nblinks

NYTimes:"When these modern machines arrived, Kiswahili came up with a quick word for something that didn't exist in our culture," said Clara Momanyi, a Swahili professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. "That was 'kompyuta.'"

But scholars subsequently opted for a more local term to describe these amazing machines, she said. It is tarakilishi, which is a combination of the word for "image" and the word for "represent."

The Swahili experts grappled with a variety of other words. How does one say folder? Should it be folda, which is commonly used, or kifuko, a more formal term?

Is a fax a faksi, as the Tanzanians call it, or a kipepesi?

Everyone seemed to agree that an e-mail message was a barua pepe, which means a fast letter. Everyone also seemed to agree that the effort they were engaged in to bring Swahili to cyberspace was long overdue.

Ahhh ... takes me back to my own senior-thesis researches. I'm glad to see the appointed experts are making efforts to balance westernisms and swahili-isms to make for a technical vocabulary that will be useful to the greatest number of people. Seems a bit better than the 1980s technical dictionary I was writing about.

[full article]