Kiswahili is Deficient in representing Numbers

This article was first published in March 2010 on my previous blogging site

It cant distinguish 11000 from 10001, both are written as 'ELFU KUMI NA MOJA', and this is the case for 12,000 and 10,002 and the like.

This means we can not reliably translate this text back to numbers using a computer.

A possible solution is to introduce a comma for 10,001 to be 'ELFU KUMI, NA MOJA' but this will only work if we are converting text assumed to be representing numbers only, Otherwise 'ELFU KUMI, NA MOJA' could mean both '10,001' and '10,000, and 1'. This now calls for the computer to analyse the context of the text and classify it in one of the two, which is not easy if you know what i mean. There goes a PHD RESEARCH TOPIC idea for those who are already there. And for Prof. Ali Mazrui and other custodians of the Kiswahili language, be careful next time you work on a language, it must be computer friendly.


Kiswahili is not my first language, if am wrong somewhere let me know.


Check out a system that converts numbers to text for Kiswahili and other 2 languages at http://numtotext.appspot.com/, this is the inverse of what we are talking about above.


This text also appeared on my blog at http://cymox1.blogspot.com/2010/08/kiswahili-is-deficient-in-representing.html