[Indic-computing-users] Sad news... on the Santhali front

[Frederick N. (FN) <fr...@by...>]

These guys, young friends from West Bengal, are trying to get the tribal 
Santhali language working with Free Software.

Below is a self-explanatory entry from http://blogs.randomink.org/ It is from 
"Weekend Aantel". Sayamindu from Kolkata was mentioning the Santhali project 
recently.

[Wikipedia has this to say about Santhali, at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhali: Santali is a language in the Munda 
subfamily of Austro-Asiatic, related to Ho and Mundari. It is spoken by about 
six million people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. Most of its 
speakers live in India, in the states of Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Orissa, 
Tripura, and West Bengal. It has its own alphabet, known as Ol Cemet', but 
literacy is very low, between 10 and 30%. Santali is spoken by the Santhals.]

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Adieu Mandal Hembrom!
Weekend Aantel  21/02/2005 - 17:23    Mandal Hembrom passed away at TMC, 
Mumbai, today in the early morning. He was under-going treatment at TMC. I 
don't yet have the details of the exact cause of death, but so far it is known 
that his condition detoriarated after he underwent Chemotheraphy and lapsed 
into a severe cardiac arrest.

Mandal-da was the lead linguist (as also being a native speaker) in our 
Santhali CASTLE Project. His death is not just a great loss to our project, but 
a loss to all the Santhals struggling to establish their identity in a 
globalised world that dictates a lop-sided homogeneity at the cost of losing 
unique cultural traits, language and social structures.

Mandal-da's illness was detected at an advanced stage. He wanted to use the 
time he had to complete the work on the translation of the strings. 
Unfortunately, he was taken away from us before that could happen! Perhaps, its 
a strange co-incidence that today happens to be the International Mother 
Language Day (21st Feb) that Mandal-da breathed his last.

We need to reaffirm our commitment to the work on bridging the ICT divide. As I 
wrote in my "A walk across the Digital Divide" experience, its not as 
un-bridgable as it often sounds. Its only by ensuring the continuance of the 
Santhali L10N project that we can truly pay our respect to the dreams and 
efforts of Mandal Hembrom.

END OF QUOTE

On behalf of BytesForAll, let me dip our flag to all these guys trying to make 
computing work for for forgotten people and the poor... whose languages 
otherwise barely make for a 'viable market'. FN
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Frederick Noronha (FN)                    Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia
Freelance Journalist                      P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436
http://fn.swiki.net                       http://fn-floss.notlong.com
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Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your
vocation. --Aristotle