Media: Telugu Internet Conference held: discusses Unicode, fonts
| Submitter: |
Brent Woo
|
| Submitter Email: | bwoo@linguistlist.org |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics Writing Systems |
| Media Body: |
The First International Telugu Internet Conference (2011) was held in Milpitas, California on September 28-30. Telugu is the third-most spoken language in India, spoken mainly in the state of Andhra Pradesh, but is lacking in computer support. The Conference addressed concerns of encoding, interoperability, and computational issues specific to the language. The Hindu reports that the Minister for Information Technology and Computers, Ponnala Lakshmaiah, put forth the initiative and funding for the research and development of a complete Telugu font. It is still not fully encoded in Unicode. The Andhra Pradesh State Government has become a member of the Unicode Consortium, the first government entity to do so. <http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Vijayawada/article2496445.ece>; At a press conference, the Hyderabad Daily News reports that Lakshmaiah has ambitious goals: “We are currently developing six Telugu fonts in unicode that will be standardised for internet use. These fonts will be brought into unicode by December this year.” <http://www.hyderabaddailynews.com/2011/09/09/first-international- telugu- internet-conference/> The Conference aimed to highlight specific areas of language technology that are deficient in Telugu support: 'language editors, spell checker, and text-to- speech' because Telugu is an “agglutinating language with a very complex morphology coupled with prolific sandhi (also known in linguistic terms as morphophonemics).' says Prof. G. Uma Maheswara Rao of the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of Hyderabad. <http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Vijayawada/article2503353.ece>; The official site for the Conference is here: <https://sites.google.com/site/iticgift/>; |
| Issue Number: | 22.3903 |
| Date Posted: | October 06, 2011 |
