Author: Otlogetswe

This painting of “The Truth coming out of the well” was done by the Frenchman Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1896 and in an attempt to explain it one story goes like this: Truth and the Lie meet one day. The Lie says to the Truth: “It’s a marvelous day today!” The Truth looks up to the…

My paper on Setswana beef cuts (dirwe tsa kgomo) has been accepted by the Anthropology Southern Africa. It contributes to a better understanding of butchering practices, especially during a Setswana wedding. Can you name the numbered parts of a Setswana cow below?

Collocations are expressions of multiple words which commonly co-occur. For example, the top few bigram collocations in a Setswana corpus are listed below, as measured using Pointwise Mutual Information: While the results above are highly collocated, the expressions are also very infrequent. Therefore it is useful to apply filters, such as ignoring all bigrams which…

Yesterday I played around with the idea of sets. Sets are mutable unordered collections of unique elements. Common uses include membership testing, removing duplicates from a sequence, and computing standard math operations on sets such as intersection, union, difference, and symmetric difference. Sets do not record element position or order of insertion. Accordingly, sets do…

We use the re.findall() (“find all”) method to find all (non-overlapping) matches of the given regular expression. Bellow we find all the three consonantal cluster followed by Four consonantal clusters together with their frequencies: [(‘tlh’, 7752), (‘tsh’, 5245), (‘tsw’, 3250), (‘nts’, 2373), (‘ngw’, 1247), (‘ntl’, 853), (‘tlw’, 652), (‘kgw’, 606), (‘nkg’, 480), (‘nth’, 363), (‘mph’,…

If we want to be able to inspect words with certain consont-vowel combinations, it would be helpful to have an index, allowing us to quickly find the list of words that contains a given consonant-vowel pair, e.g. cv_index[‘tu’] should give us all words containing tu. Here’s how we can do this:

Let’s combine regular expressions with conditional frequency distributions. Here we will extract all consonant-vowel sequences from the words of Setswana, such as [ka] and [si]. Since each of these is a pair, it can be used to initialize a conditional frequency distribution. We then tabulate the frequency of each pair. This analysis can shed light…