Okay, I guess I can start. This time properly. So yeah, my name is Daichi Shimabukuro.
Shimabukuro is a typical Okinawan name.
I'm not related to Jake Shimabukuro, the ukulele player, just for this record.
But yeah, so what you see out there is a tiny little island in the south of Japan, and that's where I'm from.
I've spent 18 years of my life, and I do live now in Tokyo with my lovely husband, Sven, who sits at the back of the conference room.
But yeah, let's move on. Yeah. So the first slide is coming up. Yeah, there you go.
So I would like to talk about keyboards.
When you type letters, characters on your computer, of course you use QWERTY or Dwarf keyboard of your choice, and you'll probably type in letters.
Up you see ASCII letters with some symbols.
These are the combinations, the letters that you can use as a combination to write type.
Words on computers. And you can say that those letters are what represent sounds.
And in case of Japanese and Okinawan, we have those characters that represent one sound.
So up there on the left upper corner, it says A, the right one is E, and so forth and so forth.
So one sort of character, a pictogram, represents one particular character. One particular sound.
So we need to come up with a system that can actually convert the ASCII letters into those characters.
And well, they kind of look similar in number, of course.
But what complicates things in Japanese and all the other Asian languages, for example, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, is that you have all the other sets of characters, for example, this much.
How do you type those words and characters onto computers with the only 24-25 letter keyboard?
Well, that's why you need an input method engine that converts the letters that you type into the combination of the first sets of characters that you saw, which converts to the combination, some of the combinations of those characters.
Bom! In Japan, you have to learn at least 1,000 to 26 characters of them.
But the Japanese government says you need to know at least 2,000 to live your life in Japan.
So that is complicated. But why those characters are needed?
Can't we just represent those characters' sounds using the first sets of characters like that?
Well, the problem here is that in Japanese, we have a lot of homophones.
Words that sound the same but have different meanings.
For example, the English translation, I mean English sentence, there are two birds in the garden.
In Japanese, it will be niwa niwa niwa niwa tori ga iru. There are two birds in the garden.
However, if you write it down with the... sound representing characters only, you see those hiraganas.
And when you say that to a person, a Japanese-speaking person, they wouldn't know which word I mean.
There are actually some people out there who actually counted the numbers of interpretation.
There are 93 ways of interpreting this particular sets of sounds. So we need those characters.
And if you don't, this picture, lovely picture, will be something like this.
Two birds doing some stupid things.
We have already the IME input method engine for the Japanese language.
So I would like to demonstrate how a normal Japanese person types on a computer. Okay. So...
So, yep, what I'm showing you is the LibreOffice, and I'm going to type some words.
So in Japanese, I mean, when you type in German as well, you sort of change the keyboard layer, right?
So from there, you can actually choose the Japanese IME, and there, I'm going to choose hiragana, ATOC, which is a Japanese proprietary company for the IME conversion and stuff.
So... So, the last sentence that I said, and then you can convert the...
There are two birds, the two birds part, and then you hit space, that converts the hiragana characters into kanji characters, which is those thousands of different sort of pictogram-ish characters.
The first... The... This one means garden. And... Oh.
And then this one means two birds, and this one means, well, day rings or something.
So there are a lot of interpretations of that. That's how you type in Japanese on computers. So...
Yep. Let me just switch it back to the slides. Okay. Okay. Okay. Good. Okay. Sorry. So...
Why the Input Method Engine for Okinawans needed? The first thing is that Okinawan is...
Belongs to a Japanese language family, which means that the Okinawan language and the Japanese language... which is widely spoken on the Japanese mainland, share the same ancestry, but they develop differently all those years.
It's like German to English or French to English or what sorts.
And it is considered to be a severely endangered language, unfortunately, because of the assimilation put onto the island, because we used to be a kingdom on its own called Ryukyu Islands, about 400 years ago.
And in 1892, sorry, 1879, Japan officially annexed Okinawa, and Okinawa has been part of Japan ever since.
Because of that, the assimilation policy has been put on the island, which means that if you speak another language other than, let's say, Japanese, for example, you would have to carry a little tag that says, I've spoken in the language of barbarians.
I shall be punished.
That resulted in significant decrease of the speakers of the language, and unfortunately, nowadays, we only have about, well, fluent speakers, 10,000 to 15,000, although the population of Okinawa is actually 1.4 million.
So I would like to...
So I'm working as a side gig, just to create the Input Method Engine for the Okinawan language.
Yeah, we have different cultures, basically.
Dragon boats and Ryukyu and folklore dances and so forth.
The other thing, well, why Okinawan, specifically, is, well, of course, one thing is that I'm from there.
The other thing is because, although the language shares its ancestry with the Japanese language, some of the sounds that we Okinawans use don't necessarily get to be represented using Japanese characters.
So, for example, the words, like, the sounds, like, uh, ih, uh, like, with the glottal sounds,
or kwa, these kind of sounds do not necessarily get represented well using Japanese characters,
and that's why we had to come up with characters, new characters,
that represent one specific sound that is native to the language.
About 30 years ago, there was somebody who thought the same, Funatsu Yoshiaki.
He created those 30 different characters, that's right, that's on the right-hand side.
So sounds like kwa, as I said, tu, du,
these sounds don't necessarily exist in the Japanese language,
but we have in the Okinawan language. So, the other problem when you are creating the IME
is that, well, computers have to understand those characters, and if computers understand them,
you need to have a standardized set of characters that they can refer to.
Usually it is Unicode, however, of course,
Unicode doesn't necessarily include those characters yet,
because they are inundated with lots of requests to insert, new sets of characters.
So, one of, actually three years ago,
a person called Friednich, or somebody, from the Philippines,
actually reached out to me to add those characters onto the Unicode's consortium.
It was proposed, but it's been still a work in progress.
The characters that Funaki-san, in the last slide, added, didn't really include
all of the special sounding words, or characters.
So, I added a few, and in order for those typing systems to be existing,
you need to have the input method engine.
So, there's an open source project out there called Mozuku,
which is a Google Japanese open source input method engine project.
So, I modified a few codes, basically the mapping of the characters, and how it's represented.
And how the dictionary form is created, and so forth.
But, of course, because I created new characters, I had to come up with a new font.
And I had to learn all those things about, you know, how the Unicode 32, sorry, yeah, Unicode 32,
and all those code conversion had to happen, and then the font creation on its own,
instead of the English language 24 to 100 letter characters,
encoding ten thousands of them into a code, into a code, into a code, into a code.
It's a code, a font set. It was a very difficult job to do. But, enough of that.
Some of the characters have to be, as I said, represented using Unicode.
And luckily, in the Unicode, there are some white space of code representation.
So, the person who I mentioned, Fred, Friedrich, I guess, has proposed to use some of those spaces
to represent Okinawan-specific characters. That's written on the right.
And then the left-hand side is what I drew, basically. I'm not a good font creator.
But I added a few characters that were missing from the original Funaki-san's character sets.
I assigned, well, arbitrarily, some of the code into those character representations. But, yeah.
So, the reason why I am making this is the... Because we have a lot of homophone words,
without the conversion system, it's really difficult for a reader
to read whatever you have written down. And also, having our own sets of characters means...
Well, gives a very unique touch onto the fact that, well,
these character sets are actually Okinawan and Okinawan only.
Because some of the times when Okinawan words
are written with the mainland Japanese character sets,
they don't necessarily carry the same sound. So, some of the words, for example, ya and ya,
one with a glottal sound and one without, actually means you and home.
And these two words are completely different meanings, but they are not distinguishable
using Japanese words or characters. So, we wanted to create the IME for this one
to make it clearly Okinawan. So, I created that,
and I'm gonna demonstrate how that is done so far. Let me swap displays. Sorry. Yeah.
So, I typed in Japanese in here. I'm gonna type using the modified mozuku. Yep, there you go.
So, that's now set to... It says hiragana, but I'll probably change it to later something.
So, for example, thank you in Japanese is arigato. But the word for thank you
in Okinawan is ni fei de biru. So, I'm gonna type that in. By the way,
if we were to type that in the Japanese language, that'll be ni fei de biru.
So, you can see that the sound fe is written using two sets of characters,
and then that will make a lot of Japanese confused because they don't know how to pronounce it.
And using the Okinawan language input... Is that the one? No. There you go. Ni fei de... Ni fei...
Sorry. Ni fei de biru. So, you can see that those two character representation
has been conduced to one, which to just one sound fe, and that makes it a lot easier.
And also, I added a dictionary so that these character sets
can be represented using the Chinese kanji characters. So, ni fei de biru can be represented
using those complicated ones. And then you can actually convert from the hiragana sets
or Okinawa kana sets into kanji and hiragana sets. So, that's what I created and working on.
Thank you. Thank you. There you go. So, yeah. Being Okinawan, we have been kind of frowned upon
as being Okinawan, especially when you're in Tokyo. You're sort of considered as, well,
a barbarian person, unfortunately. So, we would like to create our own strong identity.
And then for that, we need language. And for that, we need a language input method engine.
So, that's why I'm working on this. Community building. We actually have a lot of diaspora
outside of Japan, Hawaii and Brazil and Argentina. And also, they are Okinawan in their identity.
So, I've been reaching out to them to get their input on this.
So, broader implication in future directions. One is that, well, those conversion set
from the hiragana or Okinawa kana characters onto the kanji characters, it has to have dictionary.
And then, of course, dictionary cannot be made on a machine learning level, unfortunately,
because there are not many digitized data in the first place. So, I need to work on that.
And then the second one is education using the language to enrich the language usage.
And also, more publications in the language. And having some kind of way
to convert some other words from Japanese and English or German or Russian
into the Okinawan sounding characters, sets of sounds, that has to be done. So, yeah.
That's it for the presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Here you go.
What does the engine… I'm not sure What does the engine usually do? What is the canonical reason
these engines exist? Canonical? I don't know what that means. The input… Sorry. The input engines.
What do they usually do? What it does, it reads the user's keystroke.
So, let's say the ASCII letter A is inputinto…
to the computer that holds that information and that is converted to first hiragana characters
and then the combination of that if it includes some words that can be converted using wakanji
then they will show as candidates to convert it to and that's usually how input method
engine works. I don't know if it answered your question, sorry.
So next question please, same microphone. Hi, thank you for the nice talk.
I was wondering if there's still enough space on the QWERTY keyboard for these new hiragana
characters or are you going to build your own custom keyboard for them?
I really would like to tap into that, however I don't have much time to do so but I would
like to do that.
I would like to create the keyboard set for that particular but for now the key layout
that I'm using is QWERTY for now, yes, thank you. And now from the other microphone.
First of all, thank you very much for the presentation.
Maybe I missed this but did you explain how Okinawan is normally written without the
invented hiragana? Okay, that I didn't touch on but unfortunately Okinawan
was never written in language even before the war and after the war, World War II.
The remaining sort of artifacts of the Okinawan language has been written either in Chinese,
German or English and some of them are written also in Korean but Koreans didn't really have
much writing system back then so the main source of language sort of records are using
Latin letters. And over there please. Is your fork of the IME available publicly?
Yes, I am going to publish it soon.
I actually made the last compile of the IME last night, so I'll put it on tomorrow. Thank you.
Thank you for the talk. I was wondering, seeing as there are more kana in Okinawan,
does it reduce the homophone issue that you have with mainland Japanese?
Does it reduce more? Yes, actually. So some of the sounds that are the same sounding in
the Japanese language, they actually have different sounds or phonemes in the Okinawan
language, so we distinguish them quite a bit. I don't know how much it reduces, but there
are some less, there are less homophones, disabiguations in the Okinawan language. Thank
you. Right there, please. Thank you for the talk. I was wondering, does the Japanese government
encourage such projects? I love it, but I was just wondering how the political situation looks
like. Yeah, so, well, the mere reason why I'm here talking about this Okinawan language in Germany
is because of that, partially. A lot of Japanese linguists, they don't necessarily want to consider
the Okinawan languages as a separate language, rather than, well, they want to see it as a
dialect of the Japanese language. So they don't necessarily want to consider the Okinawan
as a Japanese language. So the government doesn't necessarily do much in order to preserve the
language. On the flip side, it actually wants to diminish it. However, the Okinawan government,
Okinawan municipality, they are trying to preserve the language, having like a day of the
Okinawan language, where people are encouraged to speak in the language. However, as the assimilation
before and after the war has been quite powerful, there are not many young Okinawan language
speakers. And one more question. Sorry, it's maybe more complicated. It's, what is your, like,
thought process for the spacing and stuff to create it, like, uniform with other fonts, or to
create a special font for it? Could you say that again? I'm sorry. Like a typeface. Yes.
Are you trying to create, like, on a specific typeface? Because I'm sometimes creating, like,
typefaces, and the spacing is a nightmare, especially in another alphabet. So that's my
question. Do I plan to make more? Is that the one? Like on the font, like on the font, do you try
to make it, like, sometimes when you transliterate fonts, you find, like, a very dominant font, and
then you try to make the characters in the same space. Do you try to make the characters in the same space?
Do you do the spacing in the same thing? Are you doing the same, or how do you work with the spacing?
Yeah, so the spacing or the margins in the typeface, well, I'm using the sort of the default for the
Japanese character sets for now, but I plan to write some guidelines to make sure that it's seen
more beautifully as a sort of general guide for other people to create their typefaces and fonts.
And another thing? Okay, thank you very, very much. Thank you. And over there, please.
I'd like to know, would a person from Tokyo, for example, be able to distinguish the sounds of the,
like the hiragana? Or would they just go, oh, that's a typo? Or it's a weird symbol?
They will probably think it's a weird symbols and characters. Sometimes they even probably think it's
typo. Okay. Okay. Thank you. It's like, you know,
for Americans seeing umlauts in their writing system, they just sort of see as well, what is this?
You know. You were earlier, so you go ahead.
Yeah, okay. So you've done this new kana characters, which is great. Are there also Okinawan kanji that you have to add to your Unicode?
We don't have Okinawan specific kanji yet. But there are some.
There are some words when you see etymologically speaking, the representation or the meanings of the word have been combination of two different characters. So we will probably have to come up with a new sets of kanji characters for Okinawan specifically in the near future.
Yeah. And I almost overlooked the microphone in the back.
Well, first of all, also from my side, thank you very much for your presentation.
And I have a question.
I have more of a general question regarding the IME, which is basically, you already talked about the ambiguities in Japanese and Okinawan.
And what I want to ask is, when you design the IME and program it, how do you actually resolve it with those suggestions?
So to form it more precise, to phrase it more precisely, how do you generate and rank those suggestions?
Because in theory, it all has the same, and not meaning, but readings.
So therefore, how would you say, I don't know, I first suggest this resolution of ambiguity before the other one.
Okay, so I haven't implemented this for the Okinawan language, but the original Mozuku, the Google open source, what it does is actually looks at parts of speech, for example, the beginning of the word, beginning of the sentence, it will probably be I.
And it will have more weight on the word that represents sort of subjects, and they will decrease the weight on the words that are not necessarily used typically for the beginning of the word.
So it will grammatically analyze the sentences from, well, sort of n-gram sort of types of things, and put some weights on it of each of the words in the dictionary.
Okay, thanks. And one more on the microphone in the back.
I actually have two questions. The first one about the IME generally, does the kana kanji conversion take the words around maybe the words that were typed already in consideration so that there's more efficient?
That's the first question. And second, do you take, do you plan like having a katakana in Ryukyu as well?
Or especially, more sounds, which is always troublesome, and is it in the Unicode application?
Yeah. So, well, let me answer the second question first.
I do not plan to create katakana, which is, katakana is a set of characters that are often used for loan words in the Japanese language.
I do not necessarily want to create a set of different sets of words or characters for that.
Maybe some people would like to, I don't know. But personally, I do not want to.
And for the first question, probably, I mean, I would probably have to look into the etymology of the, of some of the words, because some people write those words with different sets of kanji, and of course, people would like to, you know, make their own interpretation more available to the public.
So we'll have to do much more research on that.
But for now, I'm using some of the dictionary form that they have, actually, first in English, and I have added a few.
This is the dictionary file for the IME.
For now, we only have about, well, 200 or so, but I would like to add 10 or 20,000 more words into the dictionary for better conversion.
Yeah, thanks. Okay, nobody on the microphones anymore.
The internet doesn't have any questions, so this is a special occasion. No more questions.