Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus
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Notes on geminates in Sesotho
Full text linkGeminates are a feature of Sesotho phonology. Only nasals and the lateral appear as geminates, to the exclusion of the other sonorants that form part of the Sesotho phonemic inventory. This squib reports on some phonetic and phonological aspects of Sesotho geminates, including duration, the phonotactic distribution of geminates and the syllabic structures in which they appear
A typology of the use of clicks
Full text linkClick speech sounds were first identified as consonants in the 17th century. On his voyage to India in 1627, the English traveller and historian Sir Thomas Herbert stopped in southern Africa, where he met with Khoekhoe speakers at the Cape. He noticed that clicks were regular consonants in their language and represented them as such in his travelogue (Herbert 1638). Since then, click consonants have received thorough scholarly attention by linguists, many of whom have dedicated their lives to the study of click consonants. Click speech sounds are consonants in phoneme inventories of about 301 of the approximately 6,5002 languages spoken in the world today. These few languages, henceforth referred to as click-consonant-using (CU) languages, are found in southern and eastern Africa. In this squib we propose a typology of the different uses of click speech sounds in human communication
Uncovering a consonant chain shift in Gujarati
Full text linkChain shifts are not new to linguistics – the concept goes all the way back to the founding of the discipline in the west, soon after William Jones’ famous address of 1786 espousing the relations between Indian and Western languages. This squib examines a consonantal chain shift in the Indo-Aryan language, Gujarati, that has been missed in descriptions of that language
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi: Linguistic shorts in honour of Andries Coetzee – part I
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Opposing sound shifts involving alveolar and palatal clicks (ǃ ~ ǂ) in the ǃUi subgroup of TUU languages from southern Africa
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The intersection of syntax and poetry in the first Hebrew acrostic poem of Lamentations
Full text linkAcrostic poems in Biblical Hebrew are structured both by the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet at the beginning of successive strophes as well as by the ordinary features of poetic style. In this essay we consider how these two aspects of poetic style interact with the poet’s syntactic choices in the first poem of the Book of Lamentations (1:1-11) in order to determine to what extent the poetic constraints have hampered or warped the syntactic structures employed in the poetic lines or half-lines
Teachers’ views towards, and practices in the teaching of mother tongue in Uganda: an ethnographic view
No full textIn this paper, we discuss teachers’ views and related classroom practices of teaching the mother tongue, (MT) Luganda as a subject, as observed in rural classrooms in central Uganda. The challenges observed arise from the lack of and, in some cases, limited training of teachers in MT teaching. Also, there is a disjointed approach to the teaching of Luganda and English, languages to which learners are simultaneously introduced when they first learn to read. The disjointed approach to the teaching of Luganda and English brings about the problem of letter-naming when teaching the two languages. In addition, the overrepresentation of the Luganda orthography regarding the use of /r/ and /l/ as though they are phonemes affects the quick mastery of writing skills in Luganda. The paper demonstrates how teachers go about the teaching of the MT (Luganda) and how these difficulties affect language teaching in rural schools in two districts in Uganda. The paper ends with a discussion on what can be done to overcome these challenges with implications on teacher-education
Optical Character Recognition and text cleaning in the indigenous South African languages
Full text linkThis article represents follow-up work on unpublished presentations by the authors of text and corpus cleaning strategies for the African languages. In this article we provide a comparative description of cleaning of web-sourced and text-sourced material to be used for the compilation of corpora with specific attention to cleaning of text-based material, since this is particularly relevant for the indigenous South African languages. For the purposes of this study, we use the term “web-sourced material†to refer to digital data sourced from the internet, whereas “text-based material†refers to hard copy textual material. We identify the different types of errors found in such texts, looking specifically at typical scanning errors in these languages, followed by an evaluation of three commercially available Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools. We argue that the cleanness of texts is a matter of granularity, depending on the envisaged application of the corpus comprised by the texts. Text corpora which are to be utilized for e.g. lexicographic purposes can tolerate a higher level of ‘noise’ than those used for the compilation of e.g. spelling and grammar checkers. We conclude with some suggestions for text cleaning for the indigenous languages of South Africa
