Perl Helps Save Endangered Languages
To those bloggers that may have received a similar email, I have been told that it may have seemed spammy, and I apologize if so. I'm just very excited about this project and would like to see it help as many people as possible. –Michael
My name is Michael Schade, I'm a nineteen-year-old entrepreneur, student, and frequenter of the St. Louis Perl Mongers. I have been collaborating with Dr. Kevin Scannell on the free, open-source, and Perl-based Accentuate.us, a web service that is a new method of input for over 100 languages. It allows users to type text in plain ASCII and, using statistics, it will add the diacritics, which have special meaning in many languages, automatically. Improving computer input is crucial to saving endangered languages, and we have chosen Perl to aid us with this task.
Currently, there are Mozilla Firefox, Perl, Python, and vim implementations released with more under development. We are very excited about this project and am trying to spread the word. Those that have used it already have been very happy with how it has helped them, so we want to make more people aware so that these speakers of endangered languages can be able to use and enjoy computers as we do everyday.
Read more for the press release, or visit us at http://accentuate.us/ for a PDF copy of the release as well as more information.
I write about how we use Perl in Accentuate.us.