Nicole Sophie Savu-Benjamin; welcome to our world

Congratulations on your first day. I am sure that your mammy and daddy will be happy to enjoy many days and years with you.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Kamusi has a proud new logo

The Kamusi project is one of my favourite projects because one of my favourite friends is doing awesome work. Kamusi as I got to know it, is a dictionary for the Swahili language, it is also a translation dictionary into and from English. The latest news is that Kamusi has selected a great new logo, the story behind it can be found here.

I love dictionaries, but I am awed by the success of the Afrigen project. It is so important; it is one of the basic steps in properly supporting a language on the Internet. I would love to clone that project for all the Wikipedia languages...

Anyway, reasons to be cheerful: a great new logo for Kamusi
Thanks,
     GerardM

CLDR 1.8 has been published

The Unicode Common Locale Data Repository 1.8 has been published and, it is a celebration of the Afrigen project. In all, over 150 volunteers gathered locale data for 72 African languages, with data for 54 of those incorporated into the CLDR 1.8 release. 41 of these languages are completely new to the Unicode CLDR project while 13 others existed in earlier versions of CLDR and were enhanced with additional data. These languages are spoken in 26 countries across the entire African continent.

The CLDR itself contains data for 186 languages and 159 territories: 501 locales in all. Version 1.8 of the repository contains over 22% more locale data than the previous release, with over 42,000 new or modified data items from over 300 different contributors.

Information for a language in  the CLDR is considered a prerequisite for support in applications like OpenOffice. Given that translatewiki.net supports 325 languages and the CLDR only 186, it is sad to realise that many of our languages suffer from a lack of basic language support.

MediaWiki has been updated in r63857. This resulted in 18 new and 56 updated records for the languages we support at translatewiki.net.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The clock has it wrong

Kamusi, is the Swahili word for dictionary. Kamusi is also the name of a great project for Swahili dictionaries. The Kamusi project has been around for quite some time, they had a great time at Yale university, and last year became independent at kamusiproject.org because both the kamusi.org and the kamusi.com project were taken.

As of today Kamusi can be found at kamusi.org, the story behind it is a great read and a happy story. As a service to its readers, Kamusi would be happy to redirect from kamusi.com. Sadly it is extremely likely that this domain has been cyber squatted by GoDaddy.

Anyway, the Kamusi project will have to change their merchandising, they are a sign of their time.
Thanks,
GerardM

Kenyan call for peace, "Wakenya Pamoja"

I had another look at the wonderful Kamusi project. On its main page there is a video of many Kenyan artists singing, imploring their fellow Kenyans for peace. The song, it is in Swahili, can be found in many other places like the djfresh.org, youtube as well.

In translations the title "Wakenya Pamoja" means "Kenyans together". Have a listen, if only to listen how diverse the Kenyan music is. It is a great song.

Thanks,
GerardM

Kamusi, The Internet Living Swahili Dictionary has been taken offline.

Kamusi is a great lexical resource for Swahili. With a lot of great effort this became one of the really relevant Internet projects of Yale University. It is with sadness that I found that it has been taken off line.

It is sad, that such a sterling effort is endangered on what seems to me a minor issue. It is sad because the many Kamusi's users are now without their Swahili dictionary.

I contacted Martin Benjamin, the editor of Kamusi and, I learned that the World Language Documentation Centre is willing to help out with the hosting of Kamusi. Martin and the WLDC are looking for the best way forward; maybe another university can take over where Yale has dropped the ball, maybe Yale will reconsider ...

When I know how to get to the new Kamusi website, I will let you know.

Thanks,
GerardM

A new language on the Internet ?

I received a mail that was forwarded to me by Martin Benjamin (the Kamusi project). The mail was by a gentleman who wants to promote his mother tongue, the Bangubangu language. This is the first time that written material in this language has been created. The first project is a book in English, French and Swahili called “Teach yourself the Kibangubangou”.

I am thrilled with initiatives like this. The book is there now what to do next. Do you print it with an organisation like Lulu? Do you advise to make it a Wikibook? To what extend are concepts like copyright and licenses relevant and understood ..

It would be great to make this project succeed and have kids learn their mother tongue. There are stumbling blocks. Google does support less languages then the Wikimedia Foundation; Google does some hundred and The WMF some two hundred and fifty. One of the problems is that there is not much material in any but the bigger languages and Google does good by already doing this much.

To make an impact, I think it is crucial for material in particularly the endangered languages, to be tagged correctly. This gives Google and the other search engines a fighting chance to function on little material. For the Bangubangu language, there is no proper tag yet. The question is if the IETF will consider to do something about it. They are religious in their belief that the ISO-639-3 is not approved yet and that the bnx code therefore is not to be used. At issue is that there is a need that presents itself for this language.

Thanks,
GerardM

Sweet nuggets of relevancy

The Kamusi project is one of those deserving projects, it is a project dedicated to the Swahili language. It intends to create a dictionary. A dictionary that has been worked on for many years. A resource to be proud of.

It is only lacking in this one resource.. money.. If it does not find money it will pack it in. They are now finishing off software so that the project will be in the best shape it can be. I truly hope that the Kamusi project will find its way into a bright future. If you can help, please do :)

Thanks,
GerardM