Saturday, April 03, 2004

At the Annual Conference of African Linguistics(ACAL) - the 35th - this year at Harvard University. Had an opportunity to present on African languages and ICT, network, and learn quite a bit about other research relevant to my work and that of Bisharat. I will try to post more on observations and ideas in some next postings.

At this point I will modify the heading/description of this weblog to add a different take: "Beyond Niamey" will also have the sense of the implications of the Niamey 1978 "expert meeting," one of several in Africa on the topic of harmonization of transcriptions, and emblematic of the efforts to standardize scripts for the languages of the continent. Much of the work that was done in such conferences going back to before the seminal Bamako 1966 expert meeting and continuing after, has implications for discussions today about African languages and ICT.