Flipping the script? Native-speaker linguists and colonial orthographies in nineteenth-century Senegal
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Throughout the nineteenth century, Senegal was the site of some of the most extensive French experiments with alphabetic print literacy in African languages, especially Wolof. Before the advent of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), authors such as Jean Dard, Jacques-François Roger, Aloïs Kobès, David Boilat, Louis Faidherbe, and Louis Descemet experimented with Latin-scripted orthographies for representing the sounds of Wolof. This article focuses on the contributions of Boilat and Descemet, both members of prominent multilingual métis families in Saint-Louis and native speakers of Wolof. Even as they expressed deference to their predecessors, Boilat and Decemet asserted their intuitions as native speakers, challenging dominant colonial “scripts” by authoring their own texts and proposing their own orthographies. I read their nineteenth-century analyses of Wolof as important, if understudied, contributions to the history of phonetics by situating their works within the politics of colonial alphabet schemes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it