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Swahili Wiki-Dictionary?
Martin Benjamin writes "The Hartford Courant just published a feature article on the Kamusi Project Internet Living Swahili Dictionary. This project is using the Net to put together dictionaries that are as scholarly as any university publication, yet with a secure participatory model that draws on knowledge from users around the world. Now the project is developing learning tools that will build on the Kamusi model of collaborative scholarship."
I've been known to speak fluent swahili after 10 or-so pints ..
How about a dictionary in Navajo or Iroquois? Heck, even pig latin would do!
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
nope, you just have a chip on your shoulder. From the article: "With more than 80 million speakers in East and Central Africa, Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, though a fully updated dictionary of the language has not been produced for 30 years."
"he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes..."
How, exactly, does he do this? It sounds like quite a trick.
He mentions "Then there's the professional ecologist major in Benin - he's a birder. He's sent in hundreds of bird entries, every type of thrush or crow ever spotted in East Africa, with their English and Swahili names." How does he "vet" these entries if he's not an ecologist himself?
Wikipedia regularly receives all sorts of hoax and joke definitions, neologisms, fraternity-house in-jokes, and so forth. It takes more than "minutes" to sort some of them out.
Does he just go on his personal intuition, which entries sound right and "feel" right to him? Or what?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Never mind, he's got it under control:
Printer Friendly Coral Link[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
How is it racist? Be honest with yourself. How many people thing "high tech" when Africa comes to mind. Untill their ecconomy changes, I will still see the vast portion of Africa as tribal. Even as such, that does not make then any less human. So again, I fail to see how this story is racist. Sounds like your just walking on eggshells when it comes to political correctness crap.
Life is not for the lazy.
Wewe ngamia sana! You mean 12 million.
I seriously doubt that the computer:student ratio is better than that.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I know a lot of college student who would use this. I for one have been using the yale kamusi project for a longtime. And hell yea african can use computers i know lots of them. Africa is not what you see on the discovery channel. When I came to this country I was appalled by the ignorance of American one of my teachers thought that Kenya was in the carribean and i had one kid ask me "how does it feel to wear clothes".
Will words that aren't notable be put up for AFD, like at Wikipedia? Funny, someone predicted that just yesterday
As a practical matter, is he re-creating the language? And if so, does it make any difference? If people come to rely upon this dictionary as the dictionary for Swahili, and the dictionary says that the Swahili word for a particlar bird is "XYZ," then the Swahili word for the bird is "XYZ." In a generation, nobody will know the difference. Hardly anyone (if anyone) will know any better right now.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Yep I said it.
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
From the article: "We've done all the programming work that's possible, and I can envision hitting the print key in about two years," Benjamin said. You've done ALL the programming work that's possible? Clearly you are not dreaming big enough.
FTA: Biersteker and Benjamin have applied for several grants, including one from the National Endowment for the Humanities. But they won't know anything until the spring, so they need stopgap funding. Why are you looking for American sources? Why not find a few AFRICAN ORGANIZATIONS to pay for it? If this is so useful to those who speak Kiswahili, then it shouldn't be hard to find a few African businesspeople or governments to back this thing. (...and I speak as someone who works with nonprofits in Africa, and can think of a few possible agencies that I will pass it on to.) At least he's looking to a Tanzanian university for some options (see below).
FTA: Benjamin returned with a new vision; he's calling it "Kamusi in a Box," a Swahili instruction CD-ROM kit for Internet-less villages. He's also interested in other learning projects, including some with the University of Dar Es Salaam. Hmm. I hope he checks the market first... unless he expects to include it with Negroponte's $100 laptop.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Just the other day, I was lamenting to my friend how the internet seems to have everything except for a good Swahili Wiki-Dictionary.
Looks like my chum went to great lengths to collect on our 50 Rand wager.
This can happen at Wiktionary (English version here). That is the first thing I thought of when I read the title of this articll the Wikipedia people thought of a multilingual wiki dictionary a while back, when thye still had to go around saying "please expand this article, Wikipedia is not a dictionary". I see that Wiktionary only has about 5 English entries for Swahili words. Hopefully this guy will make the content on his site available under a GFDL-compatible license so that it can be assimilated into Wiktionary.
nasema kiswahili vidogo tu, lakini na kamusi ninajifunza. karibuni kamusi.
(still not sure whether -funza is the medial or causative...)
All's true that is mistrusted
"Benjamin compares his project to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia drafted largely by a band of worldwide literati. He emphasizes, however, that, unlike Wikipedia, he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes, before he posts them."
Yeah you could do that with Wikipedia too when it had 100 new entried a month, but once you reach 100 a second I'd like to see how he'd cope.
P.S. There is a Wiktionary in Swahili right here: http://sw.wiktionary.org/ It hasn't attracted too many contributors, what makes this guy think he can do better?
I've been using this site for 6 years and it is an excellent resource. It's not very much like a wiki however. It's not user-editable and I believe most of the submitters are academic types like professors at the University of Dar. It still doesn't hold a candle to the Kamusi ya Kiswahili Sanifu though. That book has many more words, better example usages and the occasional proverb that uses the word.
And when else could I post my favourite methali ya kiswahili to Slashdot and have it be vaguely relevant?
Ukimwiga tembo kunya utapasuka mkundu.
If you imitate an elephant shitting you'll burst your asshole.
I seriously doubt that the computer:student ratio is better than that.
Not nessesaraly, and it doesn't need to be. Take for example Somalia, where *complete* deregulation (that is, no central government whatsoever) has lead to a telecomunications boom. The warlords may burn the books, but nobody burns the computers, because they are important to everybody.
So much so, that the BBC maintains a Somali language website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/somali
In fact, I am writing this message from (*gasp*) Africa! And how do you think all those internet scammers operate if they don't have Internet access?
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
Lt. Uhura from original series Star Trek spoke Swahili. If the creators of the original Star Trek felt that Swahili would be an important language in the future, who am I to argue? Besides, I'm shocked that so many negative comments would appear on /. about trying to help humanity know itself better. Oh wait, most of this comments were posted anonymously, probably by one person.
Software freedom...I love it!
This project raises some interesting possibilities in terms of professors collaborating to create educational resources. Another great spot for this is http://officeofgreatideas.com/. There, theorums and lessons can be connected with hyperlinks to external resources like wikis, blogs, documentation, or newsgroups. The community can simply record knowledge, bit by bit, and start to avoid duplication of efforts in notetaking and research. With just a dose or two of the internet's collaborative magic, this site could become an unbelievable educational resource.
I think this Kiswahili wiki-dictionary is really just a sign of how much Africa, and specifically East Africa, is changing. I spent quite a bit of time living in Kenya, and to this day I am amazed at just how "Western" a lot of Africa is becoming, especially in the big cities like Nairobi. One Kenyan NGO I worked with had a larger IT staff than I have here in the States, and a Kenyan friend of mine had his own graphic design firm at age 22, and could whip up artwork in Photoshop and Illustrator like you wouldn't believe. Even in some of the tribal areas, you run across the occasional person with an old laptop computer.
But an unfortunate consequence of all of this Westernization is that many of the urban youth, especially in Nairobi, don't even speak Kiswahili anymore. They all speak English, as well as Sheng, which is an English/Kiswahili pidgin language spoken exclusively by the younger generation, using a lot of slang. I lived there for quite a while, and I can't recall a single situation where I was forced to call upon my Kiswahili language skills.
Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.
The missing link about the missing link.
Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I recall reading, is not Swahili itself basically a pigin of various languages, including Arabic, developed along the Zanzibar slave trade routes?
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
You are not Phiber Optik, and you do yourself no favor by using his handle. ESPECIALLY with the '3' added on.
When I see Mark again, I shall tell him he has an African child he did not know about.
The latest Slashdot meme.
This was definitely lacking in the other initiatives.
Of course, this supposes that a committee of reliable people (typically, university researchers, professionals, etc.) culls the articles as they are submitted, and it does require a lot of time. They already do this for peer-reviewed scientific or technical journals, with the difference that they probably get paid for doing it.Still, I believe in a serious technical/scientific committee donating their time in order to review the validity of articles submitted to online encyclopediae, and being given the rights to prevent the modification of the online articles unless those modifications have been approved. This would be a great step towards reliability in the Wikipedia publishing process.
And besides, to compare this with another great cooperative project, would Linus Torvalds let pieces of the Linux code be updated by any anonymous coward without a proper code review done by a trusted person ? This is the direction that ought to be taken for Wikipedia.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Go watch Screamers. Best quote ever:
Hey, Jefferson...what am I speaking swahili here? --Hendricksson
The computer to student ratio might no be good but it allows this to happen:
10000 "information sources" : 1 teacher
And I feel that that can have a much bigger effect than giving a dictionary to every kid in a class. Textbooks are a huge expense for african schools and keeping them up-to-date is hard unless they are core subjects like languages and maths. There is arguably a need for a greater emphasis on practical subjects and information for these has to be updated frequently to remain relevant.
In Zimbabwe (where I went to school), schools seemed to spend a lot of time teaching maths and science which reflects the cultural bias that working in a university, a bank or other office is more respectable than running a garage or a small construction business.
Regards,
Tim
This is all just my personal opinion.
Are those Internet scammers actually from Africa, or do they just say they are? It's pretty easy to sign up for a free email service, and even easier to lie about where you are...
Nupedia, Wikipedia's predecessor, was exactly such a project.
You didn't hear very much about it because after two years and $250,000 invested, it had a grand total of "24 articles that completed its review process" and 74 more that were well along.
Many of Wikipedia's organizational principles and policies originated in Nupedia, and Larry Sanger maintains that the success of Wikipedia stemmed from the fact that it had its start in a community of people who were thoroughly steeped in Nupedia ways of doing things.
Still, it is hard to see how Nupedia can be described as other than a "failure."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
In the article, it says that the 'ki' in 'Kiswahili' means 'language'. It doesn't, it's one of those noun class prefixes that are characteristic of bantu language in general and have no formal semantic payload. It must have taken the journalist a real conscious effort to make a mistake that size.
In other news, though, Swahili is an awfully fragmented language, split into zillions of dialects with only a small core of 'standard' Swahili speakers (if indeed anybody really speaks 'standard' Swahili). Creating a meaningful dictionary would at least involve annotating entries with the dialect they belong to and whether they are likely to be permanent words.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Benin is in West Africa. Not to put too fine a point on it, though, there are airports and internet services in every country in Africa, and people do travel from one side of the continent to the other every day. Even Swahili-speaking professional ecologists working for international organizations are allowed on these airplanes when their jobs demand that they transfer from one country to another. The cool thing about the Internet is that it connects people in virtual communities to overcome the limitations of physical location, thus making it possible for an ecologist who used to live in East Africa to continue to participate in the intellectual life of the region he left behind. The Kamusi Project aims to provide a forum in which this sort of interaction occurs regularly.
If you build it, they will come...
Swahili is a lot less fragmented than kahei believes. "Standard" Swahili is quite widely spoken, and most of the terms in the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary currently are Standard. However, several other dialects (certainly not zillions) are spoken, and the project supports multiple dialects through its Edit Engine. At this point the Dialects feature is underused, but we are developing search tools to make the feature more useful and user friendly, so I'd expect increasing dialect information in the dictionary as the project goes forward.
If you build it, they will come...
pilgrim23, you are wrong. The history of Swahili is actually quite similar to the history of English, reflecting the movements and interactions of people over thousands of years. Swahili has a rich vocabulary with influences from various African tongues, Arabic, and some terms from European languages, Persian/Farsi, the Indian subcontinent, and beyond. The grammar is quite complex, so the language takes years to learn well.
The myth that Swahili is a simple or pidgin language is quite common in the US and Europe. Perhaps that is because of the Tarzan movies, where the Swahili used resembles the "me Tarzan, you Jane" quality of the English. Or perhaps it is because Swahili speakers tend to be very forgiving listeners, so visitors to East Africa get the feeling that they are communicating with just a few words of the language, because their hosts twist their ears in order to understand.
If you build it, they will come...
As to private donors: http://www.justgiving.com/pfp/swahili . So far, no dot.angel has emerged, though quite a few people have been extremely generous in helping keep the project going with relatively small donations.
Funding basically involves staffing, for programming and for editorial work. The more funding available, the more technically ambitious the project can be, and the more content we can provide. We would ideally like to expand the model to other languages, but, because the quality of the project demands scholarly oversight, we would need to actually hire people to work on additional languages and additional tasks. It's a case of getting what you pay for - the project aims to produce quality educational resources, which means that professional scholars need to give their time, and if they are giving the sort of time necessary to get the resources online this century, they need to be paid so they can buy food and pay the rent. Hosting costs are minimal - Yale is quite generous with server space. Publishing costs will be borne by the publishing house, when we eventually get to the point of producing print dictionaries, although we've got some problematic issues ahead because publishing houses are wary of printing something that is also available for free online. The project has a proven record of spending its money wisely and producing results, but it does need some sort of cash flow to keep doing the things it does!
If you build it, they will come...
I'm not so blind as to assume that if your country isn't the USA or part of the EU that nobody knows what a computer looks like, but I'm pretty sure he's talking about the utterly destitute parts of Africa.
In significant portions of sub-saharan africa it is hard enough to get a mosquito net, much less schools books or a computer.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yea... that's fuckin useful...
Free text books means more money can be put into teacher salaries so we get the best and the brightest, and so children can have facilities that don't look like they've been abandoned for 25 years.
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
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You made me curious so I looked it up: The White Nile, Alan Moorhead Harper, NY 1960. in the section on Richard Burton and his expedition to Lake Tanganika and Lake Victoria it refers to the Arab slave routes they traveled starting in Zanzibar, which was the bazzar of the old East African slave trade, and of the various languages encountered and spoken. Burton, who was probably the most phenomenal linguist who ever lived, speaks of the piggin character of Swahili. Not one mention of Tarzan in the volume...
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
You are quite right about the 'ki' of course, thank you for correcting me.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
In significant portions of sub-saharan africa it is hard enough to get a mosquito net, much less schools books or a computer.
perhaps, you could start a business selling mosquito nets so no one complains about this again.
For a more thorough history of the Swahili language, check out The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500 by Derek Nurse and Thomas Spear. You might also want to read "The World of the Swahili" by John Middleton. As you'll see, quite a lot of scholarship about Swahili has been done since the time of Sir Richard, and even in the 45 years since Moorehead. It is an interesting reference, though - thanks for bringing it up, it really shows how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go, in Euro-American attitudes toward Africa and African languages.
If you build it, they will come...