Spell it the way you like: The inconsistencies that prevail in the spelling of Northern Sotho loanwords

Chokoe, Sekgaila

doi:10.1080/02572117.2020.1733838

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…The c-syllables can be formed m, n, l, r, ñ, and N syllabic consonants (Chokoe, 2020). First, csyllables are formed when two identical syllabic consonants occur in succession within a single word, for instance in words like ba-l-li 'criers', and wa-r-ra 'brother' (Chokoe, 2020). Second, when nasal consonants precede any other consonant, for instance in words like n-tšha 'draw', and m-phsa 'new'.…”

Section: Sepedi Syllablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating the Sesotho rule-based syllabification system on Sepedi and Setswana words

Sibeko,

Setaka

2023

Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023)

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The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the recently developed automated rulebased syllabification system for Sesotho can be used broadly across the officially recognised South African Sotho-Tswana language group encompassing Sepedi, Sesotho and Setswana. We evaluate the automatic syllabification system on 400 words comprising 100 most frequently used words and 100 least-used words in Sepedi and Setswana as evident in the Autshumato corpus publicly available online. It is found that the Sesotho rule-based syllabification system can be used to correctly identify vowel-only syllables, consonant-vowel syllables and consonant-only syllables in Sepedi and Setswana. Among other findings, it has been demonstrated that words with diacritics as in the case of Sepedi are correctly broken down into syllables. We make two main recommendations. First, the rules for syllabification should be updated so that Sepedi diacritics are accommodated. Second, the syllabification system should be updated so that it reflects the broader Sotho-Tswana language group instead of being limited to Sesotho. Further research is needed to ascertain whether the complex consonant [ñ] behaves similarly in all three officially recognised Sotho-Tswana languages and evaluate the need for a specific rule for the [ñ] nasal consonant.

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Section: Sepedi Syllablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating the Sesotho rule-based syllabification system on Sepedi and Setswana words

Sibeko,

Setaka

2023

Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023)

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Developing and testing syllabification systems for South African Sesotho

Sibeko,

van Zaanen

2024

Lang Resources & Evaluation

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In this article, we describe the development of two syllabification systems for South African Sesotho. First, we implemented a rule-based syllabification system based on the syllabification rules proposed by Guma (An outline structure of Southern Sotho, 2nd edn, Shooter and Shuter Publishers, Pietermaritzburg, 1982). The rules describe the location of syllable boundaries based on the location of vowels, consonants, simple and complex nasal consonants, and the lateral l. Second, we used TeX’s pattern-based hyphenation system as a syllabification system. This pattern-based system was trained on syllabified words from a dictionary as identified in Chitja (Phatlamantsoe ya Sesotho ya Machaba, Mazenod Publishers, Lesotho, 2010). The syllable boundaries in the words from the dictionary were manually checked and, where needed, adjusted to maintain a consistent orthography. Both systems were evaluated on 13,551 tokens using ten-fold cross-validation (as the pattern-based system requires training data). The rule-based system shows a 99.69% word level accuracy, which indicates that Sesotho syllabification is highly regular. The pattern-based system leads to 78.97% accuracy. This lower score is likely related to the limitations in the placement of boundaries in the TeX system. A qualitative analysis of the results shows some (unresolved) inconsistencies in the dictionary entries, in particular related to the conversion of the Lesotho Sesotho orthography to the South African Sesotho orthography and the handling of loan words.

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Tshebediso ya melao kabong ya dinoko tsa Sesotho

Sibeko

2022

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies

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Spell it the way you like: The inconsistencies that prevail in the spelling of Northern Sotho loanwords

Cited by 3 publications

References 6 publications

Evaluating the Sesotho rule-based syllabification system on Sepedi and Setswana words

Evaluating the Sesotho rule-based syllabification system on Sepedi and Setswana words

Developing and testing syllabification systems for South African Sesotho

Tshebediso ya melao kabong ya dinoko tsa Sesotho

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