An assessment of orthographic similarity measures for several African languages
Table 4: Final vowel characteristics with examples; % c. = percent consonant-ending tokens.
['[BOLD] Corpus', '[BOLD] % c.', '[BOLD] Examples']
The final vowel issue deserved closer inspection, for isiZulu words typically end with a vowel. The single consonant-ending word in the isiZulu UDHR is a loanword, kuCharter. Besides the general distribution across vowels, such as 7 times as many ending with an -a than an -u, it is worth noting the relative outliers with more a-endings in OOspell, o-endings in the UDHR, and near-absence of u-ending tokens in the UC. The curated and quality texts of OOspell and UDHR have an extremely low percentage of consonant-ending tokens, such that one relatively safely could design grammars as intended and obtain good performance. The UC and SAC less so, but for different reasons: the SAC has multiple foreign words, whereas the UC has many errors where the words should have a vowel, as noted above with sowehlul. Finally, there are relatively many consonant-ending tokens in the NIC, because there are many (valid) named entities.