Here in Botswana, iiNaturalist could be a great tool for recording animal names like IIgaa!noo?kal/kamam!!kakiyaaxo and !?oellgamkagyibaxo and linking them to the correct, well-identified species. Many languages here have few speakers and even fewer in the younger generation who are losing touch with the natural history knowledge of their elders.
Perhaps the taxonomy section should have a feature to include a sound recording ot the name and not just the written word. Its so difficult to type in the different symbols for the myriad of different clicks ! Only a highly trained linguist would be able to write and interpret the strange symbols anyway.
Itās also difficult to record the tone of a word in writing which is also quite important here in Africa.
Could iNaturalist be adapted to be more inclusive of people who rely more on speech than the written word ?
Perhaps iNaturalist could be a facilitator in sourcing funding to train young speakers of the hard-to-write, unwritten, rarely used and perhaps dying-out languages to be iNaturalists, to document the natural history knowledge and animal/plant names of their people. Funding could be used to pay a modest salary of full time iNaturalist and provide them with a reasonable cameraphone and internet.
The work of supervising and training the name-recording iNaturalists could be given to the many small museum dotted around Africa which might appreciate the role.
What else could iNaturalist to improve the recording and documentation of unwritten and hard-to-write plant and animal names here in Africa ?
It would be a neat idea so long as you got native speakers. Maybe itās too far different from what iNat already does but itās a neat idea. I have seen that some indigenous species names have been added to inat which is awesome and getting more of those on here via someone who uses the language would be really good too
A simpler solution might be to include an additional data field, for each common name, in which the International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciation could be included.
While I like the idea of having an audio version for for files, recording each one would be a huge and arduous task. And many species wouldnāt have a name in a given native tongue.
The amount of data required for audio recordings is also far more than you would need for a simple IPA guide: bytes vs hundreds of kilobytes per entry.
So letās think about using the IPA: Many dictionaries, particularly ones for endangered languages, contain IPA pronunciations for each word (i.e. the data is already available). Transcribing those is feasible for an individual to do for a given language. Once transcribed, there are online services & software which can convert an IPA string into speech, so we donāt need to worry about users being able to read the IPA.
One could even make each and every IPA pronunciation entry into a link to such a service. It would provide a uniform and universal interface without requiring tens of thousands of man hours of effort (and funding).
Given the storage issue with audio vs photos, Iād think that a link to a site that has the recordings would make more sense than trying to host them directly on iNat.
Much like how species information is hosted on Wikipedia and only displayed on iNat rather than being being hosted on iNat.
Regarding the rampant loss of unique languages around the world, thatās a serious and heartbreaking issue. Itās not really in line with iNatās model though.
However, it is exactly what the Endangered Languages Project, and others like it, are doing. That seems like the better place for the linguistic preservation elements youāre so rightly concerned about.
You mean stress mark of words? I hate it when names are copied from Wiki with it, it makes those who donāt know the language think that itās how the word is written, while people who know the language either know how to pronounce it, or can google it (and I donāt think itās a bad thing, thereāre so many words that we usually pronounce wrong, so I think itās a good brain exercise). It should be added only as part of phonetic writing as was proposed before.
Thereāre many Hawaiian names on iNat that are written that way! I know itās a proposal and Iām not against it in any way, just trying to uderstand, it definitely could work and I think itād be a good way of using them in ādescription of nameā part.
I would like to continue my initial post ! Do iNaturalists need to become phoneticists and be able to write down all the various clicks they hear, properly and write them down as the IPA. I feel Iām too old to learn to do this. The variety of clicks in languages and tonal patterns involving click sounds, would I think be forever beyond my ability, to record accurate in writing. I am an English boy who has been married into a family of traditional doctors, sangomas and herbalists for 36 years and live in Central Botswana. Us iNaturalists, record bird noises and post them and that is not beyond the computing power of iNat. So why not those difficult to write names with hard to write clicks as well ? I would not expect ALL inat plant names to be recorded as sounds but only those which are tough with funny click sounds which are really tough for mere mortals to write and are unwritten by the speakers.
I have found iNat to be a really useful tool for provoking dicsussion with elderly family members who are unable to write any language or speak English. I have been able to show them very clear and vivid pics of plants and animals using a large computer screen. They provide very interesting information about their local knowlege of natural history and names in their languages which I think deserve to be recorded for posterity on iNat as accurately as possible, including tonal pronunciation. Perhaps an audible recording of the taxon name could be included as part of the observation itself or within the notes section. @fffffffff@tchakamaura@brian_d@earthknight@murphyslab@charlie
Having both probably should work best, you can hear it, can read sounds written and see actual name written, so itād work for all people with differently working memory.
Ive realised that iNat has plenty of animal and plant names recorded from Botswana in the non-click languages like Kalanga and Setswana. But is sadly lacking names in the San languages which can only be spoken properly by a local speaker. My interest is in how to put inat in the hands of a speaker of a click language,
I in no way question the value of such an endeavor, it sounds amazing. I just question whether it could be shoehorned into iNat. I wish the answer were yes and i wish iNat could store all kinds of indigenous cultural knowledge, but iām not sure itās actually feasible, nor would all groups necessarily want us to do so anyway.
Perhaps the audible recording of names with hard-to-write, click sounds could be switched on for certain countries where there is a need, like Botswana, Namibia and S Africa and kept switched off for the rest of the world where there may be little interest, need or use.
How is iNat going to take off in Botswana if it not adapted to the needs of local users.
I havnt entered these names yet into inat since they are for unidentifiable grasshoppers without geus name or pictures. The problem is, do the || X ? ! / \ properly record the click sounds in the names. The click symbols are far more vaied than can be recorded with a standard typewriter and do not appear in Wiki as diacritics. ! also think different symbols are used for clicks in different languages. Zulu and Xhosa seem to use different symbols than the San languages. isnt it simpler to use a sound recording for the unwritten languages with clicks and let a phoneticist make use of it in the future. http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2009/09/click-symbols.html
I see there are 207000 bird sounds already on iNat and each one lasting 20-60 seconds, Sounds of hard-to-write words would be shorter clips than bird sounds and take up less āstorage spaceā. The sounds of names are part of local natural histories. My interest is in how to make inat of greater value to linguists , ethnobiologists, and ethnographers in museums in Africa, who need accurate species identification for the names they collect. The sounds of words may have more value to local speakers than the written words.
Maybe Iām misunderstanding something, but itās normal for different languages to use different alphabets, letters, or symbols for the same sounds. Iām sure Russian and Japanese have sounds that also exist in English, but I canāt tell from reading it.
I donāt see an issue with a particular sound being represented by one symbol for one language and a different symbol for a different language. The only thing that really matters is that a native speaker of a language can understand common names added to iNaturalist for that language.