The Bantu Element in Swahili Folklore

A Two-Level Computer Formalism for the Analysis of Bantu Morphology An Application to Swahili

SWATWOL is a computer program which has been designed to analyze morphologically Standard Swahili texts. It is based on Koskenniemi's (1983) already well-known two-level model. A number of applications of this model on various languages exist already. Some of those are very ambitious and almost complete (Koskenniemi 1983; Karlsson 1992), others being still in various stages of development. The ...

Optimizing disambiguation in Swahili

It is argued in this paper that an optimal solution to disambiguation is a combination of linguistically motivated rules and resolution based on probability or heuristic rules. By disambiguation is here meant ambiguity resolution on all levels of language analysis, including morphology and semantics. The discussion is based on Swahili, for which a comprehensive analysis system has been develope...

The Scorpion in Muslim Folklore

In the dry zone between North Africa and South Asia scorpions have caught the imagination of nomads and sedentary people in various ways. First of all, venomous scorpions have long been considered as embodiments of evil, but also as protectors to counter the powers of other evil forces. This is reμected in beliefs, in pictorial representations of oriental art from early historic periods, and in...

Folklore, Folklorism, and Synchronization: Preserved-Created Folklore in Israel

The Consequences of the Contacts between Bantu and Non-Bantu Languages around Lake Eyasi in Northern Tanzania

In rural Tanzania, recent major influences happen between Kiswahili and English to ethnic languages rather than ethnic languages, which had been in contact for so long, influencing each other. In this work, I report the results of investigation of lexical changes in indigenous languages that aimed at examining how ethnic communities and their languages, namely Cushitic Iraqw, Nilotic Datooga, N...