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I still think that choosing "aboriginal" is quite inappropriate and could even sound offending by other populations calling self (or having been called) Aboriginal (I seem to remember exchanges I had with Enrico Zini about "aboriginal" languages in Taiwan). So, I would urge you to raise this issue with upstream and discuss it. It seems to me that these fonts could be young enough for a rename to be sustainable. And, frankly, from my POV, I don't immediately think about North-American native populations when I hear "aboriginal" (which I immediately translate to "aborigène" in French, whether it's correct or not).
Yes, that was my first reaction too, but then after some research Irealized that the term is wider than my initial understanding and that the designer may well have chosen this name because his
fonts cover (among other things) the "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" Unicode block (U1400 introduced in 3.0): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_Syllabics http://www.languagegeek.com/font/fontdownload.htmlAnd AFAIK the Unicode consortium has a policy of researching names quite thoroughly. Looks like it's an official term used in institutions controlled by the Fist Nations/Indigenous Peoples (or whichever way languages communities want to call themselves) and also recognized by the Canadian Constitution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_peoples_in_Canada I freely admit I know next to nothing about Canada (it's a huge area and I've only been there twice for a very short time) and that this ispotentially controversial. My recommendation would be to go for autonyms: the way actual users of the languages (and related Unicode blocks when they exist) call themselves. But it's not always doable. So I recommend we trust upstream and Neskie Manuel on this. The short and long description of the package can help those among us who may not be not fully aware of the meaning to understand it better and so reduce possible misunderstandings.
Christian, were you referring to this work by Enrico and others for languages communities in Taïwan? I remember talking with Enrico briefly about this at Debconf in Edinburgh. Arne Götze is also very involved apparently. Certainly pretty impressive work :-)
http://www.enricozini.org/tags/twabo.html Cheers, -- Nicolas Spalinger http://scripts.sil.org http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org/ https://launchpad.net/people/fonts
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