Languages, Part 4c
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 CU courses in PDF files please click here.
