Language policy and orthographic harmonization across linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries in Southern Africa

Drawing on online and daily newspapers, speakers' language and writing practices, official government documents and prescribed spelling systems in Southern Africa, the paper explores the challenges and possibilities of orthographic reforms allowing for mobility across language clusters, ethnicity, regional and national borders. I argue that this entails a different theorisation of language, and for orthographies that account for the translocations and diasporic nature of late modern African identities and lifestyles. I suggest an ideological shift from prescriptivism to practice-orientated approaches to harmonisation in which orthographies are based on descriptions of observable writing practices in the mobile linguistic universe. The argument for orthographic reforms is counterbalanced with an expose on current language policies which appear designed for an increasing rare monoglot 'standard' speaker, who speaks only a 'tribal' language. The implications of the philosophical challenges this poses for linguists, language planners and policy makers are thereafter discussed.IS

Linguistics and HLT for Countries with Minimal ICT Infrastructure

This paper presents a visionary Human Language Technologies (HLT) model aimed at enabling the Basotho, who are computer illiterate, and thus unable to access internet but have access to either a landline handset or a cellular phone, to browse and access electronic government information service in their language, Sesotho. This requires various speech-based HLT components such as pronunciation modelling, speech recognition, text-to-speech (TTS) and language identification. For purposes of this presentation, we concentrate on speech recognition and TTS. The paper also provides a preliminary experimental setup necessary for the proposed model. The proposed model is specifically intended to empower the illiterate and the underprivileged members of the society

A Study on the Perception of Tone and Intonation in Sesotho

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On The Structural Positions Of Themes And Goals

This article contributes to the general discussion by pointing out a fact of considerable crosslinguistic generality that has largely escaped attention in the literature on dative-shift-like alternations: the fact that for the most part there is no similar dative shift alternation with unaccusative verbs. This fact is rather mysterious under most traditional accounts. It is particularly curious given that the restriction does not generalize to passive constructions. Nevertheless, a principled and adequately general explanation can be given using some recent developments in syntactic theory. In the process, I build an argument that (2c) is the correct thematic hierarchy. Indeed, we will see that this hierarchy is rather directly motivated even in languages like Sesotho and Mohawk, which otherwise seem to fit in more naturally with one of the other hierarchies. 2. A GAP IN THE PARADIGM OF DATIVE SHIFT Since Burzio (1986), the standard assumption has been that unaccusative verbs have selectional properties which are the same as those of comparable transitive verbs. Indeed, the NP-PP sentences in (3) have straightforward unaccusative variants, as shown in (5). (5) a. The ring passed t to Mary. b. The beer opened t for Max. However, there are no unaccusative variants of the sentences in (4). In classical GB theory, such sentences would have the unremarkable-looking D-structure shown in (6). (6) e [ VP passed Mary the ring] However, neither NP can be moved to derive an acceptable sentence from this source. If the theme NP moved, one would expect sentences like (7); if the goal NP moved, one would derive the sentences in (8). (7) a. *The ring passed Mary t. b. *The beer opened Max t. (8) a. *Mary passed t the ring. b. *Max opened t a beer. (OK only if `Mary' and `Max' are th..