Indigenous Tswana chickens are better adapted to prevailing environmental conditions and diseases than their exotic counterparts. They however exhibit slower growth rate and less mature final weight than their exotic counterparts. Crossbreeding of indigenous Tswana chickens with exotic chicken breeds can therefore be used as an alternative strategy to improve growth performance of indigenous Ts...

Tswana is traditionally described as having a process of post-nasal stop devoicing (/mba/ → [mpa]). If this description is accurate, then Tswana poses a challenge to views that neutralization processes should be articulatorily grounded. Airflow leakage through the nasal cavity should promote, not inhibit, voicing post-nasally. Zsiga et al. [1] performed an acoustic study of the speech of 6 Tswa...

Three cannulated Tswana steers were used to investigate the rumen degradability of mopane worm (Imbrasia belina) by measuring the amount of dry matter (DM) and crude protein (CP) disappearing at incubation periods up to 72 h. The effective degradability (ED) of DM and CP in the rumen was calculated at outflow rates of 0.03 / h (ED0.03) and 0.05 / h(ED0.05). Rumen degradable CP (RDP) was estimat...

We introduce an algorithm to derive word-level tone assignments for the Sotho-Tswana languages. Prerequisite inputs are identified, and the steps to transform these inputs to tone assignments for each syllable are described. Manual implementation of the algorithm shows very good agreement with tone levels measured in a small Sotho-Tswana corpus.

Our analysis begins with the puzzle: how did Botswana develop a legalrational state? We suggest that three key interlinked factors were important. First, during the pre-colonial period the Tswana developed local states with relatively limited kingship or chiefship and with a political structure that was able to integrate people of other ethnic groups such as Kalanga. Second, facing the onslaugh...

The paper reports a 5 year old male sheep-goat interspecific hybrid born under natural conditions. The hybrid was castrated at 10 months of age. Karyotype analysis confirmed that the animal was a male and a hybrid with 57 chromosomes, an intermediate number between sheep (2n=54) and goat (2n=60). Morphological characteristics of the animal were compared with those of castrated male Tswana goats...

The first severe case of caprine contagious ecthyma (parapox) in Tswana goats is described from Botswana. Affected animals were indigenous adult Tswana goats. The case involved a flock of 12 goats of which 4 (33.3%) were very severely affected but none died. The lesions were confined to the head and included swollen lips, swollen submandibular lymph nodes, gingivitis, glossitis, ulceration on l...

The article presents the data on a comparative research study of the beef production of Kalmyk steers of compact (Group I), medium (Group II) and tall (Group III) body types. It has been found that the steers of a tall body type had higher pre-slaughter weight at the age of 16 months than steers of compact and medium types by 24.7 and 12.1 kg, respectively; the weight of hot carcasses by 15.9 a...

The article investigates the realization of adjacent high tones across word boundaries in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language. The results show that downstep, a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones, takes place across word boundaries within the same phonological phrase. Downstep does not occur across phonological phrase boundaries. The study confirms an empirical phenomenon a...