At the last #Wikimedia localisation team's Office hour, one of the questions was if we could support the cuneiform script. I blogged about it and we did find a font for the cuneiform script that was freely licensed. This font has been enabled at translatewiki.net.When this font becomes available at for instance the English Wikisource, the text of the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Cyrus cylinder can be made available in the original format and we can be reasonably sure that any device that supports web fonts will show the characters as defined in the Akkadian font.
The Akkadian font is available in the Debian distribution and was developed by George Douros. There are several other fonts for historic texts created by Mr Douros. They can be made available. This however will happen on request.
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| English Wikipedia without WebFont support |
Thanks,
GerardM
3 comments:
Cuneiform fonts shall be used on translatewiki.net. Is there a plan to translate texts from cuneiform languages (Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite and others)? It seems to be impossible because I am sure that the translators will be missing for those languages. Currently those languages are not supported by Translatewiki.
The cuneiform script is available to be used. This is because we do test our language support developments at twn. We are not going to localise or translate any texts. What makes sense is to transliterate sources ie make them digitally available.
Thanks,
GerardM
I didn't know that twn cares for such things as well. For me twn was a pure translation platform. Sure, there are a lot of things behind that which enable translating resp. create the best conditions for translators but transliterating sources to make resources digitally available I didn't consider to be a task of twn. But it's interesting, though. In the nineties I was guest student at Lipsia university from 1994 - 1998 having 2 or 4 lessons a week. I studied Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite and Hurritic, and, of course, cuneiform script. But that's a hobby and that was a long time ago.
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