Acknowledgement of

The Contributions of the Center for the Study of African Languages, Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale, to the CBOLD project
and
The Collaboration between the Center, CBOLD, and the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley

prepared by Larry Hyman and John Lowe / August 1998

The Comparative Bantu On-Line Dictionary (CBOLD) project is pleased to acknowledge the important collaboration that exists between our project and the Center for the Study of African Languages at the Musée Royal de l'Afrique. This collaboration has taken the form of exchange of materials, visits between the two institutions, presentation of lectures and conference papers in Tervuren, Berkeley and elsewhere (including Leiden and Lyon), and frequent exchange of expertise in both directions in person and over email.

CBOLD is especially grateful for the following contributions which have been incorporated into our database and the tools available for theoretical, descriptive and historical research in the Bantu field:

The linguistic researchers from the Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale have been absolutely essential to the success of CBOLD, an international project involving Bantuists from North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The aim of this international enterprise is to provide a lexical database and computational tools placed at the disposal of researchers from a number of disciplines. In addition to its linguistic value, CBOLD has been consulted by Africanist historians, archeologists, anthropologists, ethnobotanists, ethnozoologists, medical researchers, and others. This international project, which has been possible thanks to the collaboration and contributions of such colleagues as those in Tervuren, will provide an example for what can be done on a large computational scale for other geographical regions and other disciplines.

For the realization of the database, the collaboration of the Center for the Study of African Languages at the Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale in Tervuren is crucial. Under its director, Dr. Claire Grégoire, the Center has provided researchers in Bantu linguistics with an estimated 10,000 Proto-Bantu and regional reconstructions to be published and circulated world-wide under the title Bantu Lexical Reconstructions II (BLR II). Once received, the ambitious effort of tagging these reconstructions with the 150+ lexicons stored in CBOLD will begin.

Colleagues at CBOLD and from all around the world look forward to many more years of fruitful collaboration with the Center of African Languages in Tervuren.