Search Results for “hausa”

Created with Sketch.

On Glosses, GPS and Google Maps

The short version: Place too much faith in a ‘gloss’ for a foreign word and you may well end up looking as foolish as the folk who follow their satnav robotically into oblivion. An allegory from Google/Apple maps for all users of bilingual dictionaries: As drivers become enslaved to their satnavs (in the well-mapped world) …

Christmas 2014 Newsletter

Download the printable PDF: Monthly Museletter 40 Christmas Greetings from Jos!  Yesterday we had our office Christmas celebration not just with colleagues but with their families too. Our group has certainly kept growing over the last year. Last year’s party met in our back garden. This time we met in a hall (on the compound we …

More or less: thoughts on the spread of education in Nigeria

Here are a collection of my observations and insights gleaned from friends and colleagues Nigerian and foreign, regarding the history and the result of the spread of education in Nigeria. It is frequently observed that there is greater access to education than ever before in Nigeria. Sometimes people claim then that Nigerians are better educated …

Linguistics & Language

Universal Keyboard for Nigerian Languages Download NaijaType app for Android or: Install Keyman from Google Play or the Apple App Store. Download the latest NaijaType Keyman keyboard to your phone or system. Use a File Browser to unzip/uncompress it. Use Keyman Settings to Add Keyboard from Device and select the naijatype.kmp file. I’m currently using …

WeSay hacks: New kinds of tasks

There are some tasks that the WeSay Configuration Tool doesn’t let you configure directly. But you can write your own quite easily (as someone else has discovered) since the XML configuration file format has quite a lot of scope for extension using just Notepad or another text editor. Here we show how to do this …

[Archive] Nigerian Language Keyboards for Mac OS X

This has been superseded by the Nigerian Keyboards for Mac OS X and Windows which support all Nigerian languages. The text below is retained for historical purposes only. Don’t use the keyboard below, because the one linked above is superior. Nigeria has a little over 500 languages in active use today and many of those are …

Kamwe (Vəcəmwe) Keyboard for Windows

If you need to type Kamwe properly download and open the file Kamwe Keyboard 1.1 then follow the instructions below. How to type Kamwe’s special letters: Press the u key to produce ə. For all other letters, type the / key (on the same key as ?) then another key to produce a special letter: /e → é /a → á …

Nigeria: The first 4 months (work perspective)

Here’s a video introduction to what I’ve been doing: [youtube_sc url=12hYSb-OrGM] Watch on MobileMe (opens a new window, so you can keep the transcript in view in case that’s helpful)

Well done chicken

Here’s a quote from a book which ended up making a somewhat surprising long-term impact on our family. It’s about the problems of translating hymns into tone-languages… I have heard Dr Nida refer to a group in Liberia who were supposed to be singing the chorus, “Precious name, oh how sweet, Hope of earth and joy of heaven.” But the tune so reassigned the pitch patterns that it came out…