cannylinguist ([info]cannylinguist) wrote,
@ 2003-12-09 18:04:00
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African Speech Technology
The African Speech Technology is a consortium of researchers and institutions working on creating language and speech technology applications for the official languages of South Africa. Some of the long term goals appear to include developing nifty things like speech synthesis in Zulu, Xhosa (pronounced Kosa), Sesotho and Afrikaans. At present they are focusing on a limited domain task for automatically handling hotel reservations. Albert Visagie, one of the collaborators in the project, has a small interactive (concatenative) synthesis demo at his site which generates a few test utterances in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa. Play with Xhosa and hear the clicks!

An interesting remark from his site:

In Xhosa, numbers are prefixed according to the noun the refer to, and the numbers are very tedious for anything above 100. Therefore amounts and digit strings are read in English, as English numerals make more sense when the numbers don't refer to anything (digitstrings) or are too big.

I wonder whether this is frequent practice among (bilingual?) Xhosa speakers, or just a technological patch.

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Numbers in Sesotho
(Anonymous)
2004-01-19 03:20 pm UTC (link)
Basotho and others who speak Sesotho tend to use English to count as well, or to tell the time. It is true that numbers are prefixed in relation with the noun they refer to
Twenty houses
MATLO A MASHOME A MABELI

Twenty trees
LIFATE TSE MASHOME A MABELI.
What's more, counting becomes ever more complex the higher the number. And that is due to the fact that we do not have a noun representing a number (Five, for example), but a phrase defining the number. Twenty is two tens, twenty-one is two tens and one root.

Now imagine telling the time and getting into how many roots all!

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Numbers in Sesotho
(Anonymous)
2004-01-19 03:26 pm UTC (link)
Basotho and others who speak Sesotho tend to use English to count as well, or to tell the time. It is true that numbers are prefixed in relation with the noun they refer to
Twenty houses
MATLO A MASHOME A MABELI

Twenty trees
LIFATE TSE MASHOME A MABELI.
What's more, counting becomes ever more complex the higher the number. And that is due to the fact that we do not have a noun representing a number (Five, for example), but a phrase defining the number. Twenty is two tens, twenty-one is two tens and one root.

Now imagine telling the time and getting into how many roots all!

Rethabile Masilo
http://lesotho.blogspot.com
http://anglais.blogspot.com

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Big numbers
(Anonymous)
2004-03-17 07:18 pm UTC (link)
I used to listen to shortwave radio in Inuktitut, just to hear the lovely sounds. I noticed that when they gave the hockey scores, numbers above a certain value, I think it was four, were given in English. Possibly a similar thing. I never heard strings of English digits, but I don't suppose the target population had telephones then.

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