Re: vygotsky and contextualism

Tane Akamatsu (tanea who-is-at ibm.net)
Wed, 24 Mar 1999 22:41:32 -0500

Martin:

Are you saying that written English is the standard written form of Somali
(hard to believe), or that the person was reading what was written in English
and then almost simultaneously translating it into spoken Somali (difficult
but not impossible)?

Tane Akamatsu

Martin Owen wrote:

> (snip)...
> My worst case scenario in written vs spoken forms was (is?) Somali. When I
> worked for the Overseas Service of the BBC, I sometimes worked on the news
> in Somali.
>
> I was handed the script in English, and the newsreader would read the
> news in Somali from the same English paper I had in front of me.
> Apparently there was no written form in Somali, so the standard written
> form was English! A deeply interesting phenomenum
>
> Should I believe this story? I can not help think that Somali like Swahili
> is close to Arabic and would have had an Arabic form.