Few East African groups have attracted the attention of academics as much as the Swahili of coastal Kenya and Tanzania. The Swahili town of Lamu has even been described as having more professional researchers than doctors per inhabitant (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:2). Researchers commonly describe the Swahili as having a maritime culture (Middleton 1992:8; Nurse and Spear 1985:97; Prins 1965:263-275) and looking to the sea for their livelihood and identity (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:19; Ylvisaker 1975:74-83). They stress the contact of the `sea-prowling` Swahili with the ocean through seafaring, trading, fishing, and boat building to acquire wealth and social standing (Mazmi and Sharif 1994: 19; Middleton 1992: 8). Futhermore, the origin of the word Swahili is said to stress the proximity of the sea, coming from the Arabic sawahil (coast) or being of local origin, swahili (literally this island), making the Swahili variously the people of the coast (Middleton 1992:1) or the people of this island (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:56).

Kiswahili language has undergone a lot of changes in the last decades especially at the lexical level. Many lexical items have been coined, adapted, borrowed or modified to express concepts that were hitherto unknown or non existent in the Swahili world view cosmology. One area that has witnessed a lot of these changes has been the area of sciences, or better put science has been a prime causer of many neologisms in this language. This eventuality has gone a long way to disprove the naive assumptions that the language has not come of age to express scientific concepts.

The paper describes a computer system for testing the coherence and adequacy of dictionaries. The system suits also well for retiieving lexical material in context from computerized text archives Results are presented from a series of tests made with Kamusi ya Kiswahlli Sanifu (KKS), a monolingual Swahili dictionary.. The test of the intemal coherence of KKS shows that the text itself contains several hundreds of such words, for which there is no entry in the dictionary. Examples and frequency numbers of the most often occurring words are given The adequacy of KKS was also tested with a corpus of nearly one million words, and it was found out that 1.32% of words in book texts were not recognized by KKS, and with newspaper texts the amount was 2.24% The higher number in newspaper texts is partly due to numerous names occurring in news articles Some statistical results are given on frequencies of wordforms not recognized by KKS The tests shows that although KKS covers the modern vocabulary quite well, there are several ru·eas where the dictionary should be improved The internal coherence is far from satisfactory, and there are more than a thousand such rather common words in prose text which rue not included into KKS The system described in this article is au effective tool for `detecting problems and for retrieving lexical data in context for missing words.

This book records the knowledge and experience Swahili-speaking people have acquired in dealing with then plant world (p. 12). With its folk botanic approach it aims at discovering the principles of taxonomy they apply in classifying and labelling their plants as well as the different kinds of uses they make of them. This is what distinguishes the book from other dictionaries of Swahili plant names, e.g. P. J. Greenway (A Swahili-Botanical-English Dictionary of Plant Names Second edition. Dares Salaam 1940) where short descriptions of morphological plant characteristics are given. Greenway only makes some remarks about the use of important plants. The dictionary of J. Schroebler and J. Berchem (Mimea ya Afrika Mashariki. Sehemu ya pili. Kamusi ya majina ya mimea. Cologne: Omimee Publishers 1992) consists of a list of Swahili plant names with then botanical equivalents and some additional remarks on plant ecology.

This book records the knowledge and experience Swahili-speaking people have acquired in dealing with then plant world (p. 12). With its folk botanic approach it aims at discovering the principles of taxonomy they apply in classifying and labelling their plants as well as the different kinds of uses they make of them. This is what distinguishes the book from other dictionaries of Swahili plant names, e.g. P. J. Greenway (A Swahili-Botanical-English Dictionary of Plant Names Second edition. Dares Salaam 1940) where short descriptions of morphological plant characteristics are given. Greenway only makes some remarks about the use of important plants. The dictionary of J. Schroebler and J. Berchem (Mimea ya Afrika Mashariki. Sehemu ya pili. Kamusi ya majina ya mimea. Cologne: Omimee Publishers 1992) consists of a list of Swahili plant names with then botanical equivalents and some additional remarks on plant ecology.

Few East African groups have attracted the attention of academics as much as the Swahili of coastal Kenya and Tanzania. The Swahili town of Lamu has even been described as having more professional researchers than doctors per inhabitant (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:2). Researchers commonly describe the Swahili as having a maritime culture (Middleton 1992:8; Nurse and Spear 1985:97; Prins 1965:263-275) and looking to the sea for their livelihood and identity (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:19; Ylvisaker 1975:74-83). They stress the contact of the `sea-prowling` Swahili with the ocean through seafaring, trading, fishing, and boat building to acquire wealth and social standing (Mazmi and Sharif 1994: 19; Middleton 1992: 8). Futhermore, the origin of the word Swahili is said to stress the proximity of the sea, coming from the Arabic sawahil (coast) or being of local origin, swahili (literally this island), making the Swahili variously the people of the coast (Middleton 1992:1) or the people of this island (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:56).

Kiswahili language has undergone a lot of changes in the last decades especially at the lexical level. Many lexical items have been coined, adapted, borrowed or modified to express concepts that were hitherto unknown or non existent in the Swahili world view cosmology. One area that has witnessed a lot of these changes has been the area of sciences, or better put science has been a prime causer of many neologisms in this language. This eventuality has gone a long way to disprove the naive assumptions that the language has not come of age to express scientific concepts.

Präsentationsfolien eines Vortrags im Rahmen der Jahrestagung der IAML Deutschland 19.09.2018 in Augsburg.

In this study, pupils’ use of digital tools for learning vocabulary is compared to the use of a traditional way of learning vocabulary from a list in a book. The goal of the study is to find out if digital tools are more efficient than using vocabulary lists, when learning new words. Furthermore, this study investigates how the use of words in a context affects learning. The 40 pupils who took part in this study are learning German in the ninth grade in two different schools in the southern part of Sweden. Three vocabulary tests were conducted within four weeks. During the experiment the pupils were divided into two groups, where one used digital learning tools and the other ordinary vocabulary lists. The results in the first test did not differ much between the groups. The second test on the other hand shows a difference where many in the digital group got better results whereas several in the traditional group got lower results. In the third test both groups showed better results in the vocabulary test. The conclusion of this study is that there is no big difference between the use of digital learning tools and a traditional vocabulary list when it comes to learning new words. However, the use of words in sentences was seen to have an effect on the words that pupils remembered best. In this study, the pupils were also asked to fill in a questionnaire. This study also shows that a combination of traditional and digital learning is preferred by the pupils.

Simulizi za ugonjwa zinatolewa na mgonjwa na mtu mmoja au wengi wanaoombwa naye wamsaidie wakashauriana hali ya maradhi. Kutambua ugonjwa ni kazi ya kawaida na siyo ya waganga au madaktari tu. Kama pengine, katika Afrika ya Mashariki wenyeji huwa na ujuzi wa kawaida juu ya maradhi, mwili, tiba, dawa za hospitali na za kienyeji. Kila jinsi ya tiba ina njia, lugha na mazoezi yake. Mfano ufuatao unaonyesha maana na matumizi ya dhana na tashbihi (metaphors) katika uganga wa kienyeji. Ni kazi yangu sasa ya kufasiri matumizi ya tashbihi na alama katika mawasiliano ambayo huitwa `simulizi za ugonjwa´, yaani illness narratives ambazo ni dhana ya utafiti katika mawasiliano ya kuganga.