Academic literature on the topic 'Ewondo (langue) – Cameroun'

Some of you know that my grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him “boy” for much of his life.—Barack Obama, president of the United States, speaking to the Parliament of Ghana, Accra, 11 July 2009How do you say khaki in fourteen languages? assuming that the answer is, in most cases, more or less khaki, what might that word mean? This question occurred to me three years ago as I was sitting in my Minnesota office with a student—a brilliant sophomore economics major from Hanoi—trying to understand a thorny text from Cameroon. The text before us was the Vietnamese translation of Ferdinand Oyono's landmark 1956 francophone anticolonial novel Une vie de boy, which I had been pondering for years. A central figure in the novel, the village's French commandant, was often depicted in “son short kaki” (“his khaki shorts”). Though I don't speak Vietnamese, I could make out enough of its modified Latin alphabet to recognize kaki several times in the 1997 translation. In seeking its Vietnamese meaning, I knew that at least six languages were already in play: kaki came to Oyono's French from English, which got the word in the mid-nineteenth century from Hindi-Urdu (where it means dust-colored), which got it from the Persian (transliterated “khakeh”), meaning dust (“Khaki”). What is more, Oyono's novel purports to be translated from the Ewondo, where kaki certainly meant something too. But in Vietnamese? My instinct was that khaki, at least in Vietnam, would signify what it did in Cameroon: the iconic colonial oppressor's fabric. But when my student, Phuong Vu, saw the word in Vietnamese, she immediately searched for an image on her laptop, then showed me a photo of the great anticolonial leader of Vietnam: the khaki-wearing Ho Chi Minh. Seeking a further data point, I asked my dean, the Somali scholar Ahmed Samatar, what khaki meant in his mother tongue. His reaction, too, was instant: “my grandfather was the first man in our village to wear khaki: it signifies modernity!” Khaki: one word, worldwide. But clearly not a monosignifying word, since it means, at minimum, dust, dust-colored, modernity, colonization, and anticolonial resistance. To paraphrase Langston Hughes, what kind of a translation can you make out of that?

International audience Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in many NLP applications that seek to identify and classify expressions such as people, location, and organization names. Many NER systems have been developed, but the annotated data needed for good performances are not available for low-resource languages, such as Cameroonian languages. In this paper we exploit the low frequency of named entities in text to define a new suitable cross-lingual distributional representation for named entity recognition. We build the first Ewondo (a Bantu low-resource language of Cameroon) named entities recognizer by projecting named entity tags from English using our word representation. In terms of Recall, Precision and F-score, the obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed distributional representation of words La reconnaissance des entités nommées (REN) est une tâche fondamentale du TALN dont le but est d'identifier les expressions telles que les noms de personnes, de lieux et d'organisations dans un texte. Il existe de nos jours plusieurs systèmes de REN, cependant les données nécessaires pour les utiliser dans le traitement des langues peu dotées telles que les langues camerounaises ne sont pas disponibles. Nous exploitons le fait que les entités nommées apparaissent rarement dans les textes pour définir une nouvelle représentation distributionnelle interlingue des mots, qui soit adaptée à la REN. En utilisant notre représentation, nous projectons les entités nommées de l'anglais vers l'ewondo (une langue bantou du Cameroun); nous obtenons donc le tout premier modèle de reconnaissance des entités nommées en langue ewondo. Les résultats en terme de précision, rappel et f-mesure montrent l'efficacité de notre représentation

Le present travail elabore dans une approche structurale est une etude descriptive synchronique de l'ewondo, langue bantu (a72a) appartenant a l'ensemble betifang de guthrie. La premiere partie (chap. 1-8) consacree a la phonologie et a la morphophonologie enonce les regles structurelles et range en systeme les unites tonales et segmentales de la langue. La morphologie (deuxieme partie) procede a un inventaire et classement des differentes unites grammaticales (titre i, chap. 9-10). Elle analyse l'augment, les prefixes et les themes des nominaux dependants et independants (titre ii, chap. 11-15). Enfin, le titre iii (chap. 1618) reserve a la morphologie verbale, examine les suffixes derivatifs qui se joignent aux radicaux pour engendrer les bases verbales primitives, etendues et bi-etendues. La troisieme de derniere partie (syntaxe, chap. 19-22), a travers les schemes predicatifs, dresse la taxinomie des fonctions syntaxiques exercees par les differents syntagmes nominaux et verbaux. Elle presente egalement les satellites verbaux qui participent a la flexion verbale. Ce travail formule les principales regles qui president a la structuration et au fonctionnement de la langue ewondo, il peut interesser tout descriptiviste travaillant sur une langue bantu
The work submitted to your attention elaborated from the structural approach, is a synchronic descriptive study of ewondo, a bantu language (a72a) which belongs to guthrie's beti-fang group. The first part (chap. 1-8) dealing with the phonology and morphophonology states structural rules and classifies segmental and tonal units of language into a system. The second part (morphology) gives an inventory and classification of different grammatical units (title i, chap. 910). It analyses augment, prefixes, dependant and independant nominals (title ii, chap. 11-15). Finally, the title iii, chap. 16-18) dealing with verbal morphology, examines grammatical suffixes which are added to radicals in order togenerate simple verbal bases, which in turn, may drive extended and biextended verbal bases. The third and last part -syntax- (chap. 19-22) examines, through predicative schemes the various functions that different types of noun and verb phrases fullfill. . It also presents verbal constituents taking part in verb flexion. The work establishes the main rules structuring the ewondo language and explaining its mechanism. All descriptive linguists working on a bantu language should be interested

La presente etude se propose dans le cadre de la theorie des actes de langage d'analyser selon une approche contrastive l'enonciation et plus precisement les actes jussifs. Ceux-ci sont etudies sur la base de deux langues essentiellement : l'allemand et l'ewondo, langue du sud-cameroun. L'etude, apres une breve presentation des langages du sud-cameroun et tout particulierement de l'ewondo, commence par l'analyse de la nature des actes de langage et leur classification. Elle se poursuit par un essai de determination de la structure de l'acte jussif, la proposition d'une nouvelle typologie apres une presentation critique des typologies proposees par wunderlich et g. Hindelang. L'analyse du mode d'expression des differents sous-types retenus au niveau de la nouvelle typologie est ensuite menee de facon minutieuse en partant des exemples tires d'un corpus indique en debut d'etude. Cette analyse fait ressortir en conclusion quelques faits linguistiques particuliers qui requierent une strategie spaciale sur le plan pedagogique
The present study sets out within the framework of the theory of speech acts, to make a contrastive analysis of enunciation and more precisely jussive acts. The study is based essentially on two languages : german and ewondo, a language of south-cameroon. After a brief presentation of the languages of south-cameroon and particularly of ewondo, the study begins by analysing the nature of speech acts and classifying them ; it then attempts to determine the structure of a speech act and to propose a new typology after critically presenting the typologies proposed by wunderlich and g. Hindelang. The analysis of the mode of expression of different subtypes retained from the new typology is then minitely conducted on the basis of examples drawn from a corpus indicated at the beginning of the study. This analysis brings out in conclusion some particular linguistic phenomena which require, at the pedagogic level, a special strategy