AikoGraphics/LugbaraDictionary · Datasets at Hugging Face

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LOST IN TRANSLATION (DREAMCAST):
This encyclopedic research documentation is inspired by (and dedicated to) Cynthia Letasi, aka Rejoice (The Beautyful One [Roger that Ayi Kwei Armah] and Green Riding Hood [Now Mrs. Mungufeni] born on Thursday 17th August 1995) who changed my worldview like a valuable pearl (Matthew 13:45-46), worth far above rubies (Proverbs 31:10), Kumari in Nepal (Orient) or Divine Feminine between 2001-6; made me feel like Bob Harris in Arua (not Japan) around 2003 because she was 11 years younger than me though inversely over four years ahead in speaking the language of the land we played on (If a snake, Balaam's donkey and parrots can talk, then how about stones?). This girl drained amalala ga kibuga [Luganda for: city haughtiness] out of me. To be honest, she was my first true "superhigh" crush within Arua (West Nile) after the Y2K Computer Bug Doom's Day didn't happen though I never told her my exact heartfelt reality for multiple years (Just tried to show it through kind, unapologetic treatment (loved her smile) until she confessed something unexpected, but very stunning directly to me that I will treasure until infinity). Cynthia engraved her fingerprints in my heart. Everytime I left Arua for campus in Mukono, I would feel my heart pain around Madi Okollo, but calm down in Nebbi Town. I adored how Xnthi's glowing eyes hawked at me (One of my favourite, unforgettable memories about her). Furthermore, her lookalikes included the volatile Tonto Dikeh (Nigerian), lyric-savvy Sheebah Karungi, decent Betty Mpologoma, unflinching Victoria Bagaya, worry-free Spice Diana as well as easygoing Scarlett Johansson who automatically became my all-time favourites; I knew her before all of them except maybe Betty who began her diamond singing career in 1999. Queenie, one of the lead vocalists in the Miracle Cathedral Rubaga (MCR) Proclaim Music choir also has that Cynthia aura plus Jommie Nankya, Pretty Banks, Sheila Gashumba, etc. Even though I reconnected with Xnthi (nickname I gave her meaning Numberless or Infinite value) via Facebook at the turn of the 2010s, I did not see her again physically until Tuesday 12th February 2019 walking southwards with her darkskinned female friend on the hyper-straight Arua Avenue at the Ediofe Road Junction (while I escorted my cousin to a printshop before he rushed to Onduparaka to see his sister). That was about 13 unlucky years since the last time, but only three surreal days after dreaming about her. I smiled like GOD's sun was shining on me in the afternoon before rush hour; it was the same day Onduparaka drew 0-0 with URA FC in the Ugandan top-flight league. Obsession is not a crime, just harness it like human solar electricity. Disconnection is re-direction; too much love will heal you. Love is indestructible and the Greatest Thing: I admired Cynthia's pleasant appearance and supadupa fluency at a very tender age of 6 to 11 and felt inspired to polish my own linguistics by reading Lugbara afresh since I learnt my mother tongue in Busoga (Birth to 11 years) and Buganda only by listening to Lugbara people talk despite being downgraded as backward or Lower class (Not Upper). Even though I spoke and understood it, I couldn't transcribe Lugbara well like English but when moonstruck by our Mt. Wati Road (Arua) neighbour's adorable brownskinned daughter, I was motivated to re-study this vernacular from Northwestern Uganda in black and white (using music lyrics, Bibilia, Straight Talk newspapers, brochures, internet articles, other literature, then a Fountain Publishers 2009 dictionary compiled by Willy Ngaka, Edward O'du'bua and Paul Iga Ongua [bought for a Twenty10 gig from Sarah Ojirot at Uganda Deaf Women's Organisation; my Design Manager from UCU named Edmund Asingwire (Munyankole studying Business Administration) also hired me after campus to do artwork in Lugbara for him and Jolynn Investments Limited - One Nation under GOD], exclusively English dictionaries, a Chinese Dictionary for finding word classes plus asked various people including my Parents and Facebook friends like Okitembeki Ndengendu [Enoch Opika Diku], etc). Consequently, I would perhaps grasp Lugbara the way ShaoLan Hsueh created Chineasy, then fabricate my own Synthetic Artificial Lugbara Technology (SALT), Informative Synthetic Encoder (ISE) or Ojapi Converter (Bypassing the Language Barrier). My big brother Victor Draman(i) Afayo (an I.T. Specialist based in KLA City) wanted to create a Lugbara.net website and gave me the assignment of doing research for him in the latter half of the 2000s; I decided to create my own Lugbara Culture blog (Amazing World of Lugbara) plus Facebook groups with the data around 2008, a process that inspired this vocabulary-book too. The words here are the ones used on UBC Radio (formerly Radio Uganda), Voice Of Life (probably since 1997 though I started listening in 2000), Arua One (since 2002), Koboko FM, Nile FM (since 2004), Radio Pacis, Access FM (since Monday 19th March 2018) plus BTN Television (from 2003), Westnile TV (from around 2020) and in voice commands for Airtel Uganda, et cetera. During one of the Mobile Monday sessions in KLA City, I asked a Google Executive from Germany who came to UG around 2012 if Lugbara could be added to the advanced Google Translate machine. He replied that he would forward my concern to the relevant office. Additionally, I posted a request at Wikimedia for a Lugbara Wiktionary but there weren't enough volunteer editors as is the requirement for the project to hatch; a Lugbarapedia would be the eventual outcome. Tualu.org [West Nile Portal] announced that they were working on a project of over 500 Lugbara words but I could not find their draft PDF. Nevertheless, Tualu posted a long and thorough Dictionary of Lugbara Personal Names by Alex Matua Asumi and his colleagues: Fortunate Drateru, Moses Dramiga and Proscovia Adrupiyo. There were no names listed with the letters H, Q and X, but the ones posted are more than enough; I commend them for that, a masterpiece about Ru'daza Lugbara niri (Naming in the Lugbara Tradition). Saidi Omar Dramani (Islamic University In Uganda - Mbale) also posted a PDF of his 2007 dissertation research for a Lugbarati Dictionary; it was very helpful. Fountain Publishers has Lugbarati Buku Anzini for Secondary School children, approved by Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) plus National Curriculum Dvelopment Centre (NCDC) in Kyambogo. Language has to be preserved through documentation and transmitted to anyone connected or interested because cultural heritage represents a collective identity of values, diversity, traditions and assets passed around from generation to generation eg my Parents (James + Elizabeth Dramani) to me, though my Mother departed in Twenty22 (during Volume 7). Some relatives and natives would laugh at my pronunciations or choice of words but it didn't phase me. I've never been ashamed to be called Omulugwara even if it is a byword for stupidity, Naked People (Only Karamoja was ranked before us) and backwardness among some communities. Aren't we all descendants of Noah, the Flood Survivor? One day, I bypassed two dudes on Acacia Avenue in KLA and heard them speak what sounded like broken Lugbara; I reasoned later that it might have been Madi language. Also, Aringa is like Lugbara Patois or Filipino. During May 2023, someone asked me why I study Lugbara yet it is not useful and I told him not to belittle my mother tongue like that; garbage or waste appears worthless until it's recycled and given value or repackaged: Lugbara is a multinational language spoken mainly across three colonial borders which converge at Salia Musala (about 2 hours by car northwards from Arua City). There are nine Lugbara clans in DR Congo (Kari Culture Minister - John Godo, a UPC stalwart, taught me that in 2009: When I went to Ariwara [inside DRC] the following year, I was stunned by the amount of Lugbara songs playing loudly near the markets, more than Lingala or even English). #SpeakLugbara on International Mother Tongue Day (21st February)! I strongly believe Generative AI can learn Lugbarati and make it reuseable and applicable in various fields; Deep Learning Indaba (DLI), Ambani, Artificial Intelligence for Development-Africa Network (AI4D-Africa), Hugging Face, Deep Site, Foundation for Lugbarati Development Initiative (FLUDI), Quantum ML or Lugbara GPT type-of-way. Live translation of President M7's speeches (by people like Nahori Oya, Fred Bada, John Ondoma, etc), media broadcasts (eg Getrude Abiria [Oku aka], Peace Victoria Eyotaru, etc) plus other arrangements such as crusades, conferences, weddings, funerals and so on can also be a reference... In December 2013, the Lugbarati Language Board proposed an Orthography Guide with 45 letters (including 7 vowels and 38 consonants). Tonal Lugbara literature with its many character symbols (accents, crosses, dashes or hyphens, dots, umlauts, etc) seems advanced plus crowdily complex (like the new books commissioned from DR Congo that I used to see at the Radio Pacis Printery) and scares away learners or researchers, but the simpler version shared in this wordbook is legit too... Lugbara funeral songs have been replaced with church hymns and modern Gospel music... In my Allegory of Artificial Ignorance: For machines to learn Lugbara, humans (both self-motivated and paid contributors) must train them or organise datasets for AI to decode unsupervised... Artificial Dreams (or Hallucinations) can also come true like Dreamcast... My makeshift Word Interchange Theory (WIT) from 1996 was not far-fetched afterall (feeling like Michael Jordan versus Detroit Pistons: No rules)...

When I was in Senior 5 (during 2001), I told my hostelmates that one day there will be a radio device that converts words spoken on air into text like S2T (Speech-2-Text) or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and displayed on a screen, not just lyrics as Jango Radio does, but conversations too (Inspired by the way we transcribed classroom dictation from teachers). I was labelled "mulalu [Luganda for: mad]" but dreams are not hopeless; GOD's time brings them to life for instance Google Assistant, Meet (In-chat captions), Apple's Siri, TranSay (My Favourite), Lingmo One2One, Translate 4 Me, Waverly Labs Pilot, Mesay, Langogo, Translaty, MUAMA Enence, Xiaomi AI Translator, Clik, WT2 Translator, Travis, LeTrans, Sigmo, NTT DoCoMo Translation Service, OBTranslate (from Nigeria), Logbar ili, OpenAI's ChatGPT or Whisper, Assembly AI, iFlytek, etc. Twitter (X) Spaces is also not very far from my Ongo (Ojapi Converter) vision. Zero-Shot Machine Translation tech is a model that can learn to translate words into another language without having to see any examples... Meta's Universal Speech Translator is a very ambitious AI research project that might improve language-mixing or Computer-Assisted Translation... LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) which Blake Lamoine labelled "sentient" was originally introduced as Meena in 2020. It's a conversational Large Language Model (LLM) built by Google... The Madi-Lugbara language is related to the languages of Southern Nigeria eg Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Iduma, Igala, Igbira, Gbari and Nupe. In addition, we can include Ijo and Kalabari of the Niger Delta plus the Bariba - north of Yoruba and Aja (Ewe) spoken in Southern Dahomey (Benin), Togo and South-Eastern Ghana... Some people consider Lugbara a dialect of Madi but many do not accept this theory. In fact, a survey concluded that the Ogoko, Okollo and Rigbo dialects which are considered Southern Madi or Madi (I)ndri, should be categorised as dialects of Lugbara. Besides, we share the same names, numbers and many words. The only mother tongue interference I have heard from tribemates is mixing S with SH like when saying "soap" and "shop" or -TION with -SON eg "information" becomes "informason". Some interchange D with TH eg "together" is spoken as "togeder" while "three" may be pronounced "tiri" but most times, pronunciation is okay. Exactly 11 days before I created my electronic Lugbara Dictionary in Twenty16, Google Translate switched to Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) translating whole sentences at a time rather than piece by piece which GT used to do through Statistical Machine Translation since 28th April 2006. GNMT improves the Quality of Translation because it uses an Example-based Machine Translation (EBMT) in which the system learns from millions of examples... In 2020, with support from the Hewlett Foundation, Sunbird AI commenced the African language technology project. They created a large multilingual parallel text dataset of Ugandan languages, with translations in Acholi, Ateso, Luganda, Lugbara and Runyankole. On Saturday 11th October 2025, an AI Language Model called Sunflower (developed by Sunbird) was officially launched and it is described as "the ChatGPT for Uganda"... GeoPoll (a global research organisation) has datasets in Lugbara while JEHOVAH's Witnesses translate their publications into Lugbara (Available at www.jw.org). Companies like MTN, dfcu Bank, etc also use Lugbara in their PR content... It was very unreal to discover on Sunday 10th September 2023 while googling for "Lugbara AI" that the mother of Jeff Dean (55 year old Google AI Lead then) speaks "fluent Lugbara"; she lived in West Nile when Jeffrey was 5 years old. I guess she knows that Lugbara is learnable by machines; Meta introduced its own AI on WhatsApp a few days later. I love the fact that it paraphrases websites rejected by Wikipedia. Mark Zuckerberg believes AI will make superintelligent multi-lingual connections possible for all. When you copy some of the BigAMBO [Words] in this dictionary and paste as a chat message to Meta AI like a Paul and Silas jailbreak, it can learn Ugandan Lugbara by reading patterns and fine-tuning itself to chat with you even though it used a strange vocabulary as Lugbara in Twenty24 (probably Central or West African) like TranslatorMind the following year. Sam Altman (CEO at Open AI) also revealed that you can add knowledge and create a custom GPT by uploading files in the GPTs App Store. Self-Adapting or Adjusting LLMs (SEAL or SALMs) will learn new words by themselves... Vibe-coding can also help you create Lugbara chatbots, games eg Scrabble or Pictionary plus other software for investors, traders, friends, lovers, in-laws, tourists, media watchers, music listeners, conference audiences, ethnodoxologists, migrants, refugees and those supertalented in Xenoglossy... The ISO 639-3 Language Code for Lugbara is lgg while the Glottocode is lugb1240, but I wish the language code for Lugbara was simply Lbr (which is my Dictionary logo in a circle); it corresponds better though already taken by Lohorung language (endangered Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nepal). The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!

[GODisgreat!]

(CC) AIKO (Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Organiser) 2003-Now
PARAMETERS:
Consonants do not have to be repeated when writing Lugbara eg Mekki = Meki; Oluffe = Olufe; Owaffa = Owafa; etc, but repeating vowels means something or becomes ambiguously redundant eg leta-a [in love]...
Every Lugbara word ends with a vowel eg simu [phone]...
In consonant clusters DJ, GB and KP, the first letter is silent eg odji = oji [wash]; gbanda = banda [cassava]; okpo = opo [power]. Meanwhile MV is pronounced NV eg omve [call] while NZ is pronounced NJ eg Inzikuru...
Letter C is always pronounced CH as in Church eg candi = chandi [sorrow]...
Letters Q and X are not used in Lugbara, but four unique ones are added with an apostrophe to indicate the sound H eg 'B = Bha, etc meaning the Simplified Lugbara Alphabet has 28 letters...
Some words have more than one meaning depending on the tone of the vowel(s) eg ai can mean salt, pray, beg or Atifiso Intelijensi, etc...
Various Lugbara dialects (Aringa, Ayivu, Maracha, Madi-Okolo, Terego, Vura, Zaki, etc) may pronounce words differently eg nya (in Ayivu) = na (in Terego) [eat]

SIMPLIFIED LUGBARA (The words below are exactly 140 though possible English meanings are so much more. Only letters Q and X are missing, but four new ones are added with an apostrophe representing the sound H):
aa ae ai ao au
ba be bi bo bu// 'ba 'be 'bi 'bo 'bu
ca ce ci co cu
da de di do du// 'da 'de 'di 'do 'du
ea ee ei eo eu
fa fe fi fo fu
ga ge gi go gu
ha he hi ho hu
ia ie ii io iu
ja je ji jo ju
ka ke ki ko ku
la le li lo lu
ma me mi mo mu
na ne ni no nu
oa oe oi oo ou
pa pe pi po pu
ra re ri ro ru
sa se si so su
ta te ti to tu
ua ue ui uo uu
va ve vi vo vu
wa we wi wo wu// 'wa 'we 'wi 'wo 'wu
ya ye yi yo yu// 'ya 'ye 'yi 'yo 'yu
za ze zi zo zu

DIPHTHONG CLUSTERS (25 pairs):
aa ae ai ao au
ea ee ei eo eu
ia ie ii io iu
oa oe oi oo ou
ua ue ui uo uu

LUGBARA MUSIC:
Black Harmony ("Eto") Lyrics
[INTRO:]
EMMANUEL LEDRA:
Aha, aha, anzi akuari eca'bo, ee, o'di o'di be?
Drinikulu ri kini: Ondo le 'ba ma dro ku. Ee?
[Iya mi ci, ido mi ci! 4x]
Lugbara le 'di yo!
Wupi, ii! Wi!

[CHORUS:]
EMMANUEL LEDRA
(ROBERT ADIMA):
Mama we, ma we 'do,
(Eto ni ma aza ko ala ku).
Mama eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te,
(Kani tiku ni yo).
Ma ati maye, ma we 'do,
(Eto ni ma aza ko ala ku).
Dadi eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te 'do,
(Kani tiku ni yo).
Mama we, ma we 'do,
(Eto ni ma aza ko ala ku).
Mama eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te,
(Kani tiku ni yo).
Ma ati maye, ma we 'do,
(Eto ni ma aza ko ala ku).
Dadi eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te 'do,
(Kani tiku ni yo)!

[VERSE 1:]
Eto katro afa nya tro ti eni be ra,
A 'yo 'di, eri ma okpo ni deni.
Mami la, mama eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te 'do,
(Kani 'ba zi lu MUNGU-i)!
Eto katro afa mbe tro ti eni be,
Kani eri ma okpo ni de ni ya,
A 'yo 'di, mami eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te,
(Kani tiku ni yo)!
Eto ni afa nya munyumunyu eni be ra,
Eto ni afa nya karukaru etu be zu,
A 'yo 'di, mami eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te,
(Kani 'ba zi lu MUNGU-i)!
Eto ni afa nya karukaru etu be zu,
Eto ni afa nya tikitiki eni be ra,
A 'yo 'di, mama, eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te.
Kanisi, mi iri 'di, a 'yo 'di.

LOST IN TRANSLATION (DREAMCAST):

This encyclopedic research documentation is inspired by (and dedicated to) Cynthia Letasi, aka Rejoice (The Beautyful One [Roger that Ayi Kwei Armah] and Green Riding Hood [Now Mrs. Mungufeni] born on Thursday 17th August 1995) who changed my worldview like a valuable pearl (Matthew 13:45-46), worth far above rubies (Proverbs 31:10), Kumari in Nepal (Orient) or Divine Feminine between 2001-6; made me feel like Bob Harris in Arua (not Japan) around 2003 because she was 11 years younger than me though inversely over four years ahead in speaking the language of the land we played on (If a snake, Balaam's donkey and parrots can talk, then how about stones?). This girl drained amalala ga kibuga [Luganda for: city haughtiness] out of me. To be honest, she was my first true "superhigh" crush within Arua (West Nile) after the Y2K Computer Bug Doom's Day didn't happen though I never told her my exact heartfelt reality for multiple years (Just tried to show it through kind, unapologetic treatment (loved her smile) until she confessed something unexpected, but very stunning directly to me that I will treasure until infinity). Cynthia engraved her fingerprints in my heart. Everytime I left Arua for campus in Mukono, I would feel my heart pain around Madi Okollo, but calm down in Nebbi Town. I adored how Xnthi's glowing eyes hawked at me (One of my favourite, unforgettable memories about her). Furthermore, her lookalikes included the volatile Tonto Dikeh (Nigerian), lyric-savvy Sheebah Karungi, decent Betty Mpologoma, unflinching Victoria Bagaya, worry-free Spice Diana as well as easygoing Scarlett Johansson who automatically became my all-time favourites; I knew her before all of them except maybe Betty who began her diamond singing career in 1999. Queenie, one of the lead vocalists in the Miracle Cathedral Rubaga (MCR) Proclaim Music choir also has that Cynthia aura plus Jommie Nankya, Pretty Banks, Sheila Gashumba, etc. Even though I reconnected with Xnthi (nickname I gave her meaning Numberless or Infinite value) via Facebook at the turn of the 2010s, I did not see her again physically until Tuesday 12th February 2019 walking southwards with her darkskinned female friend on the hyper-straight Arua Avenue at the Ediofe Road Junction (while I escorted my cousin to a printshop before he rushed to Onduparaka to see his sister). That was about 13 unlucky years since the last time, but only three surreal days after dreaming about her. I smiled like GOD's sun was shining on me in the afternoon before rush hour; it was the same day Onduparaka drew 0-0 with URA FC in the Ugandan top-flight league. Obsession is not a crime, just harness it like human solar electricity. Disconnection is re-direction; too much love will heal you. Love is indestructible and the Greatest Thing: I admired Cynthia's pleasant appearance and supadupa fluency at a very tender age of 6 to 11 and felt inspired to polish my own linguistics by reading Lugbara afresh since I learnt my mother tongue in Busoga (Birth to 11 years) and Buganda only by listening to Lugbara people talk despite being downgraded as backward or Lower class (Not Upper). Even though I spoke and understood it, I couldn't transcribe Lugbara well like English but when moonstruck by our Mt. Wati Road (Arua) neighbour's adorable brownskinned daughter, I was motivated to re-study this vernacular from Northwestern Uganda in black and white (using music lyrics, Bibilia, Straight Talk newspapers, brochures, internet articles, other literature, then a Fountain Publishers 2009 dictionary compiled by Willy Ngaka, Edward O'du'bua and Paul Iga Ongua [bought for a Twenty10 gig from Sarah Ojirot at Uganda Deaf Women's Organisation; my Design Manager from UCU named Edmund Asingwire (Munyankole studying Business Administration) also hired me after campus to do artwork in Lugbara for him and Jolynn Investments Limited - One Nation under GOD], exclusively English dictionaries, a Chinese Dictionary for finding word classes plus asked various people including my Parents and Facebook friends like Okitembeki Ndengendu [Enoch Opika Diku], etc). Consequently, I would perhaps grasp Lugbara the way ShaoLan Hsueh created Chineasy, then fabricate my own Synthetic Artificial Lugbara Technology (SALT), Informative Synthetic Encoder (ISE) or Ojapi Converter (Bypassing the Language Barrier). My big brother Victor Draman(i) Afayo (an I.T. Specialist based in KLA City) wanted to create a Lugbara.net website and gave me the assignment of doing research for him in the latter half of the 2000s; I decided to create my own Lugbara Culture blog (Amazing World of Lugbara) plus Facebook groups with the data around 2008, a process that inspired this vocabulary-book too. The words here are the ones used on UBC Radio (formerly Radio Uganda), Voice Of Life (probably since 1997 though I started listening in 2000), Arua One (since 2002), Koboko FM, Nile FM (since 2004), Radio Pacis, Access FM (since Monday 19th March 2018) plus BTN Television (from 2003), Westnile TV (from around 2020) and in voice commands for Airtel Uganda, et cetera. During one of the Mobile Monday sessions in KLA City, I asked a Google Executive from Germany who came to UG around 2012 if Lugbara could be added to the advanced Google Translate machine. He replied that he would forward my concern to the relevant office. Additionally, I posted a request at Wikimedia for a Lugbara Wiktionary but there weren't enough volunteer editors as is the requirement for the project to hatch; a Lugbarapedia would be the eventual outcome. Tualu.org [West Nile Portal] announced that they were working on a project of over 500 Lugbara words but I could not find their draft PDF. Nevertheless, Tualu posted a long and thorough Dictionary of Lugbara Personal Names by Alex Matua Asumi and his colleagues: Fortunate Drateru, Moses Dramiga and Proscovia Adrupiyo. There were no names listed with the letters H, Q and X, but the ones posted are more than enough; I commend them for that, a masterpiece about Ru'daza Lugbara niri (Naming in the Lugbara Tradition). Saidi Omar Dramani (Islamic University In Uganda - Mbale) also posted a PDF of his 2007 dissertation research for a Lugbarati Dictionary; it was very helpful. Fountain Publishers has Lugbarati Buku Anzini for Secondary School children, approved by Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) plus National Curriculum Dvelopment Centre (NCDC) in Kyambogo. Language has to be preserved through documentation and transmitted to anyone connected or interested because cultural heritage represents a collective identity of values, diversity, traditions and assets passed around from generation to generation eg my Parents (James + Elizabeth Dramani) to me, though my Mother departed in Twenty22 (during Volume 7). Some relatives and natives would laugh at my pronunciations or choice of words but it didn't phase me. I've never been ashamed to be called Omulugwara even if it is a byword for stupidity, Naked People (Only Karamoja was ranked before us) and backwardness among some communities. Aren't we all descendants of Noah, the Flood Survivor? One day, I bypassed two dudes on Acacia Avenue in KLA and heard them speak what sounded like broken Lugbara; I reasoned later that it might have been Madi language. Also, Aringa is like Lugbara Patois or Filipino. During May 2023, someone asked me why I study Lugbara yet it is not useful and I told him not to belittle my mother tongue like that; garbage or waste appears worthless until it's recycled and given value or repackaged: Lugbara is a multinational language spoken mainly across three colonial borders which converge at Salia Musala (about 2 hours by car northwards from Arua City). There are nine Lugbara clans in DR Congo (Kari Culture Minister - John Godo, a UPC stalwart, taught me that in 2009: When I went to Ariwara [inside DRC] the following year, I was stunned by the amount of Lugbara songs playing loudly near the markets, more than Lingala or even English). #SpeakLugbara on International Mother Tongue Day (21st February)! I strongly believe Generative AI can learn Lugbarati and make it reuseable and applicable in various fields; Deep Learning Indaba (DLI), Ambani, Artificial Intelligence for Development-Africa Network (AI4D-Africa), Hugging Face, Deep Site, Foundation for Lugbarati Development Initiative (FLUDI), Quantum ML or Lugbara GPT type-of-way. Live translation of President M7's speeches (by people like Nahori Oya, Fred Bada, John Ondoma, etc), media broadcasts (eg Getrude Abiria [Oku aka], Peace Victoria Eyotaru, etc) plus other arrangements such as crusades, conferences, weddings, funerals and so on can also be a reference... In December 2013, the Lugbarati Language Board proposed an Orthography Guide with 45 letters (including 7 vowels and 38 consonants). Tonal Lugbara literature with its many character symbols (accents, crosses, dashes or hyphens, dots, umlauts, etc) seems advanced plus crowdily complex (like the new books commissioned from DR Congo that I used to see at the Radio Pacis Printery) and scares away learners or researchers, but the simpler version shared in this wordbook is legit too... Lugbara funeral songs have been replaced with church hymns and modern Gospel music... In my Allegory of Artificial Ignorance: For machines to learn Lugbara, humans (both self-motivated and paid contributors) must train them or organise datasets for AI to decode unsupervised... Artificial Dreams (or Hallucinations) can also come true like Dreamcast... My makeshift Word Interchange Theory (WIT) from 1996 was not far-fetched afterall (feeling like Michael Jordan versus Detroit Pistons: No rules)...

When I was in Senior 5 (during 2001), I told my hostelmates that one day there will be a radio device that converts words spoken on air into text like S2T (Speech-2-Text) or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and displayed on a screen, not just lyrics as Jango Radio does, but conversations too (Inspired by the way we transcribed classroom dictation from teachers). I was labelled "mulalu [Luganda for: mad]" but dreams are not hopeless; GOD's time brings them to life for instance Google Assistant, Meet (In-chat captions), Apple's Siri, TranSay (My Favourite), Lingmo One2One, Translate 4 Me, Waverly Labs Pilot, Mesay, Langogo, Translaty, MUAMA Enence, Xiaomi AI Translator, Clik, WT2 Translator, Travis, LeTrans, Sigmo, NTT DoCoMo Translation Service, OBTranslate (from Nigeria), Logbar ili, OpenAI's ChatGPT or Whisper, Assembly AI, iFlytek, etc. Twitter (X) Spaces is also not very far from my Ongo (Ojapi Converter) vision. Zero-Shot Machine Translation tech is a model that can learn to translate words into another language without having to see any examples... Meta's Universal Speech Translator is a very ambitious AI research project that might improve language-mixing or Computer-Assisted Translation... LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) which Blake Lamoine labelled "sentient" was originally introduced as Meena in 2020. It's a conversational Large Language Model (LLM) built by Google... The Madi-Lugbara language is related to the languages of Southern Nigeria eg Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Iduma, Igala, Igbira, Gbari and Nupe. In addition, we can include Ijo and Kalabari of the Niger Delta plus the Bariba - north of Yoruba and Aja (Ewe) spoken in Southern Dahomey (Benin), Togo and South-Eastern Ghana... Some people consider Lugbara a dialect of Madi but many do not accept this theory. In fact, a survey concluded that the Ogoko, Okollo and Rigbo dialects which are considered Southern Madi or Madi (I)ndri, should be categorised as dialects of Lugbara. Besides, we share the same names, numbers and many words. The only mother tongue interference I have heard from tribemates is mixing S with SH like when saying "soap" and "shop" or -TION with -SON eg "information" becomes "informason". Some interchange D with TH eg "together" is spoken as "togeder" while "three" may be pronounced "tiri" but most times, pronunciation is okay. Exactly 11 days before I created my electronic Lugbara Dictionary in Twenty16, Google Translate switched to Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) translating whole sentences at a time rather than piece by piece which GT used to do through Statistical Machine Translation since 28th April 2006. GNMT improves the Quality of Translation because it uses an Example-based Machine Translation (EBMT) in which the system learns from millions of examples... In 2020, with support from the Hewlett Foundation, Sunbird AI commenced the African language technology project. They created a large multilingual parallel text dataset of Ugandan languages, with translations in Acholi, Ateso, Luganda, Lugbara and Runyankole. On Saturday 11th October 2025, an AI Language Model called Sunflower (developed by Sunbird) was officially launched and it is described as "the ChatGPT for Uganda"... GeoPoll (a global research organisation) has datasets in Lugbara while JEHOVAH's Witnesses translate their publications into Lugbara (Available at www.jw.org). Companies like MTN, dfcu Bank, etc also use Lugbara in their PR content... It was very unreal to discover on Sunday 10th September 2023 while googling for "Lugbara AI" that the mother of Jeff Dean (55 year old Google AI Lead then) speaks "fluent Lugbara"; she lived in West Nile when Jeffrey was 5 years old. I guess she knows that Lugbara is learnable by machines; Meta introduced its own AI on WhatsApp a few days later. I love the fact that it paraphrases websites rejected by Wikipedia. Mark Zuckerberg believes AI will make superintelligent multi-lingual connections possible for all. When you copy some of the BigAMBO [Words] in this dictionary and paste as a chat message to Meta AI like a Paul and Silas jailbreak, it can learn Ugandan Lugbara by reading patterns and fine-tuning itself to chat with you even though it used a strange vocabulary as Lugbara in Twenty24 (probably Central or West African) like TranslatorMind the following year. Sam Altman (CEO at Open AI) also revealed that you can add knowledge and create a custom GPT by uploading files in the GPTs App Store. Self-Adapting or Adjusting LLMs (SEAL or SALMs) will learn new words by themselves... Vibe-coding can also help you create Lugbara chatbots, games eg Scrabble or Pictionary plus other software for investors, traders, friends, lovers, in-laws, tourists, media watchers, music listeners, conference audiences, ethnodoxologists, migrants, refugees and those supertalented in Xenoglossy... The ISO 639-3 Language Code for Lugbara is lgg while the Glottocode is lugb1240, but I wish the language code for Lugbara was simply Lbr (which is my Dictionary logo in a circle); it corresponds better though already taken by Lohorung language (endangered Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nepal). The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!

[GODisgreat!]

(CC) AIKO (Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Organiser) 2003-Now

PARAMETERS:

Consonants do not have to be repeated when writing Lugbara eg Mekki = Meki; Oluffe = Olufe; Owaffa = Owafa; etc, but repeating vowels means something or becomes ambiguously redundant eg leta-a [in love]...

Every Lugbara word ends with a vowel eg simu [phone]...

In consonant clusters DJ, GB and KP, the first letter is silent eg odji = oji [wash]; gbanda = banda [cassava]; okpo = opo [power]. Meanwhile MV is pronounced NV eg omve [call] while NZ is pronounced NJ eg Inzikuru...

Letter C is always pronounced CH as in Church eg candi = chandi [sorrow]...

Letters Q and X are not used in Lugbara, but four unique ones are added with an apostrophe to indicate the sound H eg 'B = Bha, etc meaning the Simplified Lugbara Alphabet has 28 letters...

Some words have more than one meaning depending on the tone of the vowel(s) eg ai can mean salt, pray, beg or Atifiso Intelijensi, etc...

Various Lugbara dialects (Aringa, Ayivu, Maracha, Madi-Okolo, Terego, Vura, Zaki, etc) may pronounce words differently eg nya (in Ayivu) = na (in Terego) [eat]

SIMPLIFIED LUGBARA (The words below are exactly 140 though possible English meanings are so much more. Only letters Q and X are missing, but four new ones are added with an apostrophe representing the sound H):

aa ae ai ao au

ba be bi bo bu// 'ba 'be 'bi 'bo 'bu

ca ce ci co cu

da de di do du// 'da 'de 'di 'do 'du

ea ee ei eo eu

fa fe fi fo fu

ga ge gi go gu

ha he hi ho hu

ia ie ii io iu

ja je ji jo ju

ka ke ki ko ku

la le li lo lu

ma me mi mo mu

na ne ni no nu

oa oe oi oo ou

pa pe pi po pu

ra re ri ro ru

sa se si so su

ta te ti to tu

ua ue ui uo uu

va ve vi vo vu

wa we wi wo wu// 'wa 'we 'wi 'wo 'wu

ya ye yi yo yu// 'ya 'ye 'yi 'yo 'yu

za ze zi zo zu

DIPHTHONG CLUSTERS (25 pairs):

aa ae ai ao au

ea ee ei eo eu

ia ie ii io iu

oa oe oi oo ou

ua ue ui uo uu

LUGBARA MUSIC:

Black Harmony ("Eto") Lyrics

[INTRO:]

EMMANUEL LEDRA:

Aha, aha, anzi akuari eca'bo, ee, o'di o'di be?

Drinikulu ri kini: Ondo le 'ba ma dro ku. Ee?

[Iya mi ci, ido mi ci! 4x]

Lugbara le 'di yo!

Wupi, ii! Wi!

[CHORUS:]

EMMANUEL LEDRA

(ROBERT ADIMA):

Mama we, ma we 'do,

(Eto ni ma aza ko ala ku).

Mama eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te,

(Kani tiku ni yo).

Ma ati maye, ma we 'do,

(Eto ni ma aza ko ala ku).

Dadi eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te 'do,

(Kani tiku ni yo).

Mama we, ma we 'do,

(Eto ni ma aza ko ala ku).

Mama eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te,

(Kani tiku ni yo).

Ma ati maye, ma we 'do,

(Eto ni ma aza ko ala ku).

Dadi eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te 'do,

(Kani tiku ni yo)!

[VERSE 1:]

Eto katro afa nya tro ti eni be ra,

A 'yo 'di, eri ma okpo ni deni.

Mami la, mama eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te 'do,

(Kani 'ba zi lu MUNGU-i)!

Eto katro afa mbe tro ti eni be,

Kani eri ma okpo ni de ni ya,

A 'yo 'di, mami eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te,

(Kani tiku ni yo)!

Eto ni afa nya munyumunyu eni be ra,

Eto ni afa nya karukaru etu be zu,

A 'yo 'di, mami eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te,

(Kani 'ba zi lu MUNGU-i)!

Eto ni afa nya karukaru etu be zu,

Eto ni afa nya tikitiki eni be ra,

A 'yo 'di, mama, eto tiniku, cika ma eri dro te.

Kanisi, mi iri 'di, a 'yo 'di.