Seed catalogs for the polysynthetic and syllabary languages of the Americas

[dqnykamp]

#1654 seeded eight languages indigenous to the Americas: Haitian Creole, Quechua, Guarani, Aymara, Nahuatl, Kʼicheʼ, Mapudungun and Ojibwe.

Five more were in that batch's original scope and were deliberately left out: Kalaallisut (kl), Inuktitut (iu), Cree (cr), Cherokee (chr) and Navajo (nv).

Why they were held back

Every other catalog in this repository is an unreviewed machine-generated seed, and that is a workable state because a seed is checkable: a speaker can read it against the English beside it, and lint:i18n reports what is missing. These five would not have met that bar, for three distinct reasons.

Polysynthesis means a seed would be inventing words, not recalling them. Kalaallisut, Inuktitut and Cree build a sentence's worth of meaning into single words through long affix chains. There is no dictionary form to look up for "no attempts remaining" or "invalid attribute value" — the word has to be constructed, and constructing it wrong produces something that looks like the language and is not. That is a different failure from a wrong word choice, because a reader cannot tell the two apart.

Tone and diacritics carry meaning and would be wrong at a high rate. Navajo marks tone, nasalization and vowel length, and all three are contrastive. A seed that gets them mostly right is not mostly correct; it is a text a learner would be actively harmed by reading.

Three of the five are written in scripts a reader cannot check the seed against. Cherokee uses its own syllabary, and Inuktitut and Cree are published in syllabics — those are the orthographies their school boards and governments actually use, so writing them in Latin would be the wrong answer too. packages/i18n/README.md already gives exactly this reason for omitting the Khmer, Lao and Sinhala chemistry names rather than guessing them:

An unreviewed guess written in a script the reader cannot check against the English beside it is worse than the English

That argument was made about 130 chemistry keys. It applies with more force to a whole catalog of 562.

What would unblock each

These are not equally hard, and they do not all need the same thing.

• kl Kalaallisut — has a stable official orthography, a language secretariat (Oqaasileriffik), and a real body of published administrative and educational text. The blocker is word-building rather than the writing system. A corpus of Greenlandic software or school UI strings would probably be enough to seed from.
• iu Inuktitut — Nunavut publishes government and school material in syllabics, and there is existing localized software UI to draw on. Note the script decision if this is picked up: CLDR's default for iu is Cans, and a iu-Latn reader would then reach the syllabics catalog, which is the bs-Cyrl asymmetry the README already describes.
• cr Cree — same script question, plus cr is a macrolanguage; whoever seeds it should decide which variety the catalog is written in and say so in its header, the way locales/qu names Southern Quechua. Note that Seed catalogs for eight indigenous languages of the Americas #1654's MACROLANGUAGE_MEMBERS will need a cr entry, and oj's existing entry is the model.
• chr Cherokee — the Cherokee Nation runs an active language program with published materials and existing software localizations. The syllabary is well supported in Unicode; the blocker is vocabulary, not encoding.
• nv Navajo — the hardest of the five. Needs a speaker or a substantial verified corpus, because tone and the verb system are where a machine pass goes wrong invisibly.

Suggested approach

Rather than another machine pass, these want either an existing localization corpus to seed from, or a speaker willing to review. #1521's translation platform is the natural home for the second. Splitting them is fine — kl and chr look most tractable and could ship well before nv.

Whoever picks this up: packages/i18n/README.md is the place to start, and the eight catalogs in #1654 are the closest models for headers that state honestly what a seed does and does not know.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code