Answer a question

Where something about a saying is not settled, the card says so, and says what would settle it.

An Asante saying: the traveller may tell all he has seen, but he cannot explain all. Rattray, who put it into English in 1916, gives no note on when it is said: a caution to the man just back and full of news, or a modest thing a traveller says about himself. The two are opposite in the mouth and identical on the page. Others are smaller: which of two readings a collector meant.

When an answer holds, the card changes. It carries your name from then on if you would like it to, and the answer alone if you would not. We ask, and the choice is yours. Teltu names the people who wrote these sayings down, and it puts nobody’s name on anything without asking. We owe the same to anyone who helps now.

Were we wrong

An open question is something we knew we did not know. A mistake is something we got wrong without knowing: a date, a reading, an attribution, a word. If you see one, tell us. We would rather be corrected than be wrong in public, and a corrected card says so.

Make a card

If you hold the rights to what you work from, your own collection, your fieldwork, a text you edited, you can make a card yourself. That material may have no other way in. A tradition with no book in the public domain reaches Teltu only through the person who collected it.

You write it, we set it, and your name is on it. The form of the card is ours: its shape, how a source is cited, how an open question is stated. The body is yours, and it is a card, not an article: what the saying means, when it is said, a word-by-word gloss, where it comes from, and an observation. The observation is what makes a card worth reading: two facts set side by side, not an argument, and the reader draws the conclusion. Anything longer goes behind a tap, as an extension of the card rather than a replacement for it.

We check every claim against the source, as we do our own. You keep your rights, and we show the card with your permission. Reading a few cards first is the fastest way to see what we mean, and we will send you some.

The template is not built yet. We would rather build it with the first people who want to do this. support@teltu.app

Your work, read

We want Teltu to be a place where scholars and educators can put their work in front of people and be credited for it, without the apparatus that usually sits in the way. A linguist with forty years on a language can publish a card here, and it will be read by more people than the article was. There is no fee and no waiting on a committee. The one check is ours: every claim against its source, as for our own cards. Your name goes on the work, in front of readers who would never otherwise have found it.

Too much of this has come to be about formalities and liability rather than about recognising the people who did the work. We would rather err the other way.

Scholars read free

Write to us from a university address and the app is open to you, without charge. One answer from someone who knows a tradition is worth more to this work than a subscription.

Departments and libraries

If you teach a class that would use this, write and we’ll open it for your students. No charge. Use the cards however is useful: read them together, set them as writing exercises, build on them. You don’t need to ask. Libraries are a bigger thing, so write and we’ll find something that works.

We would rather your students had this than not.

If you hold a collection

Libraries, archives, mission societies, university presses and publishers hold what we cannot reach: a manuscript nobody has scanned, a collection still in copyright, a single page that would settle a question. If you hold something and would consider letting it reach more readers, write to us.

We are small and starting out, and what we can offer now is care rather than money: proper credit on the card itself, the collection shown as it was printed, and the work put in front of people who would never otherwise open the book. Where we can pay, we will, and as Teltu grows, that is where the money goes first. Anyone who works in one of these institutions reads free.

support@teltu.app

Thank you

I would not be who I am without my education. Most of what is on these cards exists because somebody spent a career on a language or a people that few were paying attention to: the collectors, the editors, the ones who wrote the dictionary nobody asked for. Teltu is made out of their work, and I am grateful for it.

Michael M.

support@teltu.app