type Samoan

Computers

Teach your computer to type Samoan Or Hawaiian, Tongan, Fijian...

By Catherine Adler

THE military explorers

were the first Europeans to arrive in the Pacific, in their wake came mission aries and merchants. They also brought bits and pieces of the indus trial revolution: guns, of course, and access to the printing press. Later tinned foods, (developed as field rations for Napoleon’s army) and the typewriter (commercially available circa 1874) arrived as well.

The missionaries (especially the Protestants) were anxious to make the Bible available to local people. Thye learned local languages, with an emphasis on religious and ceremonial vocabulary, and depending on how acutely they could hear and the variety of English or German they spoke, recorded d’s or t’s and r’s or I’s. thus taro/talo/ dalo reflecting both the real differences among the Polynesian lan guages themselves and the fact that some Polynesian consonants are different from English ones. Island vowels are the lovely

liquid ones also found in the latin-derived romance languages of Europe: a, e, i, o, u; not the guttural grunts

heard in hat, het, hit, hot, hut. And Polynesian languages use so many vowels, to distinguish the long sound such as A a from a, aa, or a’a, the missionaries chose the macron, familiar to all English lan guage dictionary users as a pronunciation mark. As long as type was hand set using individual characters, adding A A A a A E A e and so on to the standard etaoin shrdlu typecase was no problem, (etaoin shrdlu is the frequency of letter use in English with e the most common letter). But the late 1800 s saw two inventions that worked against the sensible choice of the macron to characterise some of the Pacific vowels: the typewriter and the linotype.

The typewriter was the result of stick ing type to the ends of hammers (based on the scheme used for the piano) arranged in a semicircle so tha( each piece of type would impact in the same target spot shift ed one space at a time on a movable car riage. The familiar qwertyuiop typewriter keyboard is the result of spreading out the most frequently used letters - etaoin shrud lu - so the typewriter keys don’t jam

together in the middle so easily.

The fa’amamafa, easy to write by hand, became a bit more cumbersome to use. As long as island typewriting moved at island time, it was no problem to type a vowel and then backspace, shift lock for upper case, roll the paper down, and type an underline (a capital hypen) over the vowel, but 60wpm typists found it inconvenient to stop/start typing and went back to adding fa’amamafa in ink by hand while proof reading. then came the Linotype, a mini factory that cast molten metal as a com plete line to type based on entries from a “typewriter” keyboard. Island printers ordering direct from the manufacturer could easily include fa’amamafa vowels on their special machine, but many devices that end up on Pacific islands are second hand from some mainland. Fa’amamafa not included.

Next came the computer. The 256 chan racter ASCII character set was the original standard. This may sound like much more than enough but nearly 90 chracters are needed to represent the standard english typewriter keyboard including numbers and punctuation, also, computers were developed for military and scientific use so many more characters were assigned for mathematic and scientific symbols. With the standard characters for some other European languages added as well, there was no room in the basic ASCII character set for fa’amamafa vowels, even if anyone has thought of including them.

So the fa’amamafa, so sensible, so easy when first devised, became a victim of

improvements in technology. ■