Te Reo smartphone from 2degrees coming
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Phone demoed at Te Huarahi Tika Trust meeting will be available by Christmas
By Computerworld Staff | Auckland | Thursday, 3 November, 2011 | 8 Comments
2degrees has announced the first Te Reo Mâori smartphone.
The availability of the Huawei Android phone was announced yesterday at the Te Huarahi Tika Trust annual general meeting in Auckland, where Mâori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples took the first call on the device.
According to a statement from 2degrees, the mobile operator "worked closely with Huawei to translate all of the menus in its IDEOS X3 smartphone to Te Reo Mâori.
In the statement, 2degrees director and Hautaki Trust Board member Bill Osborne says making Te Reo Mâori available in today’s mobile technology was a vision that the Hautaki Trust had when it helped found the company.
“Through Hautaki Trust, our primary objective was to engage Mâori in the telecommunications industry,”Osborne says. “A further aim was to ensure that the Mâori culture and language were embraced by modern information and communications technology, and the IDEOS X3 smartphone with Te Reo menu is testimony to the commitment to this goal by 2degrees and Mâori.”
The statement continues: "Osborne says that these new handsets and a range of other initiatives demonstrate the value of the Mâori investment in 2degrees, which has already delivered significant benefit to the New Zealand economy.
"A recently released report by Venture Consulting showed $2.24 billion of benefits to the economy have already flown from the creation of 2degrees."
The Te Reo IDEOS X3 will be available from 2degrees retail stores before Christmas.
Comments
A lot of stuffing around for no practical benefit?
Will adding macrons and perhaps a few menu words in Te Reo make 2degrees' phone the slightest bit more understandable to anyone?
Posted by Curious at 8:43:08 on November 5, 2011
Posted by Curious at 8:43:08 on November 5, 2011
Macron in Websters
Looks like Websters doesn't recognise either Maaori or Māori, so my money is on Blueshift's answer.
Google comes back with almost 74k hits for Maaori compared to 61m hits for Maori and 195k for Māori.
Posted by Ralph at 10:16:14 on November 4, 2011
Google comes back with almost 74k hits for Maaori compared to 61m hits for Maori and 195k for Māori.
Posted by Ralph at 10:16:14 on November 4, 2011
Macron in Websters
Just like to point out that is a self fulfilling prophecy argument being advocated here.
Index's return more hits for Maori vs Māori because creators ease of adding macrons to their content via their preferred editing and input system is considered "too hard" or they are ignorant = More generated content sans Macron.
As for Websters, I am unsurprised it does not include Macron or double vowels. I mentioned Websters because he was the chap that ripped pages out of the Oxford English Dictionary and whom Codified American English.
Puritanistical advocates can sit on either side of the adding/removing wrods and spellings debate. But for the effort involved in making the Macrons available as the default choice for New Zealand English Keyboard Layouts, or even adding a Māori keyboard layout option... to an Operating system. And thus increasing the chance content authors might use it by decreasing the barrier to entry, I think it is pretty cut and dried.
Posted by Joel Wirāmu Pauling at 13:12:18 on November 7, 2011
Index's return more hits for Maori vs Māori because creators ease of adding macrons to their content via their preferred editing and input system is considered "too hard" or they are ignorant = More generated content sans Macron.
As for Websters, I am unsurprised it does not include Macron or double vowels. I mentioned Websters because he was the chap that ripped pages out of the Oxford English Dictionary and whom Codified American English.
Puritanistical advocates can sit on either side of the adding/removing wrods and spellings debate. But for the effort involved in making the Macrons available as the default choice for New Zealand English Keyboard Layouts, or even adding a Māori keyboard layout option... to an Operating system. And thus increasing the chance content authors might use it by decreasing the barrier to entry, I think it is pretty cut and dried.
Posted by Joel Wirāmu Pauling at 13:12:18 on November 7, 2011
Macron in Websters
I'm all for macronisation being easily available, but as far as anglicisation goes, there's a couple thousand years of history of English borrowing and bastardising words from other languages. How often do you see cafe spelt with an e, or encyclopedia with an æ? The sausage grinder of the English language has a strong tendency to wear off frilly diacritical marks. Lets not even start on pronunciation - Paris vs Paree, Maaree vs Maaori.
Posted by BlueShift at 14:06:52 on November 7, 2011
Posted by BlueShift at 14:06:52 on November 7, 2011
Macron in Websters
See - even this forum stole the ' from above the e there...
Posted by BlueShift at 14:08:35 on November 7, 2011
Posted by BlueShift at 14:08:35 on November 7, 2011
Please Note Maori is avaiable as an IME for all android phones
Any Linux based meego/maemo phone as well as any existing Android handset can have te reo Māori added by adding an IME (input method) and language option ( although it is generally omitted from most distributed firmware ).
I would love to see te reo added to the cyanogenmod or upstream AOSP (android open source project) code bases. These are the places which will ensure it is a default install option, like it now is in Ubuntu and Debian.
Also note your incorrect use of the Macron 'hat' in this article instead of the 'dash' macron when printing/writing : Māori
Posted by Joel Wirāmu Pauling at 11:23:35 on November 3, 2011
I would love to see te reo added to the cyanogenmod or upstream AOSP (android open source project) code bases. These are the places which will ensure it is a default install option, like it now is in Ubuntu and Debian.
Also note your incorrect use of the Macron 'hat' in this article instead of the 'dash' macron when printing/writing : Māori
Posted by Joel Wirāmu Pauling at 11:23:35 on November 3, 2011
Please Note Maori is avaiable as an IME for all android phones
As I understand it, they'd be better off leaving out the macron altogether. In English, Maori is spelt Maori, as the macron isn't part of the usual orthography, whereas in Maori, it is spelt Māori. Its the same reason that the capital city of Russia is referred to as Moscow, not Москва.
Posted by BlueShift at 14:11:41 on November 3, 2011
Posted by BlueShift at 14:11:41 on November 3, 2011
Please Note Maori is avaiable as an IME for all android phones
Actually blueshift, it is technically Maaori, Maori is simply used (incorrectly) for convenience. On your basis we might as well through out any English words which sound the same but are written differently - there is a chap in the new world called Webster who you might get on well with.
Beware, you enter the realm of dragons and unicode.. here is a summary of the technical details:
My advice is to check out Wikipedia article. Also Macrons and accents are very much part of the standard Latin character sets ... even the reduced UCS (sometimes called extended ASCII) set used circa windows3.1 for vfat filesystems includes macrons and accents ... (ASCII does not however ISO 646 (UCS sorta being a subset) - does )
Unicode (when I say Unicode , I really mean UTF-8, rather than full blown UCS6.0 support - which I believe PERL is one of the few (if only) languages to completely supports working with UCS 6.0 profiles ... ) support in most OS's and being the default for NTFS , HPS+ and Ext2,3,4 and pretty much mandatory for webbrowsers. Easily includes them.
Really the only technical difficult in adding support for Maori macron's is ensuring it is a selectable keyboard layout in whatever Operating systems you are using, so that there is a meta-compose character for the existing US/UK latin keyboard layout that will cycle through the Macron's for the valid vowels.
I think if you were to make ANY argument, it would be that the standard English (New Zealand) language setting automatically added the Maori (and thus Macron) keyboard definitions... rather than use the US layout which is what it currently does.
Posted by Joel Wiramu at 20:44:21 on November 3, 2011
Beware, you enter the realm of dragons and unicode.. here is a summary of the technical details:
My advice is to check out Wikipedia article. Also Macrons and accents are very much part of the standard Latin character sets ... even the reduced UCS (sometimes called extended ASCII) set used circa windows3.1 for vfat filesystems includes macrons and accents ... (ASCII does not however ISO 646 (UCS sorta being a subset) - does )
Unicode (when I say Unicode , I really mean UTF-8, rather than full blown UCS6.0 support - which I believe PERL is one of the few (if only) languages to completely supports working with UCS 6.0 profiles ... ) support in most OS's and being the default for NTFS , HPS+ and Ext2,3,4 and pretty much mandatory for webbrowsers. Easily includes them.
Really the only technical difficult in adding support for Maori macron's is ensuring it is a selectable keyboard layout in whatever Operating systems you are using, so that there is a meta-compose character for the existing US/UK latin keyboard layout that will cycle through the Macron's for the valid vowels.
I think if you were to make ANY argument, it would be that the standard English (New Zealand) language setting automatically added the Maori (and thus Macron) keyboard definitions... rather than use the US layout which is what it currently does.
Posted by Joel Wiramu at 20:44:21 on November 3, 2011
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