Microsoft has Quechua but Not Unicode

The Associated Press announced the Bolivian launch of Quechuan software by Microsoft today. The article notes that the word used for file is “quipu”, “borrowing the name of an ancient Incan practice of recording information in an intricate system of knotted strings.” Both Microsoft Windows and Office offer Quechua. Other languages supported include several varieties of Sami as well as Cymraeg, Māori and isiXhosa.

Microsoft also released its nearly completed version of Internet Explorer 7, named Release Candidate 1. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t fully implement Unicode as can be seen by trying to read the June posts of this blog.

女書 (nǚ shū)

The secret writing system used by women in China is discussed at World of Nushu. This site is by Orie Endo, a sociolinguistic in Japan. Read about how she learned of 女書 in the 1990s and made trips to interview users of 女書. It is an endangered language mode. The existence of this language was kept a secret until 1983 when it was reported to the authorities in China; see the Wikipedia article for additional information.

Accents & Installing Foreign Languages

My first Windows machine was Japanese Windows 3.1. It required quite a bit of extra software to get Japanese capability, and it was slow. Each version of Windows has provided more international support, and beginning with Windows 2000, you can sometimes get international characters to work with programs that don’t explicitly support interntional character sets.

If you just need accents, umlauts, and tildes, the easiest option for English Windows is the US International keyboard. Type an apostrophe (’) followed by a vowel to get an acute (rising) accent: á, é, í, ó, ú. Type the grave (downward) accent (upper left on the keyboard) followed by a vowel for that accent: à, è, ì, ò, ù.