Introduction To Tswana

A contribution to racial understanding dedicated to the memory of a great man, Robert Moffat of Kuruman.

Tswana for beginners is a functional grammar explaining the meaning, structure and use of the various word categories. Well-formulated objectives and self-assessment questions enable students to study independently. Tswana for beginners was compiled to serve as a progression from Practical Tswana vocabulary and phrases (published by Via Afrika) and is integrated with the data contained in the trilingual dictionary Dikiinare ya Setswana-English-Afrikaans Dictionary/Woordeboek (Via Afrika). This grammar for beginners can therefore serve as an introduction to a more comprehensive knowledge of the Tswana language and culture.

"Learn simple Tswana for getting around and making friends. Modern Tswana is a concise, portable and easy-to-grasp reference of the Tswana language.This kasahorow language guide includes a basic grammar of Tswana for readers and writers.Written in Modern Tswana. Modern Tswana is a simplified spelling system used to write all the varieties of spoken Tswana.Subscribe to the online magazine ""Tswana kasahorow"" to read more Modern Tswana."

This book is about the design of a Setswana corpus for lexicography. While various corpora have been compiled and a variety of corpora-based research has been attempted in African languages, no effort has been made towards corpus design. Additionally, although extensive analysis of the Setswana language has been done by missionaries, grammarians and linguists since the 1800s, none of this research is in corpus design. Most research has been largely on the grammatical study of the language. The recent corpora research in African languages in general has been on the use of corpora for the compilation of dictionaries and little of it is in corpus design. Pioneers of this kind of corpora research in African languages are Prinsloo and De Schryver (1999), De Schryver and Prisloo (2000 and 2001) and Gouws and Prisloo (2005). Because of a lack of research in corpora design particularly in African languages, this book attempts to fill that gap, especially for Setswana. It is hoped that the finding of this study will inspire similar designs in other languages comparable to Setswana. We explore corpus design by focusing on measuring a variety of text types for lexical richness at comparable token points. The study explores the question of whether a corpus compiled for lexicography must comprise a variety of texts drawn from different text types or whether the quality of retrieved information for lexicographic purposes from a corpus comprising diverse text varieties could be equally extracted from a corpus with a single text type. This study therefore determines whether linguistic variability is crucial in corpus design for lexicography.