The paper describes a collaboration approach in progress for morphological analysis of less-resourced languages. The approach is based on firstly, a language-independent machine learning algorithm, Maximum Affix Overlap, that generates candidates for morphological decompositions from an initial set of language-specific training data; and secondly, language-dependent post-processing using langua...

Read online: Scan this QR code with your smart phone or mobile device to read online. The objective of this article is to create awareness amongst speech-language pathologists and audiologists in South Africa regarding the difference between the sound systems of Germanic languages and the sound systems of South African Bantu languages. A brief overview of the sound systems of two Bantu language...

Unlike most other biological species, humans can use cultural innovations to occupy a range of environments, raising the intriguing question of whether human migrations move relatively independently of habitat or show preferences for familiar ones. The Bantu expansion that swept out of West Central Africa beginning ∼5,000 y ago is one of the most influential cultural events of its kind, eventua...

The classification of kin into structured groups is a diverse phenomenon which is ubiquitous in human culture. For populations which are organized into large agropastoral groupings of sedentary residence but not governed within the context of a centralised state, such as our study sample of 83 historical Bantu-speaking groups of sub-Saharan Africa, cultural kinship norms guide all aspects of ev...

A T A CONFERENCE on “Hormones and Atherosclerosis,” held at Brighton, Utah, questions were raised concerning age-specific death rates as against crude rates from coronary heart disease and cerebral vascular disease among the South African Bantu. These people often have been cited as an example of a population among whom coronary heart disease presents no public health problem; however, cerebral...

This paper derives from work we have been doing on unsupervised learning of the morphology of languages with rich morphologies, that is, with a high average number of morphemes per word. Our focus in this paper is Swahili, a major Bantu language of East Africa, and our goal is the development of a system that can automatically produce a morphological analyzer of a text on the basis of a large c...

Majority of Bantu languages encode subjects by head-marking and objects by positional licensing. This reflects a point in the historical process whereby positional licensing of objects becomes obligatory due to the loss of inflecctional morphology. What we observe in synchronic grammar is considerable variation both across and within languages in the use of head-marking morphology for objects. ...