Hi Paa Kwesi, I wonder if ultimately we might not turn the technology
more fully oral so that it can check the sounds, while accounting for
dialect differences and match the WYSIWYG orthographies to that. Text
has, since the beginning more or less been something fixed in stone,
clay wood or ink. This has had a lot of advantages for learning and
unambiguous transmission of messages. But is there a degree to which
the fluidity made possible by computers and bytes can make the
regularity of spelling less important for those objectives than the
trueness to speech and meaning?
What if a computer could "read" (TTS) a text and match the sounds with
a sound corpus with meanings (it is possible to search sound strings
in digital audio files, so I understand, so this would I think push
the matter ahead a couple of degrees of sophistication). Basically do
a spell and grammar check as audio internally rather than as text
strings. A computer could "read" this way much faster than we can - as
computers are made to do everything more rapidly.
It's been a long day and this is off the top of my head, but some of
us like Tunde Adegbola have chatted about how ICT can make possible
literate + neo-oral civilization in Africa. Not sure what this might
mean, or if it's even practical, but the possibilities opened by ICT
are not, of course, limited to repeating what others have done with it.
All the best.
Don
--- In AfricanLanguages@yahoogroups.com, "paa kwesi imbeah" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>
> Forward march towards ubiquitous spellchecking ability...
>
...
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