Enrico Carniani
2024
Tracing Linguistic Heritage: Constructing a Somali-Italian Terminological Resource through Explorers’ Notebooks and Contemporary Corpus Analysis
Silvia Piccini
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Giuliana Elizabeth Vilela Ruiz
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Andrea Bellandi
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Enrico Carniani
Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024
The aim of this contribution is to introduce the initial phases of constructing a Somali-Italian terminological resource that dates back to Italy’s colonial expansion into Africa. Specifically, the terminological data was extracted from the notebooks authored by the Italian explorer Ugo Ferrandi (1852 - 1928) and published by the Società Geografica in 1903 under the title “Lugh. Emporio Commerciale sul Giuba”. In order to develop Ferrandi’s terminological resource, we have employed Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, and SPARQL) and embraced the Linked Open Data paradigm. This ensures the FAIRness of the data and enables the publication and sharing of our terminological resource within an open interconnected Web of Data, thus contributing to addressing the absence of Somali in the Linguistic Linked Data cloud. Whenever feasible, Ferrandi’s lexicon entries have been linked and enriched with information derived from a Somali lexicon included in a contemporary Somali Corpus. This approach allows the synchronic corpus-related Somali lexicon to acquire historical depth, thereby illuminating the linguistic dynamics that have transpired over time and would otherwise have remained obscure.
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