the policy, there was a concerted US effort to get Indians to leave their reservation lands. And part of the reason was some of those lands had valuable resources on them. And the other reason is the US government wanted to get out of the business of providing rights to Indian tribes who had rights that had been given in the treaties that they signed, which gave away their land. So this was the Jalaila school. This is a quote from Natasha Goban, who's currently teaching Lushoot Seed on Tulalip Reservation, and she recounts how her grandmother would not speak to them in Lushoot Seed because it was considered too dangerous a thing to do. And to get you to sort of understand this a little better, I would say if you can think of coming from a country where there's, say it's a traditional enemy of the United States. Okay, so say if you speak your native language here, the US government may decide that you're an enemy worth eavesdropping on or spying on. Your parents as immigrants might actually protect you by not speaking that language in the home. So this kind of same dynamic was going on in Indian homes where a generation that had been through this experience of the boarding schools stopped speaking the language to their children, and that was a big factor in the near extinction of the language. There were some recordings made of Lushoot Seed being spoken by storytellers in the 50s. Those tapes were archived at the University of Washington in the 1960s, a linguist named Thomas Hess probably listened to them and decided to go up to the Tulalip Reservation and try to find native speakers so that he could decipher the language linguistically and create a written script for it. He had a lot of help from a woman named Vi Hilbert, a young woman on the reservation who spoke the native language and could connect him with the elders who were storytellers. And this was not an easy task at first because I read an anecdote that Thomas Hess wrote where he said he went up to the reservation, found a small house where he believed a storyteller was living. He's knocking on the door. It's pouring rain outside, which it was doing a lot of then. And he can hear the dog sparking like crazy inside. So he knows someone's home and they won't open the door to him. So I think that Vi Hilbert was probably the person who got people to open up and talk to him. And they listened to the stories of storytellers. Vi Hilbert helped him translate them. And then he figured out the syntax, the grammar of the language. And he used the Latin alphabet combined with symbols from the international phonetic alphabet to create a sort of phonetic way of writing this language. And that's what it looked like. That was the typeface that he created. Those of you who are type designers will recognize Times Roman. That was sort of a lot of linguists kind of just would open up their Times Roman system font and add the letters that they needed. And you can see it's not very attractive. In fact, it kind of looks a little bit forbidding like something that would be hard to understand, you know, like maybe algebra or chemical formulas. And when I saw this, I thought, how are they going to get, you know, little seven and eight-year-old kids to want to learn the language when it looks like this in the writing? And unless they can get the whole younger generation to really want to jump on board and learn this language as a second language, it's not going to survive. So I felt like they really needed a better-looking tool. Now, they were hiring me because this was not a Unicode font. And for those of you who are not type designers here, Unicode is built into the software of all the fonts on your computers. And it's what allows you to, like, open a document in Times and change it to another font without the letters themselves changing. The underlying Unicode tells you what letter every symbol on that page should be. So if you don't have Unicode, you cannot read a document unless you have the exact font that it was created in. And so the use of this non-Unicode font for many years sort of restricted the act of document exchange among scholars. So my approach was to look into salish art forms and figure out if I could design this in a way that it looked as indigenous as the typeface sounded when you listen to it. Those of you who are into type design here know that Times Roman has a European pedigree. You can really trace it back to the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, England, et cetera. At that time, there was no connection between the Indians on the West Coast and Europe, so this is not part of their tradition. It's something that they've had to adapt that's kind of been imposed on them. And I wanted to design a typeface that looked like it had grown up in the place where the language was spoken, and I thought maybe that would be possible if I studied their art forms. And I was very lucky because the Seattle Art Museum had a big exhibition about salish art at the time that I was doing my design. So in these slides, I'll be showing you some of the art objects from that exhibition, and over on the right are some of the letters I designed for the font. You know, you probably can see some connection between the forms that inspired them and the forms of the letters. So if any of you are interested in designing indigenous fonts, you first have to figure out what is the unicode underlying each letter in the indigenous alphabet. And in our case, we kind of had to sit down and hammer it out with linguists because there wasn't an existing widely accepted unicode encoding set for the shoot seat. So we went through every letter in the shoot seat alphabet in consultation with linguists and decided what was the proper unicode to underlie the font design. And then because I had decided to make my round letters based on the sort of wide flat shape of the spindle wall, I was going to have a problem with the lower case letters that are divided into parts. Like for example, the S or there's no E in the shoot seat, but there's a schwa which would look to you sort of like an upside down E. And you can see if you look at that normal Latin typeface at the top, it's based on what we call a four line grid. So there's a line where the descenders hit, there's the baseline, there's a line called the X height, and then there's a line where the ascenders are going to hit. And if I was going to try and make a letter like an S in the amount of space that I had done the A in here, I was going to have trouble with the spaces inside the letter getting too small. So I got inspiration from Morris Fuller Benton, who was an American type designer. And early, most of his work was done in the very early 20th century and I happened to have done my master's dissertation on him. So I had studied his typefaces a lot. And he had a typeface called Clear Face. This is a photograph of a catalog from 1923, which is why you've kind of got that distorted curve in the page. And if you look at closely at the A and the S, you can see that there sort of been, the tops of them have sort of been tipped back like opening a can and they're actually poking above that X height a little bit. And he did that because he was interested in this as a legibility typeface. So in that catalog, he shows it going down as small as five points in type and it's still legible. So I kind of borrowed this idea and I added two extra grid lines to those shoot seat alphabets. So they actually are based on a six line grid instead of a four line grid. So there's a second X height for the letters that I need to poke above the original X height that need more space. And then there's a very, there's a very tall extra line to accommodate letters where the diacritics are stacked on top of each other, which is not done in very many languages but was definitely the way that it was preferred to be done in the shoot seat. So I based the letter forms on the metaphor of type made from wood instead of type made from metal because wood was the material that all the sculptors used in the traditional art. And so where the letters intersect and where the middle of the W is, instead of it being pointed and sharp, I sort of treated it as if it had been done with a small router so it would feel more like wood which has a softer appearance than cast metal. And you'll see if you look at the L over on the right that there is, there are no straight lines in it. It's actually slightly convex and the top terminal of that L is also, it's actually slightly concave I should say on the sides and it's convex at the top. So I was avoiding perfect geometric circles and I was avoiding straight corners and lines in this typeface. So at the top you have a sample of the type, the text at the bottom is set in the original Times Roman version of the shoot seat and the top sample is in the new font. And those of you who are designers will probably notice that the lower case W is not the same form as the little raised W. The raised W is done with two curves and a lower case W is slightly pointed and the reason for that is that first of all the teachers were writing it that way and suggested that I do it that way but what it did for me was it allowed me to keep the space inside that really tiny raised W larger without making the W larger. So I could actually close up a little bit that gap that the raised W made in words when it was used for example in the Times Roman. So when I was asked to do this talk because I had finished the font so long ago but it's been almost 10 years now, I didn't want to rehash an old talk and I went back up to the reservation to try and figure out what had been happening to the font since I designed it and what effect it had. And so the rest of this talk is really about that ripple effect. And so the font was actually made for the language teachers but it became much more widely used. And in fact it's available for free download from the website of the shoot seat department, the Tulalope shoot seat department. And even though it is no longer a proprietary font it's widely associated visually with the tribes. So one use it got put to is in their new cultural museum. All the exhibits are bilingual and there's kind of these audio buttons where you can actually press a button and hear this traditional story being told in the shoot seat. I didn't design these exhibits but I really like the way they chose extreme contrast in pairing the two fonts with the very condensed font next to the shoot seat. So one effect of the font being so distinctive looking which I had not anticipated was that it would sort of become a de facto branding tool for the tribe. They use it in a lot of their communications. So there you see the website for the cultural center you see they have it their own TV channel and that happens to be a picture of a boy who went to summer language camp and was reciting part of a story in the shoot seat and it's subtitled in the shoot seat. And over on the right you see a logo that was designed internally for a conference that was held at the reservation. After the font was finished in 2000 I was released in 2009 we started work in 2008. One of the first images someone emailed me was a picture of the font on the back of a police car. And I thought wow that's really strange you know not all the teachers have adapted this yet but it's on a police car there. So I was kind of looking into it and I realized that just before the font was finished there had been a development locally where the Tulalip Reservation Police were a group of them were deputized by the King County police. So prior to this if an outsider who was not a member of the Lushootse tribes came on the reservation and committed a crime it was very hard to prosecute that crime. A lot of you know traffic violations would be ignored by the outsiders they would claim that the Lushootse tribal police had no jurisdiction over them and the Lushootse police couldn't really you know chase people off the reservation. So with this act a group of them who met certain training qualifications became King County deputies and that way they could function as King County deputies when any crimes were created on the reservation. This is a huge issue in tribal sovereignty being able to apply the law on the reservation and beyond that in 2014 the Tulalip tribes became one of only a very small group of tribes who were given the right to prosecute domestic violence cases themselves instead of having to refer them to state court. So I'm not trying to claim that the font is actually winning these these tribal sovereignty cases but if you think about it the federal government has a brand that we recognize the state governments have brands that we recognize even the county governments have brands that we recognize the cities have brands that we recognize and the fact that they have these strong visual brands actually increases their authority over us psychologically and so the tribes to the to the extent that they can create a cohesive brand that's unique to them are actually strengthening their fight for tribal sovereignty. These are some of the handouts language teachers created the one on the left the kids are supposed to trace the letter forms and then write it themselves. The one in the middle is from the website and it's actually a Lushootseed song this was this is actually a song created by a contemporary poet on the reservation and you can press a button when you're on the website and hear the song being sung and over on the right is a picture of one of the language teachers. The language by the way now is taught in preschool elementary school high school and college level in our area. They have not been able to actually get teachers into the middle school near the reservation again materials created by the teachers themselves a poster created by Tulalip in-house designers showing the alphabet and then the next stage is actually an interesting story by itself. I had the thought when we finished the digital font that if you really wanted to get kids interested in learning the language it would be fantastic if they could actually print it themselves with their own typeface and I did actually look into creating metal font but it was prohibitively expensive and I couldn't even find anybody who said they would do it but I contacted the Hamilton Museum of Wood Type and Printing which is in two rivers Wisconsin and they have all the equipment that was used to manufacture wood type in the 19th century by the Hamilton Company and they have got it up and running again and they're cutting new wood typefaces now and they sort of jumped on this project I inquired about the cost of it and they said we're doing it you know at this the point at which we started this project we didn't have approval from the Tulalip tribes there was no guarantee that the museum would ever get paid for their work but they wanted to do it because they were in the process of becoming a living museum and they wanted to connect with what was going on today and not sort of just show obsolete stuff so first thing we had to do a very practical thing if you're ordering a wood font is to figure out how many of each letters there should be so that you can actually use it and in order to do that we went back to our linguists and they ran 7,775 Lushootse sentences through some software that counted how many times each letter in the alphabet was used and that gave me this list of the most frequently used letters down to the least frequently used letters and then I translated that into okay you know 12 of this letter four of that letter over on the right you see the vector diagrams that I had to provide that show the letter forms as well as the side bearings on the the piece of wood type and of course wood type if you've ever printed with it you don't actually build in spacing between the letters like you do with a digital font over on the right that was the beautiful sight we saw when we opened the carton when that font was shipped to us and on the left is some sample printing that was done with it so the typeface was used in a summer language camp with the children and this video if hopefully we're going to be able to get it to work is one of the teachers talking about how it affected the way she taught language in the camp. My name is Rebecca Posey. I'm a Lushootse teacher. This is a proofing press and it came from a woman named Sandra Lyons. She had donated this to us and from what I believe it's from the late 1800s these are made out of wood and they're carved and it was made out of I believe an really old pine wood and we actually have a piece of the wood in our trays with the letters to show the wood that it was made from. It's been very very useful and we were making the little poster things for our giveaway and this one says us hey wood which means show respect we have luck guts, listen, hide, pay attention and Khachosa God right now we're working on that one and that's our traditional teachings and so those are the four words that we chose to make posters look this year for this camp and for the giveaway so I'm kind of teaching the kids more to read and write than I have normally I just focus on vocabulary words pick a couple words from the play and this time I'm asking them what sound does the schwa make what sound does the you know and asking them what sounds certain letters make and they can tell me and so they have yesterday we actually brought we had them use the letters just by themselves it would take the letters out and they stamped the letters onto the piece of paper so they had to spell the word out so they're learning more to read and write than they normally would at a language camp. I'm just going to show you a series of pictures of the kids at language camp the first picture on the left is the training session we did with Becky and then there she is showing someone else I feel like that proves my point what impresses me in these pictures is the incredible age range of all the people that were interested in using these letter forms so obviously what I did was a custom font and in fact if you wanted to combine that font with English say if you were typing you would have to switch fonts for the English my font does not include the regular Latin alphabet and the reason is well first of all it wasn't in the scope of my work but I would have liked to do it but I didn't want to make the Latin letters look the same as the Lusciusi letters so if I were to do it I would want for example the lowercase a that was part of the Latin set to look different from the Lusciusi lowercase a and until the popular software programs that we use advance a little bit it's not possible to use that language function so right now mine is a standalone Lusciusi font the other side of the coin is what we call pan indigenous fonts and they are often typefaces that have the complete Latin alphabet extended Latin alphabet so you can speak you know you can set European languages as well and they will have every character that's needed for sometimes all the indigenous languages in the world sometimes just Native American ones but in other words they include many indigenous languages with the Latin alphabet and if you are doing a lot of bilingual type setting especially say in a academic setting this kind of pan indigenous font is going to be more useful than what I developed there are many more people who are doing this now I just show these examples the two on the left are free downloads and free appeals to everybody a lot of Native American tribes you know have gotten started with their language revival programs by being able to use these free downloads over on the right you see the work of Ross Mills and it's a different approach he's interested in creating a font that has the tools you need for the kind of literary type setting that we're used to from a Western culture so they have bold bold italic small caps etc and and and I think the thinking there is that if you were to translate a Western literary work for example into a native language you would want to have those options the other thing is that if you are going to combine the Latin language and indigenous languages into one font you're going to have to provide those variations for the Latin so you end up sort of doing it for all your funds at the moment at least with the Lusci tribe there is absolutely no need for small caps italic and bold if you are talking about type setting in Lusci because at this point there's very little original literature being created in Lusci it's all about language revival and in fact while we might use an italic for emphasis in because of we have this kind of legacy of written text in Lusci when you wanted to emphasize something you repeated it the storytelling is not haphazard it follows a very specific pattern and the important points in a story are repeated over and over through the story so I don't know if when someone starts creating original Lusci literature you know whether they're going to want that italic or not it might be they can but you know at least they they're going to have options but what an indigenous font that's based on cultural aesthetics can do which a pan indigenous font can't do is these things that I've tried to show you in this talk it can attract youth just to the language if it's you know if it feels familiar to them visually it can help them preserve their culture and certainly display their culture with pride it creates visual branding which also helps as it would help any business it helps the tribes with their business and it also helps them in their ongoing quest for complete tribal sovereignty so the Lusci seat is no longer considered a language on the verge of extinction it's actually a language in revival this is a much more recent assessment by ethnologue which is an SIL if those of you who are in the type world kind of know SIL does a lot of world language fonts and I belong to a group of printers in Seattle who every year do a joint project with Children's Hospital where children who are being treated for cancer and other life-threatening diseases and are in the hospital for a while participate in a program led by writers and they create poems as part of that program so we sort of partner with them and make visual broad sides for the poems and this opportunity came up to make a broad side for a poem that had been written by a boy who was a member of Swinomish tribe so it came to me and I had it translated into Lusci seat and the broad side was made bilingualy so in a sense having this font has helped sort of spread the the idea beyond the reservation that this is this language must be preserved thank you thank you Juliette is there any questions fantastic project it's really really cool I'm curious how you involved those natives in the design process if at all I had an initial meeting with the group of language teachers they were the one they were really the clients language teachers and I asked them how they wrote every letter and it turned out that at least one of the letters they wrote in a form that was not the traditional typographic form and you know if if somebody did that in a well established language you would still make the typeface the traditional typographic form but here I was had maybe eight people in the meeting and they were the only people standing between the extinction of this language and its revival and I felt that their preferences should be respected so we actually made two typefaces one with their preferred method and one with the typographic method and since then they've actually used their preferred method less and they've gone more with the typographic but in the beginning they only used their preferred method the other thing that happened was that when I went to make my first design presentation I did a similar presentation where I showed them all the art pieces I had you know I had photographs of from the Seattle Art Museum exhibit and then I showed them the typeface and I had just you know when you do a project you sometimes kind of go on auto and I had made the the comma like a crescent shape but then I had made the apostrophe like your normal ball and tail shape and one of the teachers just kind of looked at it and said well I don't like that why don't you make it a crescent we have crescents in our artwork and that was actually kind of the first hint I had that they were accepting the design that I had made so there wasn't a lot of interaction with the teachers really about design but there was a lot of interaction with my contact who is actually their technical media guy because most people don't know that fonts are software programs and software programs have bugs and particularly when you're dealing with a character set that's not widely used at that time it didn't work in a lot of software so I was back and forth with my technical contact a lot and I don't know that this project would have seceded without him I think that language teachers would have just said we know fonts are so much trouble forget it you know I did have a problem when I finished it I had worked really carefully on the kerning to get rid of those gaps after the raised letters and we tried it in word and word would not read the kerning and I live in Seattle and I know people working at Microsoft and you know I was emailing back and forth I was sending them the font we never could get it to Kern in word so I actually redesigned the whole thing so that worst case scenario without kerning would look okay which meant I essentially opened up all the letter spacing and then if you use it in in design the kerning works and it looks a little better so was learning the language or the grammar a part of your process or to what extent did you learn about the language well you certainly you can't help learning some of it but you don't need to understand the language in order to be able to design a typeface for it a few things are very important to have one is sample texts so you know which letters tend to follow in sequence and the second thing is it's really important is to have native readers to look at what you're doing because you certainly don't want to do something that will strike them as looking really odd so I had I had both those things to work with and you know my approach to kerning is all-case scenario anyway so but it helped to know a lot that some kerning cases kerning is you know high-space two letters next to each other never occurred so I didn't have to worry about building that into the font I thought it was really interesting how you mentioned like the language shaping the culture and vice-a-verse and I was wondering if you are aware of other examples of language shaping certain kinds of cultures and vice-a-verse just just say the last sentence again I was wondering if you are aware of like other languages shaping cultures in specific ways or other cultures I think that's that's absolutely universal right every every culture is shaped by its language and you know that there are certain phrases and words in some languages that you just they don't translate into single words in other languages but yeah I think what Toby Lengen was saying was this absolutely universal and that's that's why languages have to be preserved you mentioned native readers since the written language was so young what how old were the people who were native readers of this language actually I don't know if I said native readers it should be I should have said native speakers okay and yeah they were quite advanced in age and during the time I was involved in designing the thing several more died I mean you know these this generation actually don't think there's anybody left from that original generation now hi this this may be something you started with because I was late but I was wondering about other native languages my understanding is there's there's many nations have the language was written but I thought in in roman letters and before even well certainly not before tie a letter set type but but can you tell me at what if if it's really unusual that you actually created a different font or if like the Cherokee nation if it's still used the roman letters are still yes the Cherokee nation doesn't use roman letters they have what we call a syllabary and their typeface was designed by a Cherokee chief and that was in the early 19th century so the chute seed wasn't written down until the mid 20th century so any typeface you see for a native american font that's written with latin alphabets with the addition of accents and certain phonetic symbols means that it was actually developed by linguists probably in the 20th century because that was the tool they used the combination of the international phonetic alphabet with the latin alphabet and all the accents that affect how a letter is is pronounced and that way any linguist would be able to read the chute seed without having heard it and pronounce those letters correctly so it's really it's really a question of when the language was written down so is it ingested when you had a upper and lower case that's a good question doesn't there's no it's all lower case and if you see typesetting and the chute seed that uses uppercase it was not typeset by a chute seed speaker and the reason is they have over 40 letters in their alphabet and in order to get all the alphabet on the keyboard they had to use the shift key for another set of letters so they just dispensed with capital letters and is there any kind of arbitrary decisions in with the font so for example with the roman font you you know choosing between caps and lower case is often fairly arbitrary I think it was really just a practical decision that was the only way to fit the whole language on the keyboard they just needed all those extra spaces on the keyboard and when you think about it if there's a period there you can tell it's a new sentence thanks is there any other question okay wondering if there was any interest in your part on your part or on the part of the tribe to develop additional typefaces you know whether they were going to commission you yeah they um yeah but they they haven't come to fruition it takes a long time for these things to cycle through and and you know um first of all it costs money and second of all the tribes are governed by a tribal council and uh fonts are not high on their priorities so yeah it's a difficult thing to get through and most of the people as you know delv who are who are developing these fonts are not doing it with the support of the people that the fonts will eventually serve thank you very much julia