LANGUAGES, Part 4c

 



The Rosetta Stone <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rosetta_Stone> : One
text, three languages

 

Salama

 

An example

 

Hugh Tweedie has contributed the following link:
http://www.njas.helsinki.fi/salama/index.html

 

The linked web site appears to present an automatic generator of
dictionaries, which would in principle be a good thing, and a very good
thing. 

 

But it is not very clear as to whether these are what it calls "monolingual"
dictionaries (i.e. proper dictionaries that define words in the language
itself), or whether they are dictionaries which are definitions of words in
English. If the latter is the case, then one would want to look elsewhere,
because the mediation of languages via English translation is not really
what we want in the post-colonial time.

 

This would seem to be confirmed on the Salama web site under "dictionary
compilation" where it says:

 

"Application to other languages

 

"The system can currently be applied to the compilation of dictionaries
between Swahili and any other language, provided that a conversion
dictionary between English and the target language is available.  Using an
electronic conversion dictionary, most of the English glosses can be
converted into the target language. Manual editing is needed for checking
and correcting the result, because only part of lexical data can be
converted in this way."

 

The English language therefore becomes the medium and the yardstick of the
other language. Which is not such a good thing, after all.

 

The Rosetta Stone

 

The rediscovery in 1799 of the "Rosetta Stone", by a soldier in Napoleon
Bonaparte's invading force in Egypt, with one text on it in three ancient
languages, led to the deciphering of two ancient Egyptian scripts, arranged
in a very early form of "Cross-Language".

 

 

.        To download any of the files in this course, please use this link:
https://sites.google.com/site/cu2012courses2/26-languages

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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