Building tools with Bété, Mende, and Kpelle users
While proposals for Unicode inclusion of the Bété and Kpelle scripts are being developed, there has been some interest on…
Category: African Languages
Turning the page on a 19th century Mende prayer
As I noted in an earlier post, there was one 19th century prayer that had been published in Mende in Latin script…
Progress in the transcription of a Mende primary source
In a previous post, “Minding Mende”, I introduced the notebooks of Bokari Kanneh that had been digitized, and were awaiting…
Lifting up Black voices
As I write this, it is the day before George Floyd’s funeral in Houston. It is hard to understate the…
The role of digital tools in relation to understanding Meroitic
Progress toward understanding the Meroitic script has been well underway since the foundational work of Francis Llewellyn Griffith, published in…
Learning about West African Ajami
The study of Ajami texts, those using the Arabic script and various modifications and extensions of it to represent languages…
Keeping up with Coptic
The digital needs for the Coptic script are becoming better served in recent years, with the introduction of a standard…
Cataloging Ethiopian Materials
The prospects for cataloging materials in Ge’ez, Amharic, Tigre, and Tigrinya have greatly improved since the introduction of a system…
Gearing up for Garay
In 1961, El Hadji Assane Faye was inspired by listening to a radio speech by the president of newly independent…
Encountering the Vai script
I have never been to Liberia. I tried to get there once, in 2009, for the Liberian Studies Association conference…