Eine neue Schrift für die Wolof-Sprache

Ich möchte mich zuerst bei allen bedanken, die Interesse an Schriften in Afrika entwickelt haben. Aufrichtiger Dank richtet sich daher an Helma Pasch und Anja Kootz für ihre bemerkenswerten Bemühungen. Vielen Dank auch an alle, die zur Verwirklichung der Tagung „5000 Jahre Schrift in Afrika“ beigetragen haben. Insofern geht ein besonderer Dank an die Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung, den Förderer der Tagung.

Somali Writings

L’article propose un aperçu sur les différentes écritures employées pour le Somali avant l’introduction en 1972 de l’alphabet latin. Avant une présentation sur le rôle de l’Islam et la littérature somalie en arabe, l’article discute les orthographes basés sur un’élaboration de l’écriture arabe, pour se concentrer ensuite sur les alphabets « autochtones », et en particulier sur l’Osmania. L’article se concentre sur le climat culturel qui en conditionna la naissance et la (relative) diffusion, mais aussi, plus tard, sa décadence et abandon. Le développement de l’alphabet Osmania et ses caractéristiques sont également détaillés. La dernière section présente brièvement deux autres orthographes «autochtones», l’écriture Gadabuursi et l’alphabet Keddaria.

Mandombe

Mandombe, one of the most recent modern African scripts, was originally designed to write the Bantu languages of the Congos, and eventually all languages on the continent. Its symbols are made of simple and composite geometrical forms which predate the script. It is apparently the only African script which has gained some social success without any political support.

Language attitudes and language shift among ethnic migrants in Khartoum

This paper investigates language attitudes among ethnic migrant groups in Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan. A questionnaire was used to collect data on language preference, language parents prefer their children to learn, and reasons for language preference. Results suggest that while positive attitude played a significant role in learning Arabic among some of the groups under investigation, it proved to be of no help in maintaining the groups’ ethnic languages. Arabic was reported as very important for education, religious activities, economic privileges and social interaction. Ethnic languages, on the other hand, were preferred for purely symbolic reasons (symbolizing groups’ ethnic identity).

Interactive Ray Tracing for Virtual TV Studio Applications

In the last years, the well known ray tracing algorithm gained new popularity with the introduction of interactive ray tracing methods. The high modularity and the ability to produce highly realistic images make ray tracing an attractive alternative to raster graphics hardware. Interactive ray tracing also proved its potential in the field of Mixed Reality rendering and provides novel methods for seamless integration of real and virtual content. Actor insertion methods, a subdomain of Mixed Reality and closely related to virtual television studio techniques, can use ray tracing for achieving high output quality in conjunction with appropriate visual cues like shadows and reflections at interactive frame rates. In this paper, we show how interactive ray tracing techniques can provide new ways of implementing virtual studio applications.

Playing with the Real World

In this paper we provide a framework that enables the rapid development of applications using non-standard input devices. Flash is chosen as programming language since it can be used for quickly assembling applications. We overcome the difficulties of Flash to access external devices by introducing a very generic concept: The state information generated by input devices is transferred to a PC where a program collects them, interprets them and makes them available on a web server. Application developers can now integrate a Flash component that accesses the data stored in XML format and directly use it in their application.