Kamusi Project Envisions A Unified African Dictionary Online And In Print
By ADRIAN BRUNE
SPECIAL TO THE HARTFORD COURANT
November 20, 2005
Coming of age during the American Revolution, Noah Webster believed fervently in the country's cultural independence and the role played by its American idiom, pronunciation and style. In 1806, America's first lexicographer published his "compendious dictionary of the English language." Nearly 200 years later, the Merriam Webster dictionary has become one of the world best known, with more than 200,000 entries.
Wesleyan University professor and Yale research fellow Martin Benjamin has a similar vision, one focused on another continent -- Africa and the language of Swahili.
"Some people argue that Swahili is associated with the slave trade, but now it is the language of the liberation movement," said Benjamin, an assistant professor of languages. "Swahili is becoming the go-to language of the African Union."
With more than 80 million speakers in East and Central Africa, Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, though a fully updated dictionary of the language has not been produced for 30 years.
Benjamin aims to change that with the Kamusi (Dictionary) Project, an effort to document and produce a comprehensive guide to Swahili using the Internet. He just needs to maintain funding for the project and his desire to prepare the 120,000 or so entries he has received for print via
www.yale.edu/swahili.
In the past year, the project has taken several big steps to stay out in front of other efforts, one based at the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and a private foundation in Tel Aviv, Israel. Recently, it made several Swahili-based computer programs available for download, including Jambo Open Office; it launched its photo engine, which allows users to upload pictures and illustrations to augment definitions; and began developing lessons for a comprehensive online Swahili curriculum.
And, of course, the entries grow daily as the website adds new words from Swahili's rich well, just as the language is enjoying a resurgence.
Now the official language of the African Union, Swahili (also known as Kiswahili, as the prefix "ki" means language) has its roots in the Bantu language family, which extends across the continent and includes thousands of words from other languages. There are words from Arabic - the language largely spoken in Northern Africa; words from the colonial languages of French, Portuguese, German and the like; and words from languages spoken in sub-Saharan Africa near the Middle East.
Benjamin compares his project to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia drafted largely by a band of worldwide literati. He emphasizes, however, that, unlike Wikipedia, he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes, before he posts them.
So the Kamusi Project, in its most simplistic form, works as a translation device from English to Swahili, or vice versa. About half a million users visit the website each month, and there they can plug in a word and get its translation.
Many users probably don't recognize that the words they have just looked up don't necessarily come from Swahili lexicographers but from "akina sisi," everyday people. There's Ben Stanford, a former Peace Corps volunteer who taught sciences in Tanzania; Mayowa Famakinwa, a Yoruba man from Nigeria who enjoys learning different languages, he explains on the website; and Hartford resident Ed Mini, who used the Kamusi Project several years ago to make a "Welcome Home" sign for his daughter, returning from East Africa, and who contributed a few of his own words.
"Then there's the professional ecologist major in Benin - he's a birder. He's sent in hundreds of bird entries, every type of thrush or crow ever spotted in East Africa, with their English and Swahili names," said Benjamin, an enthusiastic scholar who can hold forth on the state of Africa for hours on end.
"Just two months ago, one of our regulars - a news buff - read about a plane crash in Africa, and within minutes, we had the Swahili word for cargo as an adjective." On the website, the example for Mizigo is given: "Cargo Plane Crashes in Tanzania," or "Ndege ya Mizigo yanngurka Tanzania (BBC 23 Machi 2005)."
The projects' regulars are appreciative of the entire effort, but at least one wishes it were not led by a "mzungu."
"I believe he [Benjamin] has a vision that should have been born in Africa, by Africans," wrote Carolyne Onyango in an e-mail from the United Kingdom. "I used it to encourage the high schoolers I teach to change the negative attitude they have about the subject - they are now more enthusiastic about Kiswahili.
"They were not pleased that a `mzungu' is the initiator of the project. But I reminded them that if we Africans won't revise the existing dictionaries quickly, [a non African] will do it. ... this should be our language, we understand it better."
Still, Benjamin's commitment would be difficult to question, after a decade of effort.
In 1992, Benjamin, then a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Yale, traveled to Tanzania to research his dissertation on the difficulties of international development aid in the countryside. He had a cursory knowledge of Swahili but pledged to learn it. Armed only with an Oxford University Press dictionary from 1936, however, Benjamin found learning the language difficult. (The Catholic University of America press had printed the last English-Swahili dictionary in 1967, but it was not widely available.)
Frustrated but inspired, Benjamin brought the idea for the Kamusi Project back to the States with him. In 1994, the dawn of the Internet age, Benjamin approached his adviser, Yale African scholar Ann Biersteker, about developing a website that would serve as a standard Swahili dictionary, one that documented the living, breathing language.
Biersteker approved and even turned over her book "Masomo ya Kisasa: Contemporary Readings in Swahili," from which Benjamin drew the project's initial entries.
"Of course, the Web and the Internet were both very different back then, and I wasn't sure how it would work," Biersteker said. "Both Martin and I thought [the website] would be used by academics and students. We were certainly not aware how many people worldwide would use it and the enthusiasm it would receive."
By spring 1995, Benjamin had entered 21,000 words into the database, and the Kamusi Project went live. It was one of Yale's first academic websites.
It took three more years for Benjamin and department research assistants - when he could afford them - to enter the entire Swahili-English Dictionary into the system. By 2000, the Kamusi Project had posted a 56,000-word dictionary, established a discussion forum and guide to Africa and launched the website editing engine, which brings the global community together to work toward the dictionary's refinement.
The following year, however, the money dried up. Though Kamusi remained online, Benjamin took a hiatus and applied for grants. It took nearly three years to return the project to its previous status. Now, closer than ever to his goal of printing a Swahili dictionary, Benjamin needs money again.
"We've done all the programming work that's possible, and I can envision hitting the print key in about two years," Benjamin said. "Yet I've received my layoff notice from Yale."
Biersteker and Benjamin have applied for several grants, including one from the National Endowment for the Humanities. But they won't know anything until the spring, so they need stopgap funding.
Since "Swahili is spoken by many of the world's greatest marathoners," Benjamin said, he has taken up the sport to raise money for the project. In October, Benjamin ran 26.2 miles in Yale's Payne Whitney Gymnasium to raise $2,495 toward his goal of $14,550.
In the grand scheme of African economics and politics, Benjamin remains realistic about the Kamusi Project's significance. "Having a dictionary is not as necessary as having a hospital; you can live without a dictionary," Benjamin said.
Still, last summer Benjamin was reminded of the dictionary's importance.
"I brought a bunch of English magazines to read myself to sleep at night, and this teenage kid, Ernest Kidenya, whom I've known since he was knee high, was looking through them wanting to learn some of the words," Benjamin said. "Then I realized, `How are kids in Africa going to ever learn a language if there is one dictionary for every 400 students?'"
Benjamin returned with a new vision; he's calling it "Kamusi in a Box," a Swahili instruction CD-ROM kit for Internet-less villages. He's also interested in other learning projects, including some with the University of Dar Es Salaam.
"It keeps getting better and better for Swahili," he said.
Copyright 2005, Hartford Courant
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