Latin | EPFL Graph Search

Latin (lingua Latīna ˈlɪŋɡʷa ɫaˈtiːna or Latīnum ɫaˈtiːnʊ̃) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in Latium (also known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage. For most of the time it was used, it would be considered a "dead language" in the modern linguistic definition; that is, it lacked native speakers, despite being used extensively and actively. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculin

CoWriting Kazakh: Transitioning to a New Latin Script using Social Robots

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Pierre Dillenbourg

In the Republic of Kazakhstan, the transition from Cyrillic towards Latin alphabet raises challenges to teach the whole population in writing the new script. This paper presents a CoWriting Kazakh system that aims to implement an autonomous behavior of a social robot that would assist children in learning a new script. Considering the fact that the current generation of primary school children have to be fluent in both Kazakh scripts, this exploratory study aims to investigate which learning approach provides better effect. Participants were asked to teach a humanoid robot NAO how to write Kazakh words using one of the scripts, Latin vs Cyrillic. We hypothesize that it is more effective when a child mentally converts the word to Latin in comparison to having the robot perform conversion itself. The findings reject this hypothesis, but further research is needed as it is suggested that the way the pre-test was performed might have caused the obtained results.

IEEE2019

CoWriting Kazakh: Learning a New Script with a Robot

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Pierre Dillenbourg

In the Republic of Kazakhstan, the transition from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet raises challenges to training an entire population in writing the new script. This paper presents a CoWriting Kazakh system, an extension of the existing CoWriter system, aiming to implement an autonomous social robot that would assist children in transition from the old Cyrillic alphabet to a new Latin alphabet. With the aim to investigate which learning strategy yields better learning gains, we conducted an experiment with 67 children, aged 8-11 years old, who interacted with a robot in a CoWriting Kazakh learning scenario. Participants were asked to teach a humanoid NAO robot how to write Kazakh words using one of the scripts, Latin or Cyrillic. We hypothesized that a scenario in which the child is asked to mentally convert the word to Latin would be more effective than having the robot perform conversion itself. Results show that the CoWriter was successfully applied to this new script-switching task. The findings also suggest interesting gender differences in the preferred method of learning with the robot.

Association for Computing Machinery2020

The transferability of handwriting skills: from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Pierre Dillenbourg

Do handwriting skills transfer when a child writes in two different scripts, such as the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets? Are our measures of handwriting skills intrinsically bound to one alphabet or will a child who faces handwriting difficulties in one script experience similar difficulties in the other script? To answer these questions, 190 children from grades 1–4 were asked to copy a short text using both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets on a digital tablet. A recent change of policy in Kazakhstan gave us an opportunity to measure transfer, as the Latin-based Kazakh alphabet has not yet been introduced. Therefore, pupils in grade 1 had a 6-months experience in Cyrillic, and pupils in grades 2, 3, and 4 had 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5 years of experience in Cyrillic, respectively. This unique situation created a quasi-experimental situation that allowed us to measure the influence of the number of years spent practicing Cyrillic on the quality of handwriting in the Latin alphabet. The results showed that some of the differences between the two scripts were constant across all grades. These differences thus reflect the intrinsic differences in the handwriting dynamics between the two alphabets. For instance, several features related to the pen pressure on the tablet are quite different. Other features, however, revealed decreasing differences between the two scripts across grades. While we found that the quality of Cyrillic writing increased from grades 1–4, due to increased practice, we also found that the quality of the Latin writing increased as well, despite the fact that all of the pupils had the same absence of experience in writing in Latin. We can therefore interpret this improvement in Latin script as an indicator of the transfer of fine motor control skills from Cyrillic to Latin. This result is especially surprising given that one could instead hypothesize a negative transfer, i.e., that the finger controls automated for one alphabet would interfere with those required by the other alphabet. One interesting side-effect of these findings is that the algorithms that we developed for the diagnosis of handwriting difficulties among French-speaking children could be relevant for other alphabets, paving the way for the creation of a cross-lingual model for the detection of handwriting difficulties.

2021

The transferability of handwriting skills: from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Pierre Dillenbourg

2021