Does your organisation work with #language #data in #Arabic, #Tagalog, #signLanguage, #Kannada, #Tamil, #Burmese, #Croatian, #Tigrinya, #Vietnamese, #Thai, #Pashto, #Uzbek, #German, #French or #Kurdish?

The @mozilladatacollective has an open #CfP to fund the uplift or creation of datasets in this space that focus on dialogic interaction, multimodal - so video or speech paired with transcription, or which focus on the intersectionality of under-represented contexts or domains.

Is that your organisation?

https://community.mozilladatacollective.com/call-for-proposals-mdc-is-commissioning-mission-aligned-datasets/

Call for proposals: MDC is commissioning mission-aligned datasets!

Mozilla Data Collective is building towards a multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal future that works for all of us. And over the past few months, we’ve listened as people have flagged what kinds of datasets they need, but are struggling to find.  So we’re pleased to announce that MDC

Mozilla Data Collective

The #storySeedLibrary is now available in #Tigrinya !

https://storyseedlibrary.org/ti/art/

We got a translation of the all of the illustrations available, but so far I managed to upload only the first 45.

Huge thanks to Nadait Gebremedhen, MD for her work!

#Solarpunk #HopePunk #futurism #art #illustration #climate #climateChange

ሶላርፓንክ ስነ ጥበብ

ዝሓሸ መጻኢ ክሊማ ክትሓስብ ዝሕግዘካ ቤተ-መጻሕፍቲ ሶላርፓንክ ስነ-ጥበብን ዘርኢ ዛንታን!

ቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ዘርኢ ዛንታ

This great song is the one we danced to at my Eritrean student's wedding anniversary party. It shows the singer back in the 1970s, flirting with a girl, then they're married and she's pregnant, and later the baby's born, a little girl, and later still they're an old couple and the singer (with his hair grayed up) is holding is grandson.

The chorus, my student told me, is singing, "one wife, one wife." #Eritrea #Tigrinya https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6vSKh9hiBU

Mak Ezra - Tewehade - ማክ እዝራ - ተወሓደ - New Tigrigna music 2025 (Official Video)

Mak Ezra - Tewehade - New Tigrigan music 2025 (Official Video)#ethiopianmusic #nahomrecordsinc #Make_Ezra #Tewehade #Mizan #amanuel_yemane #nahomrecords #t...

YouTube

Bit of a posting spree this week, but I’m looking for feedback on something that’s been bothering me for several years now.

The terms Ethiosemitic, Ethio-Semitic and so forth have a big downside: they tend to (understandably!) trigger Eritreans, who make up a considerable share of the people speaking these languages. Hence, it would be nice if we could settle on an alternative. Afro-Semitic sounds kind of cool, but could be misinterpreted as including North African, Egyptian, and Sudanese Arabic, maybe even Punic. Something deriving from the Horn of Africa would be more precise, but I don’t see any elegant way to turn that into a single adjective. So my leading candidate is Abyssinian.

Pros:

  • based on an endonym, Habesha
  • used both in Antiquity and in the present
  • unquestionably refers to speakers of the three biggest/most studied languages in this group: Ge’ez, Amharic, Tigrinya
  • covers languages from both Ethiopia and Eritrea and from both main linguistic groups (South and North/non-South if North isn’t a valid category by itself)
  • already an existing English word
  • some history of linguistic usage
  • not literally the same word as Habesha so there’s some liberty to use it differently

Cons:

  • sounds kind of old-fashioned and colonial to me (maybe unrightfully so)
  • often limited to predominantly Christian groups (Amharic and Tigrinya speakers), may exclude predominantly Muslim groups (Tigre, Harari speakers); isolated (mostly Christian) Gurage speakers seem like an edge case from what I can find online
  • may be a loaded term given recent ethnic tensions in Ethiopia

So, what do you think? Is it worth going back to an outdated term in an attempt to make some people feel included and stop them from getting mad, with the risk of excluding another group of people and making them mad?1 I would especially love to hear from anyone with a relevant ethnic background—Habesha, Ethiosemitic speakers, what have you—but all input is very welcome.

Cheers.
  • But note that the biggest relevant non-Habesha group, Tigre speakers, are also excluded by Ethiosemitic. ↩︎
  • https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/08/08/ethiosemitic-or-abyssinian/

    #Amharic #GeEz #Gurage #linguistics #Tigre #Tigrinya

    Ethiosemitic or Abyssinian?

    Bit of a posting spree this week, but I’m looking for feedback on something that’s been bothering me for several years now. The terms Ethiosemitic, Ethio-Semitic and so forth have a big…

    Benjamin Suchard
    Kijk voor deze kinderboekentip op https://lekkerlezen.nu.
    Ella Egel is weg – Joke de Jonge
    Een prentenleesboek, speciaal voor jonge nieuwkomers.
    https://lekkerlezen.nu/ella-egel-is-weg-joke-de-jonge/
    #Prentenboek #4 #6 #Leesboek #Arabisch #Bulgaars #dieren #egel #Engels #Farsi #Fries #Hongaars #Ivriet #nieuwkomers #NT2 #Oekraens #Pools #Portugees #Russisch #talen #Tigrinya #Turks #VreemdeTalen
    De tips komen van verschillende kinderboekenmakers.
    Lekker lezen nu

    Ontdek de leukste kinderboeken

    Lekker lezen nu

    Following Turkey's approval of its integration into #NATO, #Sweden ends the #Kurdish broadcast of its public radio. #Russian and #Tigrinya broadcasts will also be canceled. Another example of the criminalization of #Kurds in #Europe and their further exclusion in order to appease the Turkish government.

    https://www.rudaw.net/english/world/01022024

    #reggae #tigrinya 🎵🎶🎸🎼🔥 #np
    Saba Tewelde - Semarulay Daqey
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh841PRIEDo

    #mastoradio

    Semarulay Daqey

    YouTube

    Earlier this year, I had two fun conversations with the team of the then newly-founded Kedem YouTube channel, which popularizes scholarship on the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. The first video was published yesterday. We talk about the concept of a language family, what languages constitute the Semitic language family, where Semitic comes from geographically and linguistically, how we can reconstruct earlier ancestors of the attested languages, and a few things this kind of reconstruction tells us about Proto-Semitic.

    Stay posted for my second video with this channel, to be released sometime next year, on the different modern and—especially—ancient pronunciations of Biblical Hebrew.

    https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/video-intro-to-the-semitic-language-family/

    #Afroasiatic #Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #Moabite #ModernSouthArabian #news #Omotic #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic #Tigrinya #Ugaritic

    Semitic Languages - A full introduction | With Dr. Benjamin Suchard

    YouTube
    💬 HornChat is a chatbot built in cooperation with #LLM and a Translation Systems to address the linguistic barriers of low-resourced languages in LLMs. Used #OpenAI and Lesan #AI APIs. Current version: #Tigrinya and #Amharic only.
    #ChatGPT #Africa
    https://horn-chat.vercel.app/it
    HornChat

    Chatbot for horn of africa languages.

    "Se chiedi a #ChatGPT in #Tigrinya o in #Amarico le domande più semplici e più frequenti, ti dà un senso incomprensibile, un mix di Tigrinya e Amarico, o anche parole inventate. Chatbot come ChatGPT sono completamente rotti o inutili per queste lingue. La maggior parte dei dati che li alimenta sono fondamentalmente dati internet, non ci sono abbastanza dati online per queste lingue. Così rende ancora più urgente creare tecnologie specifiche" Asmelash Teka Hadgu #Etiopia 🇪🇹 https://restofworld.org/2023/3-minutes-with-asmelash-teka-hadgu/
    The AI startup outperforming Google Translate in Ethiopian languages

    "Chatbots like ChatGPT are utterly broken or useless for these languages."

    Rest of World