Pinyin Keyboard for iOS

Pinyin is the official standard for using the Latin script to represent Mandarin Chinese. There is now an app which makes it really easy to type Pinyin on iOS devices and then email the result or copy/paste it to other apps:

http://troubadourworks.com/pinyintypist/

Typing Nuosu Yi

Nuosu Yi is spoken by a couple million people in SW China and is written using several hundred characters representing individual syllables. Further info can be found on the Babelstone Yi Page, and links to several useful resources are available here.

Both OS X and iOS come with fonts for reading/writing Unicode Yi.

The logical way to type Nuosu Yi is with an input method like those used for pinyin Chinese. You can obtain such an IM via this link.

iOS 4 Display Languages

While the "supported" languages for iOS are listed in the tech specs for the iPad and related devices, iOS 4 also includes fonts that permit display of a number of additional languages and scripts in apps such as Safari, Mail, and Pages. These include Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhala, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Armenian, Georgian, Lao, and Yi.

No New Localizations for Pro Video Apps

I had thought that Apple might add more language localizations when totally redesigning Final Cut Pro, but from the Mac App Store entry which appeared today these remain at the traditional 4: English, French, German, and Japanese. OS X Lion and its non-pro apps will have 22 when released this summer.

Norwegian Spell Check and Dictionary.app Module for OS X

http://home.no/stavekontroll/mac.html

http://www.mediafire.com/?2u4nyqny2ilrs8d

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/697341/norske-ordlister-stavekontroll.pkg

Romanian & Slovak Localizations

Anyone interested in Romanian language localizations of OS X and some apps should check out this site. For Slovak, see here.

OS X 10.7 Lion: More on New Language Features

Apple has released more info on new features in OS X 10.7 Lion. Of interest related to languages are:

+Voices in 23 languages (compared to 1 in Snow Leopard).

+Safari support for vertical text and Web Open Font Format (WOFF)

+New System Localizations in Arabic, Czech, Turkish, and Hungarian

+iOS-like access to accented characters via a pop-up dialogue when you click on a character

+General support for vertical text in apps other than Safari

+Fonts added for Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Telugu, Ethiopic, Lao, Khmer, and Myanmar, plus color Emoji

+Improved Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese input methods

Extra Spell Checking Dictionaries for OS X 10.6

Apple provides only a limited selection of spell checkers for OS X. But you can also add dictionaries used by OpenOffice. You just put the .dic and .aff files in Home/Library/Spelling.  Sources for these:

1) http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries

2) http://extensions.services.openoffice.org:80/en/dictionaries

3) https://github.com/SublimeText/Dictionaries

4) https://dictionaries.io

What you download from the second source will have the extension .oxt. You need to change this to .zip, then double click on the file. The resulting folder should contain the .dic and .aff files.

Oddly those sites have nothing for Turkish.  For that try this one:

http://code.google.com/p/tr-spell/downloads/list

For Greek, go here.

For Finnish, go  here.

For Catalan, go here.

For Slovak, go here.

For info on making dictionaries, see >this page