Introducing the Eskaya writing system: A complex Messianic script from the southern Philippines

This paper introduces and documents the Eskaya writing system of the Philippines, developed ca. 1920–1937, and attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of its creation. Although the script is used for representing Visayan (Cebuano)—a widely used language of the southern Philippines—its privileged role is in the written reproduction of a constructed utopian language, referred to as Eskayan or Bisayan Declarado. Held to have been invented by the ancestral 'Pope Pinay', the Eskayan language and its script are used by approximately 550 people for restricted purposes in the southeast of the island of Bohol. Of the approximately 1,065 characters in the system, a primary set of 24 are alphabetic with optional syllabic values; the remaining letters have syllabic values only and can be decomposed into an inahan ('mother'), standing for (C)V, and a sinyas ('gesture') indicating consonant diacritics on either side of the nucleus. Coda diacritics are largely inconsistent, meaning that each syllabic character needs to be acquired independently. The script has minor logographic elements with ideography employed in the decimal numeral system. Over half of all Eskaya characters are redundant and at least 37 represent phonotactic impossibilities in either Visayan or Eskayan. The sheer size, complexity and irregularity of the hybrid Eskaya script is unparalleled among the world’s writing systems. I argue that the very opacity of Eskaya writing is, in part, what makes it attractive to new learners and has contributed to its successful transmission for 90 years

Classification of individuals using handwritten numeral with geometric morphometric techniques

No individual will have exactly same handwriting. Handwriting style is something that will acquire and develop through years of learning involving questioned that form individuality. The analysis of handwriting for the purposes of author identification had started since the origin of the handwriting itself. It assisted investigator in crime involving document analysis such as fraud, document falsification and many more. The numbers that used nowadays are also called Hindu- Arabic numbers are combination of 10 digits which are 1,2,3,4,5,,6,7,8,9,and 0. It is a base ten system since the value increases by the power of ten. The handwriting style has very high variations sizes, shapes and fonts. However, the most distinctive characteristics is the shape itself. Geometric morphometric (GMM) is a study of variations in shape. It uses Cartesian geometric coordinates rather than linear, area or volumetric variables. The basis of the technique is coordinates of identifiable landmarks (LM) and semilandmarks (SL) to capture the image shape. In this project, 200 samples of consisting of numeral 1, 6, 8 and 9 were collected from 10 students of Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). The number is based on previous study by Tay Eue Kam (2019), as it successfully used in ethnic discrimination by using fully manual method based on slant, width and height measurement. The PCA of PC1 and PC2 shows cumulative variance percentage for numeral 1, 6, 8 and 9 were 100.00%, 67.59%, 56.34% and 65.17% respectively. Numeral 6 was the only numerals that show significant differences between individuals. Geometric morphometric is useful in individual identification based on shape of the numerals

Mercantile arithmetic and the incunable Catalan printing : Suma de la art de arismètica, by Francesc Santcliment (1482)

La publicació de l'edició facsímil, amb estudi, de la Suma de la art de arismètica de Francesc Santcliment (Barcelona: Pere Posa, 1482) dóna peu a reflexionar sobre l'obra. Té uns condicionants que la fan rellevant: és un exemplar únic, conté la primera aritmètica mercantil impresa a la Península Ibèrica i potser la segona publicada a Europa, fou impresa pel primer impressor català, empra la numeració aràbiga, té un recorregut bibliogràfic ben allargassat en el temps —que s'inicia amb l'inventari de l'impressor—, és escrita en català i, segons la bibliografia més recent, mostra una vinculació amb l'aritmètica occitana conservada en la tradició manuscrita. Aquestes eren aritmètiques pràctiques destinades als usos mercantils i adreçades als mercaders o a qui n'hagués de menester; s'escrivien en la llengua de la terra i en un estil planer per exigència d'una classe mercantil cada vegada més puixant, que en general no sabia llatí i volia tenir coneixements pràctics; empraven la numeració indoaràbiga i els algoritmes de càlcul; substituïen l'àbac pel llapis i el paper, i compartien la vocació pedagògica i didàctica dels textos pràctics. El seu objectiu era ben distant del de l'aritmètica teòrica que s'impartia a les universitats. El sistema matemàtic basat en els numerals indis de posició s'havia anat introduint a Europa a partir de traduccions de treballs àrabs. En aquest sentit, la impremta no innovà, però, en canvi, es convertí en testimoni viu de la vida comercial del moment i d'una part dels coneixements matemàtics orals o manuscrits, a l'estandardització dels quals contribuí tant formalment com visualment. S'estableix un paral·lelisme amb un altre incunable, la Compilatió[n] de arismética sobre la arte mercantívol, atribuït a la impremta de Saragossa, al taller de Pau Hurus i a l'any 1486, i escrit en un castellà que palesa la influència catalana i aragonesa, pertanyent, segons el colofó, a «Franciso Sanclimente».Publication of the facsimile edition of the Suma de la art de arismètica by Francesc Santcliment (Barcelona: Pere Posa, 1482) and a study of the work gives us occasion to reflect upon its idiosyncrasies: it is a singular copy; it contains the first commercial arithmetic printed on the Iberian Peninsula and, perhaps, the second published in Europe; it was printed by the first Catalan printer; it employs Arabic numeration; it spans a very long bibliographic course in terms of time–beginning with the inventory done by its printer; it is written in Catalan; and, according to the most recent bibliography, it shows a connection to the Occitanian arithmetic preserved in the handwritten tradition. These arithmetics were practical, intended for commercial use, and were addressed at merchants or others who might need them. They were written in the vernacular and in a simple style at the request of an ever-rising merchant class that, in general, did not know Latin and wanted to gain practical skills. They employed Hindu-Arabic numerals and calculation algorithms, substituted the abacus for pencil and paper, and shared the pedagogic and didactic line of the practical texts. Their objective was quite far from that of the theoretical arithmetic taught at universities. The mathematical system based upon Hindu positional numerals had been introduced into Europe through the translations of works in Arabic. In this sense, typography was not innovative. It did, however, convert the commercial life of the moment into a living testimony, as well as a part of the oral and handwritten mathematical knowledge, the standardization of which it contributed to, both formally and visually. A parallel can be drawn between this work and another incunabulum, the Compilatió[n] de arismética sobre la arte mercantívol, attributed to the typographical workshop of Paulus de Konstanz (Hurus) in Zaragoza and to the year 1486. This work was written in a Spanish that shows Catalan and Aragonese influences and belongs to “Franciso Sanclimente,” according to the colophon

Improving Search via Named Entity Recognition in Morphologically Rich Languages – A Case Study in Urdu

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. February 2018. Major: Computer Science. Advisors: Vipin Kumar, Blake Howald. 1 computer file (PDF); xi, 236 pages.Search is not a solved problem even in the world of Google and Bing's state of the art engines. Google and similar search engines are keyword based. Keyword-based searching suffers from the vocabulary mismatch problem -- the terms in document and user's information request don't overlap. For example, cars and automobiles. This phenomenon is called synonymy. Similarly, the user's term may be polysemous -- a user is inquiring about a river's bank, but documents about financial institutions are matched. Vocabulary mismatch exacerbated when the search occurs in Morphological Rich Language (MRL). Concept search techniques like dimensionality reduction do not improve search in Morphological Rich Languages. Names frequently occur news text and determine the "what," "where," "when," and "who" in the news text. Named Entity Recognition attempts to recognize names automatically in text, but these techniques are far from mature in MRL, especially in Arabic Script languages. Urdu is one the focus MRL of this dissertation among Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, and Russian, but it does not have the enabling technologies for NER and search. A corpus, stop word generation algorithm, a light stemmer, a baseline, and NER algorithm is created so the NER-aware search can be accomplished for Urdu. This dissertation demonstrates that NER-aware search on Arabic, Russian, Urdu, and English shows significant improvement over baseline. Furthermore, this dissertation highlights the challenges for researching in low-resource MRL languages

An Evaluation of Existing Light Stemming Algorithms for Arabic Keyword Searches

The field of Information Retrieval recognizes the importance of stemming in improving retrieval effectiveness. This same tool, when applied to searches conducted in the Arabic language, increases the relevancy of documents returned and expands searches to encompass the general meaning of a word instead of the word itself. Since the Arabic language relies mainly on triconsonantal roots for verb forms and derives nouns by adding affixes, words with similar consonants are closely related in meaning. Stemming allows a search term to focus more on the meaning of a term and closely related terms and less on specific character matches. This paper discusses the strength of light stemming, the best techniques, and components for algorithmic affix-based stemmers used in keyword searching in the Arabic language

Muslim thought: its origin and achievements, by M.M. Sharif--edited, with notes, bibliography and introduction

Mian Mohammad Sharif's Muslim Thought: Its Origin and Achievements was first published in 1951 in Lahore, Pakistan. Discussing the most important facts about the origin and the evolution of Islamic science and philosophy, it points out historical connections between the Islamic and Western civilizations in fields of literature, philosophy, science and law. It makes the case that the Western civilization owes its progress in science and philosophy to the medieval Islamic world. The importance of the book arises from the fact that its author was one of the pioneers of philosophical study in Pakistan, and from the fact that it is a short, lucid and comprehensive introduction to the field. This thesis has produced a standardized text of Muslim Thought: it has edited the book for mistakes, typing errors and factual revisions; it has included a detailed bibliography of the sources that existed before 1951 or the post-1951 sources that provide credence to the historical references in the book; it includes a glossary of those names, places and words that may not be clear to all the readers and that are not self-explanatory within the context of the book. The thesis is accompanied by an Introduction that contributes new facts about Sharif's scholarly works and discusses the significance of this edition by placing it within the history of editorial work done in South Asia