Friday, April 29, 2016

More on Sinanci & 豪萨语 (Chinese & Hausa)

Quick follow up to the earlier post on "Sinanci & 豪萨语 (Chinese & Hausa) materials."
  • Another example of a Chinese lesson for Hausa speakers (PDF format) in which Hausa boko and Chinese pinyin used 8-bit modified ("hacked") fonts. The forward on the first page of the document is dated March 2010, which would mean use of non-Unicode solutions has continued more recently, when Unicode was available and be a better solution. The old 8-bit fonts display the characters fine in PDF, as you can see, but the text coding does not facilitate text searches and makes copy-paste of material to another document problematic. One would expect that more recent Hausa-Chinese documents use Unicode, but I have not accessed any examples.
  • Another material for Hausa speakers learning Chinese: Sinanci na Yau da Kullum 每日汉语(豪萨语注释)
  • Another material for Chinese speakers learning Hausa: Hausar Baka 豪萨语听说教程
  • Another Chinese-Hausa dictionary: Haruffan Sinanci 800 汉语800字(汉豪萨语对照)
It is not my intent to list all bilingual Hausa & Chinese materials, but with this and the previous post on this topic, hope to call attention to how much has been done in this area, as well as a persistent font issue familiar to many of us who have dealt with African languages in extended Latin orthographies.

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