Konkani

This series is a search for the roots of the Kōnkaṇi people, their land and their language, through their misty history, partly known, partly unknown, partly forgotten. Fortunately, abundant material is available across the world to make that journey. Not everything may be black and white; dates may be difficult to place. But stepping beyond that grey area of subjectivity, one does come across a rare source, that suddenly shines light on a dark patch of unknowing.

This is a collection of papers published by Prof. Lordino Rodrigues in the Boletim do InstitutoMenezesBragança between 1978 and 1999 on the subject of Konkani at the Turn of the 16th Century.  His retirement as a teacher of Portuguese at Dhempe College of Arts & Science, Miramar, Goa, providentially coincided with the return to Goa of his one time colleague, Prof. Rocky Miranda.  Having completed his doctorate in Konkani linguistics, Prof. Miranda had come to Goa on a sabbatical to do further research on Konkani. Along with field study of various Konkani variations, his study included the linguistic analysis of the 16th and 17th century Konkani texts. That is when the study of old Konkani became a lifelong passion for Prof. Rodrigues.

— Devnagari is the most popular script in India it is used by over 400 million people all over world. Recognition of Devnagari handwritten word has been a popular research area for many years because of its various applications. This paper describes different techniques for pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification which play an important role for recognition of word. Index terms- Preprocessing,Feature extraction,Segmentation

In order to function as a multilingual democracy, India has designed various language policies. But in spite of enlightened policies, many languages, both big and small, are under threat. Languages of linguistic minorities and the indigenous peoples suffer most. This is largely because of an education system that is not only poor in quality, but is often also not in the mother tongue.

Solutions include: more reliable information on the languages in the country; more flexibility in dealing with language disputes; and most importantly, improving the education system.

First, this essay rapidly sketches the colourful linguistic landscape of India. After that, it lists some of the country's constitutional and legal guarantees for linguistic minorities. Third, it reports on some serious threats to this linguistic diversity. The fourth section describes the sorry state of the educational system in India. The fifth section tracks three inspiring interventions in the country. Finally, we will see some ways forward, building on the research evidence for a mother-tongue medium based multilingual education, towards a more just linguistic order that respects linguistic human rights, and contributes to sustainable development of the country.

This paper examines the representation of the Goan ayah in the recent history of Goa. Taking Damodar Mauzo's Karmelin (1981), a novel which portrays the life of a Goan woman who migrates to Kuwait for employment, as an entry point, I will attempt to discuss the various issues pertaining to the representation of the Goan ayahs found in the historical record. It is claimed that the figure of the Goan ayah was viewed with suspicion when they migrated from Goa to Bombay, to be employed as domestic helpers. I attempt to highlight how Goan men and a few upper-class Goan women, in Goa and Bombay, shared an anxiety that in the anonymity of the metropolis the Goan ayah might transgress various boundaries: sexual, religious, caste, moral, and societal. Following this logic, I argue that rather than being a complex narrative about Goan women, Karmelin is a reiteration of a form of representation that harbors suspicion and anxiety about the migrating woman. Karmelin places the figure of the Goan ayah as central in its storyline precisely because stories about the 'scandalous' behavior of the ayahs in the diaspora have been circulating in Goan society for many years.

The overt emphasis on the usage of supposedly vulgar language in Wagh’s poems by those criticising the book is also indicative of a larger issue concerning linguistic politics within India. Post-colonial India witnessed a consolidation of languages that was effectively guided by a Brahminical sense of aesthetics—it instituted a mythical idea of a “pure” language, where the “impurities” or “profanity” originating from Dalit and Bahujan usage did not find place. Unburdened by such compulsions, Wagh unapologetically introduces words from Portuguese and the oral repertoire of Bahujan dialects in his poems, retaining their enunciations, which are markedly different from those of the Goan Saraswats. It is perhaps a radical redefining of Konkani’s linguistic scope, beyond the limits of Brahminical aesthetics, which has actually unsettled those who have taken offence to Sudirsukta.

Indigenous languages encode a considerable amount of traditional environmental knowledge -- knowledge about biodiversity management. Thus, from even a purely instrumental point of view (setting aside ethical and rights-based considerations), indigenous languages need to flourish. How serious is the situation of indigenous languages? What are some of the major reasons why languages become endangered? And what can be done about it? These are some of the questions this essay will address, largely from the Indian experience.

This is a collection of papers published by Prof. Lordino Rodrigues in the Boletim do InstitutoMenezesBragança between 1978 and 1999 on the subject of Konkani at the Turn of the 16th Century.  His retirement as a teacher of Portuguese at Dhempe College of Arts & Science, Miramar, Goa, providentially coincided with the return to Goa of his one time colleague, Prof. Rocky Miranda.  Having completed his doctorate in Konkani linguistics, Prof. Miranda had come to Goa on a sabbatical to do further research on Konkani. Along with field study of various Konkani variations, his study included the linguistic analysis of the 16th and 17th century Konkani texts. That is when the study of old Konkani became a lifelong passion for Prof. Rodrigues.

This study describes the first printed grammar books of Konkani and Marathi, two closely related statutory provincial languages spoken in Goa and Maharashtra states, respectively, in India. From 1640 to 1859, there are works by Thomas Stephens, S.J. (1549–1619), by an anonymous Portuguese Franciscan or Jesuit, living at Thane, near Mumbai, around the middle of the 17th century (New Goa 1858), and by Francesco Saverio di Sant’Anna, O.C.D. (1771–1844) (New Goa 1859). These gram- mars were written in Romanized scripts and based, undoubtedly, on the model of Latin grammar. I compared them with the Latin grammars by William Lily (ca. 1468–1522) and Manuel Álvares, S.J. (1526–1583), whose works were amongst the most influential grammars in the 16th and 17th centuries, trying to find correspondences between them. In sum, Thomas Stephens was clearly motivated by the English tradition, maybe by William Lily; the anonymous Marathi grammar had Stephens’ Konkani grammar as its main source; and Sant’Anna’s grammar was influenced by Latin and Portuguese grammarians, but it is impossible to identify its specific sources.

Joaquim Heliodoro da Cunha Rivara (1809–1879) was a Portuguese physician, professor of philosophy, politician, librarian and secretary of the governor-general of India (1855–1870). During his job in Goa, he gave a strong impulse to the development of Konkani, a provincial language of Goa. On 28 November 1857, he was appointed by the governor-general to lead a commission established to coordinate, prepare and print Portuguese-Konkani and Konkani-Portuguese dictionaries and other “monuments” of the same language. In addition to many books with primary documentation of the history of Portuguese in India, he published a Historical Essay on Konkani Language that he wrote himself; a grammar by Thomas Stephens, S.J. (1549–1619); an anonymous grammar, possibly written in the 17th century by a Franciscan or Jesuit living in Thane, on Salsette Island; and a grammar and a dictionary written probably by the Vicar Apostolic of Verapoly from 1831 to 1844, Francesco Saverio di Sant’Anna, O.C.D. (1771–1844), which circulated as manuscripts. His intense editorial activity in the defense and the dignity of Konkani, against the “despreso da lingua materna” [the contempt of the native language] (Rivara 1857b: CXIII) by Goans, allows us to consider Cunha Rivara the pioneer of the Renaissance of Konkani studies in the 19th century. Despite the fact that he did not know Konkani, Cunha Rivara paved the way for the 20th century Konkanists scholars who were inspired by his publications, such as Gerson da Cunha (1844–1900), Sebastião Dalgado (1855–1922), Shennoi Goembab (1877–1946), Mariano Saldanha (1878–1975) and Joaquim António Fernandes (1889–1975). He also had a substantial impact on the overall development of the study of Konkani.

The global reach of the Spanish and Portuguese empires prompted a remarkable flourishing of the classical rhetorical tradition in various parts of the early modern world. Empire of Eloquence is the first study to examine this tradition as part of a wider global renaissance in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, with a particular focus on the Iberian world. Spanning the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the book argues that the classical rhetorical tradition contributed to the ideological coherence and equilibrium of this early modern Iberian world, providing important occasions for persuasion, legitimation and eventual (and perhaps inevitable) confrontation. Drawing on archival collections in thirteen countries, Stuart M. McManus places these developments in the context of civic, religious and institutional rituals attended by the multi-ethnic population of the Iberian world and beyond, and shows how they influenced public speaking in non-European languages, such as Konkani and Chinese.

The literature created by the missionaries from 16th century onwards contains ample evidence of the native literature as it existed on the eve of the advent of the Portuguese in Goa. Cunha Rivara’s Bibliotheca Concani (1858) offers a distant glimpse of what could have been the pre-16th century Kōnkaṇi literature. Bibliotheca contains extensive excerpts from textual material in Kōnkaṇi as it existed on the eve of the advent of the Portuguese. The codices that contained specimen of what might have been the actual pre-16th century literature were discovered in 1950 and are now easily accessible. The debate is no longer whether there existed pre-16th century Kōnkaṇi literature; now is the time to search that literature, wherever it may lie.

The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) Part Of Speech (POS) tagset has been prepared for the Indian Languages by the POS Tag Standardization Committee of Department of Information Technology (DIT), New Delhi, India. The BIS POS tagset aims to ensure standardization in the POS tagging of all the Indian Languages. It has been used for POS tagging in the Indian Languages Corpora Initiative (ILCI) project which has developed parallel annotated corpora consisting of 25000 sentences each from the tourism and the health domain for 11 Indian Languages. In this paper we present some challenges encountered while using the BIS POS tagset for Konkani, a morphologically rich Indian Language, along with the possible solutions to overcome these challenges.

The oral monophthongal vowel system of Nepali is commonly described as a 6-member vowel system that has lost the ī-i and ū-u contrasts of Sanskrit while qualitatively retaining its ā-a contrast. Similarly, the vowel system of Tajik, a variety of New Persian, has lost the ī-i and ū-u contrasts of Early New Persian while qualitatively retaining its ā-a contrast. However, unlike Nepali, in which ā is more open (and perhaps also more back) than a, Tajik has preserved the ā-a contrast by raising ā above a. Despite this, data exist that suggest that, in the late 19th to early 20th century, Tajik had a 6-vowel triangular system very similar to that of present-day Nepali. This presentation contrasts the vowel systems of Nepali and Tajik as well as those of the languages with which the two languages have been in intensive contact, and discusses the implications their parallel and differential developments may have for the typology of vowel systems and Labov’s supposedly universal principles of vowel shifting.

A Kannada OCR, named Lipi Gnani, has been designed and developed from scratch, with the motivation of it being able to convert printed text or poetry in Kannada script, without any restriction on vocabulary. The training and test sets have been collected from over 35 books published between the period 1970 to 2002, and this includes books written in Halegannada and pages containing Sanskrit slokas written in Kannada script. The coverage of the OCR is nearly complete in the sense that it recognizes all the punctuation marks, special symbols, Indo-Arabic and Kannada numerals. Several minor and major original contributions have been done in developing this OCR at the different processing stages such as binarization, character segmentation, recognition, and Unicode mapping. This has created a Kannada OCR that performs as good as, and in some cases, better than the Google’s Tesseract OCR, as shown by the results. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the maiden report of a complete Kannada OCR, handling all the issues involved. Currently, there is no dictionary-based postprocessing, and the obtained results are due solely to the recognition process. Four benchmark test databases containing scanned pages from books in Kannada, Sanskrit, Konkani, and Tulu languages, but all of them printed in Kannada script, have been created. The word-level recognition accuracy of Lipi Gnani is 5.3% higher on the Kannada dataset than that of Google’s Tesseract OCR, 8.5% higher on the Sanskrit dataset, and 23.4% higher on the datasets of Konkani and Tulu.