| William, If you have not done this already, you may consider contacting Fr. Pratap Nsik SJ, Director of the Thomas Stephens Konknni Kendr. They may be interested in helping you move forward with your projects. Best wishes, John M. de Figueiredo Sent from my iPhone
Very interesting your approach William and a remarkable work as John referred. Kind regards, Sandra
Thank you. I am busy with Konkanni Bhaxechi Bandavoll and Konkanni Utramdaiz, taking all forms of Konkanni, without calling any one form a dialect or pottbhas or boli, into a dynamic system of soroll, that is a
common form of Konkanni speech. Once this is available, we could easily come close to a common, not standard or normative, form. Any common form should be dynamic because languages constantly borrow vocabulary and arrange it into speech, tongue or language
(= lingua Latin). This dynamic could come into any Konkanverter or Google programme of Konkanni.
W R Da Silva
William,
It is remarkable what you have accomplished.
To your question, “is it worthwhile?” I will quote the famous Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa:
“Tudo vale a pena
Quando a alma não é pequena”
(Everything is worthwhile
When the soul is not small)
Just keep going.
John M. de Figueiredo
Sent from my iPhone
It is my opinion that attempting an AI or any other online common model for writing Konkani first needs an understanding of Konkanni in at least four different scripts, not beginning in English. For example, the ergative of Konkanni, although
used by all, a majority of speakers and writers are ignorant of its presence and shape. The transitive, intransitive and causative in Konkanni is not done properly. vochonk is written as vochunk, roddonk as roddunk. It is a zaunv form, it is not kor or koroi
form, and its equivalent in English is: intransitive. But ti bori zali, zavunk. to boro zalo, tem borem zavunk. To uttlo, uttonk, not uttunk. Intr. in English but za in Konkanni. kor, korunk. koroi, koronvk. These forms in Romi are not uniformly used by all.
There is immense variation, even in FN.
I propose, first agree on a soroll form or common form of Konkanni. Don't go for bamonn (with Marathi-speaking and writing past elders) form of Konkanni. It is recent, most recent. But they do have a base Konkanni if they care for it: Chan'neache rati,
maddache savllent etc. Goinchea mhojea... etc. Monglluranchea xarant ek cheddum dekilam, kazar mhojelaguim zata mhonnon tannem sangilam etc.
There is a lot to explain, which I have worked out over thirty years of field research, but I did not come to put it down. The MSS were stolen at Alvas, Mudubidri and the Lexicon work of 1988-1991 was suppressed by the promoters. St Aloysius College. And
its re-starting was suppressed again by SAC dtb U. There is a lot to report. Is it worth while? WRDS
Thank you, Frederick, for this helpful information
John M. de Figueiredo
Sent from my iPhone
Prof John and all,
Google Translate handles Konkani only moderately well. Its performance varies widely depending on the dialect, script (Devanagari, Roman, Kannada, Malayalam, Perso-Arabic), and sentence complexity. It manages
simple phrases and everyday communication. But it struggles with literary or technical texts. Especially those involving regional idioms or culturally specific expressions. It often produces awkward or inaccurate results. This could be because of its relatively
limited digital corpus for Konkani compared to major languages. It’s a helpful starting tool, but not fully reliable for precise or complex translation. At the moment, it is focussed on Nagari (Devanagari) Konkani, though Romi abilities were also promised
in the past. See Meet the Goan American who Mangified Google Translate in Konkani | Prudent Media Goa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Mh0VcPD20
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Google Translate does not primarily “translate into Romi Konkani” as a fully separate linguistic output; rather, what you often see at the bottom (Roman script after Devanagari output) is usually generated through what they're calling
a transliteration layer. In simple terms, the system first produces the Konkani meaning in Devanagari, and then applies a rule-based + statistical mapping that converts those sounds into Latin letters based on likely phonetic equivalents (for
example, “क” → “ka”, “च” → “cha”). This Roman output is therefore closer to a
phonetic rendering of the Devanagari text than a true native Romi Konkani orthography, which has its own historical spelling conventions and variations. Because of this, the Romi line can look inconsistent or “non-standard,” especially with vowels,
aspirated consonants, and regional pronunciation differences.
This might make sense to those who are in the tech domain: AI translation for Konkani—especially across
multiple scripts (Devanagari, Roman/Romi, Kannada)—is not a single “one-click” system working perfectly end-to-end. Instead, most systems combine three components: (1)
neural machine translation (NMT) to convert meaning from source to target language, (2)
script normalization, and (3) transliteration layers that map sounds into different writing systems.
Techies keep calling Konkani a "low-resource (limited training data)" data. I suspect much of the text produced over decades and even centuries have not been scanned; and if they have been scanned in government/taxpayer-funded projects,
these have not been adequately shared or utilised. Many digitisation projects have been announced in Goa since even the 1980s and 1990s, but what's the outcome of this is not exactly clear. Systems like
Google Translate often rely on broader Indian-language models and then approximate output, especially for Roman script, which is usually generated via phonetic transliteration rather than a native Konkani orthographic model.
Current research-grade systems like AI4Bharat’s IndicTrans2 (used in academic and open-source Indic NLP work) are believed to outperform commercial tools for many Indian languages, including Konkani. These have trained specifically on multilingual
Indic corpora and supposedly handle script mapping more consistently. They might lack user interfaces that the commercial tools have.
Microsoft Translator and Google’s system are blaming the limited training data and uneven coverage across scripts for their lack of accuracy.
Another interesting tool is Konkanverter.com. It works
quite well for basic Romi transliteration, especially when converting from Devanagari or Kannada into Roman script in a consistent, rule-based way. Its strength is that it follows a
standardised orthography model, so outputs are fairly predictable and useful for learners or documentation. It is however still a
rule-based transliteration engine, not a dialect-aware AI system. So it does not truly “understand” spoken variation or regional pronunciation differences.
Konkanverter.com sometimes struggles with dialectal variation and ambiguity in Goan sub-dialects (Bardez, Saxtti, Antruz) and Catholic vs Hindu usage differences. Many Konkani words change pronunciation and vowel quality across regions,
but Konkanverter generally maps one standard form rather than adapting to those shifts. It has been called a
clean script converter, not a dialect-sensitive transliteration AI. It performs well for formal text but only moderately for capturing real-world spoken variation. I find it rendering Romi script better than others.
Please note: I am not a technical person, but have used both Google Translate and
Konkanverter.com a fair bit for my own purposes. Those who are into this subject could correct the above.....
FN
Konkani is now one of the languages in Google Translate. Congratulations to those who made this possible. Looks like it is available in Devanagari only. I tested a few words and they were fine. With AI it should be easy to include other scripts.
John M. de Figueiredo
Sent from my iPhone
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