Hi Paa Kwesi, and thanks for the thought provoking ideas. Your message
on a meta level points out two foci for work: one (towards the end of
your posting) is practical and applied, and the other is the realm of
imagination and possibilities. The two of course interact.
Concerning writing and orality, what you write is true, but I think
that teechnology is blurring some of the boundaries we have gotten
accustomed to and opening previously unimagined possibilities. A while
back I was thinking about how one could use speech-to-text in parallel
with recordings to facilitate searching words in recordings - but of
course we now have the ability to search words in digital audio
directly. What might this make possible in terms of storing,
retrieving and manipulating information? Would this make indexing and
retrieving information orally possible in ways that did not always
rely on human (collective) memories? Or text?
In a way writing is a foundation in the field of language, which
permits building and a lot of things to happen in that building (the
process and the structure). It creates its own realities (like a built
environment, which of course is a fancy name for structures we live
and work in). It also interacts with the terrain around it,
influencing and being influenced by the realities of that terrain and
the life and ephemeral structures that come and go on it (spoken
language).
Anyway, it seems to me that this has been the situation since the
invention of writing and the huge technical advance of printing along
the way. Some societies never really had writing as part of their
linguistic terrain until relatively recently if at all. The issue over
the last 50-100 years with regard to African languages, most of which
are characterized as being part of oral civilizations, has been how
much and how to invest in foundations (writing) and building (literate
culture), or whether and to what extent to just occupy space in
another older building (English, French, Portuguese).
(I realize the analogy gets stretched, but bear with me.) So along
comes information technology, which the literate cultures immediately
put to use with writing - which makes absolute sense and phenomenally
expands the potential uses of language in text (ebooks, email,
Wikipedia. etc., etc.). And on something like webpages you see the
use of this, from top to bottom, left to right - text everywhere.
At the same time, however, this technology, which is besed at its most
elemental level on myriads of tiny electronic switches (which we
represent as 0 and 1), also can deal in sound and image.
The sound or audio dimension of the new technologies is one that
arguably lags in its development, partly for technical reasons, but
partly because of this focus on text in technically advanced
societies. But the possibilities offered by this dimension also invite
us to think "outside the box" (in this case the foundation that
writing provides for working with text), to how the spoken language
can be used in ways that were not previously possible in human history
- not even with simple recording, which itself was a dramatic
technological advance.
This is not to suggest that we will dispense with text but rather that
the range of what is possible in advanced use of language may not be
as limited to text as we have been accustomed to. This ideally could
be turned to advantage of what are often referred to as oral
civilizations not only in Africa but also in various other parts of
the world (Africa, however, might be natural to take the lead in this).
I think this is important to highlight and push for, because otherwise
it might be neglected. Take sound recordings for instance - in the
domain of language, this technology has permitted all kinds of
recordings, but relatively little of that in ways that deal with
African languages (the various oral history centers in Africa
notwithstanding), and even less that feeds back to African cultures
(how often are recorded African oral histories heard by Africans?). In
one case I'm familiar with, African language recordings mined for
material to be translated into English for use in a book on
environmental change in Africa, were neglected and may have been
entirely lost - as if they didn't matter.
The new information technologies should not only make old recordings
in African languages available online, but also can be used for new
uses of the spoken word, including those that transfer between spoken
and written language, and other cutting-edge applications. In a way,
perhaps oral and text indexing might both be possible in ways that are
complementary and facilitate accessing information in different ways.
Another dimension that enters into the equation is that of mobile
technology use (cellphones, PDA phones) and how the spoken word in a
particular language is facilitated across distances, and no longer
constrained to communities in limited physical space - how can such
language use interact across technologies?
But for advances in use of the new technologies with diverse languages
to happen, vision combined with research on the practical aspects,
needs to focus on the potential and its realization. This is more or
less where I am coming from when I for my part muse on the topic of
ICT and "literate + neo-oral" civilization.
In the meantime, work with African language text such as what you are
doing (which is also visionary) and what the PanAfrican Localisation
project is working to facilitate, also needs to continue. There is a
lot to do, but the potential results are considerable.
Sorry if this ramble a bit, but hope it makes some sense.
All the best.
Don
Don Osborn
Bisharat.net
PanAfrican Localisation project
--- In AfricanLanguages@yahoogroups.com, "paa kwesi imbeah" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>
> Purely speculating in the following muse:
>
> I think the advantage of writing is as a memory aid--assuming a finite
> memory recall ability, it is more efficient to recall an index of
texts than
> the contents of the text itself. Writing allows us to file away
detail and
> only have to remember that "there's a book on the subject" whenever
we need
> to recall that detail.
>
> Orality doesn't allow for that since there's no stored memory apart
from the
> collective memory. For there to be a "neo-oral civilization" with
comparable
> recall ability to literate civilizations, we should be able to store
massive
> amounts of oral knowledge organized in a sensible index (e.g. the
title of a
> book is an index to the contents of the book). And this index must
itself be
> oral in order to be accessible as accessible as its content. The closest
> I've come to seeing this idea in practice is the interactive voice
response
> system where you can call a telephone number and find out answers to
> particular queries by following a series of oral prompts.
>
> It would be nice if the equivalent of paper for audio were invented
so that
> storing audio is a simple as writing on a scrap of paper.
>
> End of muse.
>
> More realistically, the reason I'm interested in spell-checking is
to make a
> workflow like the following possible.
>
> English text => Standardized African language => Variant languages
=> speech
> from text. Computers unfortunately are incredibly dumb and can be
thrown off
> more easily by spelling inconsistencies than humans.
> 50 cedis,
> paa.kwesi
>
> On 9/19/06, Don Osborn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > 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<AfricanLanguages%40yahoogroups.com>,
> > "paa kwesi imbeah" <pki@>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > Forward march towards ubiquitous spellchecking ability...
> > >
> > ...
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> www.kasahorow.com > communicate
>
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