Well, in addition to sending a request to the font designer of Raleway to include the glyphs needed for the language. I sent a request to the Library of Congress to designate a language code used in HTML for the Comanche language. I think these are both important because if the language is to stay alive, then it has to be a web-friendly language. People need to be able to type it, and computers need to be able to identify it quickly. I keep my expectations down from my little request getting consideration to the Library on Congress, but it is certainly worth asking them. I proposed the HTML language tag be “nu,” which would be the first two letters of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Comanche) name.

I actually just bought two dictionary books too (with a Christmas gift card), to help me learn the language better. I also hope to get the officially release tribal dictionary whenever I can get tribal recognition, mostly because the non-member price is steep. I think having an online dictionary is important for the language, without any gated content. This will make it easier to casually learn verbs, and would be more alike the European language authority. The language might need an online dictionary to help the case of getting the HTML ISO 639 language name.

I am still hitting road bumps with the tribal application, but I will persist:

1. The toughest is that my mom’s father was not a good person, so my mom does not know much about that family tree branch, which is required for the application. I think I have my dad’s side of the family correct, but I can try to ask my 88 year old grandpa if he has the time. It is a bit confusing with my parental grandpa because he was born out of wedlock, plus his mom did not have a birth certificate, which was probably typical of a Comanche person 100+ years ago.
2. The second bump is that when I was born, my dad’s name was not listed on the birth certificate; this was to save money on the hospital bill, and because my parents were not married. It actually took some asking to get that story out of my mom, only a few years ago (in my 30s). I guess there is some shame from that time of having a baby before marriage. I simply wanted the truth. Anyways, I need my dad’s name on the birth certificate, so that can be sent in with the tribal application.

   As I have been doing some ancestral records sifting, many of the government’s public records are for birth certificates and death certificates, so having the birth certificate be correct for the record seems good. In order to update my birth certificate, I had to mail out a request to the county clerk to get a certified copy of my parents’ marriage certificate. Once that is delivered, I have to haul my parents to a notary to sign a paper documenting that they are my parents. Then I can send in the birth certificate request to the state of Texas with these two documents. Once I get the certified birth certificate, that will be part of the tribal application package. I suppose all this work does prove this tribal recognition is important to me to go through the hassle.

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