A Grammar of Vai a Grammar of Vai
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MANDE LANGUAGES INTRODUCTION Mande Languages
Article details Article author(s): Dmitry Idiatov Table of contents: Introduction General Overviews Textbooks Bibliographies Journals and Book Series Conferences Text Collections and Corpora Classifications Historical and Comparative Linguistics Western Mande Central Mande Southwestern Mande and Susu- Yalunka Soninke-Bozo, Samogo, and Bobo Southeastern Mande Eastern Mande Southern Mande Phonetics Phonology Morphosyntax Morphology Syntax Language Contact and Areal Linguistics Writing Systems MANDE LANGUAGES INTRODUCTION Mande languages are spoken across much of inland West Africa up to the northwest of Nigeria as their eastern limit. The center of gravity of the Mande-speaking world is situated in the southwest of Mali and the neighboring regions. There are approximately seventy Mande languages. Mande languages have long been recognized as a coherent group. Thanks to both a sufficient number of clear lexical correspondences and the remarkable uniformity in basic morphosyntax, the attribution of a given language to Mande is usually straightforward. The major subdivision within Mande is between Western Mande, which comprises the majority of both languages and speakers, and Southeastern Mande (aka Southern Mande or Eastern Mande, which are also the names for the two subbranches of Southeastern Mande), a comparatively small but linguistically diverse and geographically dispersed group. Traditionally, Mande languages have been classified as one of the earliest offshoots of Niger-Congo. However, their external affiliation still remains a working hypothesis rather than an established fact. One of the most well-known Mande languages is probably Bamana (aka Bambara), as well as some of its close relatives, which in nonlinguistic publications are sometimes indiscriminately referred to as Mandingo. Mande languages are written in a variety of scripts ranging from Latin-based or Arabic-based alphabets to indigenously developed scripts, both syllabic and alphabetic. -
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INFORMATION TO USERS This material was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the original submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or patterns which may appear on this reproduction. 1. The sign or "target" for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting thru an image and duplicating adjacent pages to insure you complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a large round black mark, it is an indication that the photographer suspected that the copy may have moved during exposure and thus cause a blurred image. You will find a good image of the page in the adjacent frame. 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., was part of the material being photographed the photographer followed a definite method in "sectioning" the material. It is customary to begin photoing at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue photoing from left to right in equal sections with a small overlap. If necessary, sectioning is continued again — beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete. 4. The majority of users indicate that the textual content is of greatest value, however, a somewhat higher quality reproduction could be made from "photographs" if essential to the understanding of the dissertation. -
Mandenkan, 63 | 2020, « Numéro 63 » [En Ligne], Mis En Ligne Le 06 Juillet 2020, Consulté Le 08 Juillet 2021
Mandenkan Bulletin semestriel d’études linguistiques mandé 63 | 2020 Numéro 63 Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/mandenkan/2183 DOI : 10.4000/mandenkan.2183 ISSN : 2104-371X Éditeur Llacan UMR 8135 CNRS/Inalco Référence électronique Mandenkan, 63 | 2020, « Numéro 63 » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 06 juillet 2020, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/mandenkan/2183 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ mandenkan.2183 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021. Les contenus de Mandenkan sont mis à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International. 1 SOMMAIRE Dictionnaire goo – français Ekaterina Aplonova On latent nasals in Samogo Laura McPherson Vers une lexicographie mandingue sur la base de grands corpus annotés Valentin Vydrin Kastenholz, Raimund. A corpus dictionary of Vai. Klingenheben’s collection of lexical data (Archiv Afrikanistischer Manuskripte 9). Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2019. Alexandra Vydrina Mandenkan, 63 | 2020 2 Dictionnaire goo – français Goo-French dictionary Гоо-французский словарь Ekaterina Aplonova Introduction 1. Composition du dictionnaire 1 Le goo est une langue peu dotée : il n’existe pas de publications en goo, sauf deux livrets de contes traditionnels transcrits par moi en collaboration avec mon assistant Roger Goh Duané. De plus, une version simplifiée de ce dictionnaire a été diffusée en Côte d’Ivoire, à Zagwee, le plus grand village des Goo. Quelques publications académiques sur le goo sont accessibles en russe (Vydrin 2014) et il existe aussi deux articles en français : une description préliminaire de la langue (Vydrin 2013) et une description du système TAM (Aplonova 2017). -
The Evolution of Linguistic Diversity
The Evolution of Linguistic Diversity Daniel Nettle Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD University College London 1996 ProQuest Number: 10044366 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10044366 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the causes and consequences of diversity in human language. It is divided into three sections, each of which addresses a different aspect of the topic. The first section uses computer simulations to examine various mechanisms which may produce diversity in language: imperfect learning, geographical isolation, selection on the basis of social affiliation, and functional selection amongst linguistic variants. It is concluded that social and functional selection by speakers provide the main motive forces for the divergence of languages. The second section examines the factors influencing the geographical distribution of languages in the world. By far the most important is the ecological regime in which people live. Seasonal climates produce large ethnolinguistic groups because people form large networks of exchange to mitigate the subsistence risk to which they are exposed. -
Vai (Also Vei, Vy, Gallinas, Gallines) Is a Western Mande Langu
Distribution of complexities in the Vai script Andrij Rovenchak1, Lviv Ján Mačutek2, Bratislava Charles Riley3, New Haven, Connecticut Abstract. In the paper, we analyze the distribution of complexities in the Vai script, an indigenous syllabic writing system from Liberia. It is found that the uniformity hypothesis for complexities fails for this script. The models using Poisson distribution for the number of components and hyper-Poisson distribution for connections provide good fits in the case of the Vai script. Keywords: Vai script, syllabary, script analysis, complexity. 1. Introduction Our study concentrates mainly on the complexity of the Vai script. We use the composition method suggested by Altmann (2004). It has some drawbacks (e. g., as mentioned by Köhler 2008, letter components are not weighted by their lengths, hence a short straight line in the letter G contributes to the letter complexity by 2 points, the same score is attributed to each of four longer lines of the letter M), but they are overshadowed by several important advantages (it is applicable to all scripts, it can be done relatively easily without a special software). And, of course, there is no perfect method in empirical science. Some alternative methods are mentioned in Altmann (2008). Applying the Altmann’s composition method, a letter is decomposed into its components (points with complexity 1, straight lines with complexity 2, arches not exceeding 180 degrees with complexity 3, filled areas4 with complexity 2) and connections (continuous with complexity 1, crisp with complexity 2, crossing with complexity 3). Then, the letter complexity is the sum of its components and connections complexities. -
Person Marking in South-West Mande Languages: a Tentative Reconstruction1
Mandenkan No. 46, 2010, pp. 3-48 Person Marking in South-West Mande Languages: 1 a Tentative Reconstruction Kirill Babaev Institute of Linguistics for the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow The article presents a brief comparative analysis of systems of person marking in the six languages of the South-Western group of the Mande family and a tentative reconstruction of the proto- language person markers. The paper includes data from the newly- discovered Zialo language recorded in 2010 by the Russian linguistic expedition to West Africa. Keywords: personal pronouns, person marking, comparative analysis, reconstruction, Mande languages, Niger-Congo languages 0. Introduction The general idea of the present paper is to conduct an analysis of the systems of person marking in the South-Western Mande (further referred to as SWM) languages and to deliver a tentative reconstruction of the original Proto-SWM system. So far, no attempt of such a reconstruction has been published. The area populated by speakers of SWM languages lies in the savanna and rainforest zones of West Africa. The group encompasses the following languages: 1. Bandi (French bandi) is spoken by about 100 thousand people (2001) in Lofa county in the northern part of Liberia. Bandi is rather homogeneous: the only variety with significant phonological peculiarities is the dialect of Yawiazu. 2. Kpelle (or Kpese, French guerzé) is in use by nearly 800 thousand speakers equally distributed between Guinea (N’Zérékoré province) and northern Liberia. There are about a dozen of dialects of Kpelle that vary greatly: the common distinction is drawn between the Guinean and Liberian dialect clusters. -
West African Manuscripts in Arabic and African Languages and Digital Preservation
West African Manuscripts in Arabic and African Languages and Digital Preservation Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History West African Manuscripts in Arabic and African Languages and Digital Preservation Fallou Ngom Subject: Historical Preservation and Cultural Heritage, Intellectual History, West Africa Online Publication Date: Jun 2017 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.123 Abstract and Keywords West African manuscripts are numerous and varied in forms and contents. There are thousands of them across West Africa. A significant portion of them are documents written in Arabic and Ajami (African languages written in Arabic script). They deal with both religious and nonreligious subjects. The development of these manuscript traditions dates back to the early days of Islam in West Africa, in the 11th century. In addition to these Arabic and Ajami manuscripts, there have been others written in indigenous scripts. These include those in the Vai script invented in Liberia; Tifinagh, the traditional writing system of the Amazigh (Berber) people; and the N’KO script invented in Guinea for Mande languages. While the writings in indigenous scripts are rare less numerous and widespread, they nonetheless constitute an important component of West Africa’s written heritage. Though the efforts devoted to the preservation of West African manuscripts are limited compared to other world regions, interest in preserving them has increased. Some of the initial preservation efforts of West African manuscripts are the collections of colonial officers. Academics later supplemented these collections. These efforts resulted in important print and digital repositories of West African manuscripts in Africa, Europe, and America. Until recently, most of the cataloguing and digital preservation efforts of West African manuscripts have focused on those written in Arabic. -
Paths Into Script Formation in the Ancient Mediterranean Edited by Silvia Ferrara and Miguel Valério
STUDI MICENEI ED EGEO-ANATOLICI NUOVA SERIE SUPPLEMENTO 1 Paths into Script Formation in the Ancient Mediterranean edited by Silvia Ferrara and Miguel Valério Edizioni Quasar STUDI MICENEI ED EGEO-ANATOLICI NUOVA SERIE SUPPLEMENTO 1 è una pubblicazione del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Roma ISBN 978-88-7140-898-9 Direttore / Editor-in-chief Anna D’Agata (CNR, Roma) Undertaken with the assistance of Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP), Philadelphia * Printed with the support of Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Düsseldorf * The editors are grateful to Judith Weingarten for revising the English of the original manuscript Immagine di copertina / Cover illustration Writing Travels the Sea, drawing by Miguel Valério based on signs from the Cretan Hieroglyphic, Byblos and Anatolian Hieroglyphic scripts Stampa e distribuzione / Printing and distribution Edizioni Quasar di Severino Tognon s.r.l. Via Ajaccio 41-43 – 00198 Roma tel. +39 0685358444, fax +39 0685833591 email: [email protected] www.edizioniquasar.it © 2018 CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Autorizzazione Tribunale di Roma nr. 288/2014 del 31.12.2014 SOMMARIO Anna Lucia D’Agata Preface 7 Silvia Ferrara, Miguel Valério Introduction 9 Image-Bound Scripts at the Inception of Writing 1. Roeland P.-J.E. Decorte The Origins of Bronze Age Aegean Writing: Linear A, Cretan Hieroglyphic and a New Proposed Pathway of Script Formation 13 2. Mark Weeden Hieroglyphic Writing on Old Hittite Seals and Sealings? Towards a Material Basis for Further Research 51 Adaptations: Between Pictorialism and Schematism 3. Juan Pablo Vita, José Ángel Zamora The Byblos Script 75 4. Miguel Valério Cypro-Minoan: An Aegean-derived Syllabary on Cyprus (and Elsewhere) 103 5. -
A Diachronic Comparison of the Vai Script of Liberia (1834–2005)
Tykhostup, O and Kelly, P. A Diachronic Comparison of the Vai Script of Liberia (1834–2005). Journal of Open Humanities Data, 2018; 4: 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.10 DATA PAPER A Diachronic Comparison of the Vai Script of Liberia (1834–2005) Olena Tykhostup1 and Piers Kelly2 1 Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, DE 2 The Mint research group, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, DE Corresponding author: Olena Tykhostup ([email protected]) This dataset provides the first comprehensive diachronic comparison of the Vai script of Liberia, as derived from sixteen sources dated between 1834 and 2005. The Vai syllabary was invented by non-literate speakers of a Mande language and is of interest to scholars in the fields of writing and cultural transmission as an emergent writing system. Script samples that entered the dataset were retrieved from a wide variety of published manuscripts. The compiled dataset tracks the evolution of the Vai script via archival records and has reuse potential across various fields of research. Keywords: Vai script; writing systems Context periods [13, 14, 15, 3]. However, their comparison charts The Vai writing system is a syllabary representing selected only a handful of historical sources, or they syllables and morphemes of Vai, a Mande language compared a small subset of the syllabary. Svend Holsoe, spoken by approximately 167,000 people in Liberia late professor emeritus of anthropology at the University and neighbouring Sierra Leone [1]. What makes the Vai of Delaware and scholar of Liberia, began compiling a script especially interesting for scholars of both writing more expansive comparative chart but was unable to and cultural transmission is that it was invented by non- complete the work before he passed away [Charles Riley, literates and has been continuously transmitted to the pers. -
Outlines of a Grammar of the Vei Language, Together with a Vei
This is a reproduction of a library book that was digitized by Google as part of an ongoing effort to preserve the information in books and make it universally accessible. https://books.google.com OUTLINES OF A GRAMMAR OF THE VEI LANGUAGE, TOGETHER WITH A VEI-ENGLISH VOCABULARY. AND AN ACCOUNT OF THE DISCOVERY AND NATURE OF THE VEI MODE OF SYLLABIC WRITING. BY S^W. KOELLE, CHURCH MISSIONARY. LONDON CHURCH MISSIONARY HOUSE, SALISBURY SQUARE. 1854. PL Republished in association with the African ^ f I Languages Review of Fourah Bay College 19C8 entoitjae re e£ evbs alfiaroi irav eOvos av6pdrKu>v KaroiKeiv eiri trav to vpoaairov rtjs 7>}r- St. Paul,. Acts xvii. 26. S. B. N. - GB: 576.11611.4 Republished in 1968 by Gregg International Publishers Limited 1 Westmead, Farnborough, Hants., England Printed in Germany CONTENTS. PAGE Preface i — vi CHAPTER I. §. 1. Ethnological Relationship of the Vei Language, 1 I. Affinity with Indo-European, Semitic, and Afri can Roots 1 II. Languages belonging to the Manden-ga Stock. 10 III. Illustration of peculiarities of the Vei Language. 11 CHAPTER II. %. 2. Sounds and Orthography 14 CHAPTER III. Etymology of the Parts of Speech. 3. General 19 §. 4. Etymology of Substantives 19 §. 5. Etymology of Pronouns 23 I. Personal and Possessive Pronouns 23 II. Reflective Pronoun 24 III. Demonstrative Pronouns 24 IV. Interrogative Pronouns 26 V. Reciprocal Pronoun 26 §. 6. Etymology of Adjectives 26 %. 7. Etymology of Numerals 27 CONTENTS. PAGE §. 8. Etymology of Verbs 32 §. 9. Etymology of Adverbs 35 §. 10. Etymology of Postpositions 38 §. 11. Etymology of Conjunctions 39 §. -
The Story of [W]: an Exercise in the Phonetic (Eds.)
The story of [w]: He notes that additional evidence on the phonological identity of such double stops An exercise in the phonetic explanation may be gained by observing how they pattern in phonological rules, e.g., the labiovelar for sound patterns stops in Kpelle and Yoruba must be velars since preceding nasals assimilating to their place of articulation show up as [ ] not [m]. In languages where labiovelars pattern John Ohala and James Lorentz as both labials and velars, e.g., the /w/ in Fula, he proposes that there must be two /w/'s, one phonologically labial and one velar. University of California, Berkeley Central to the taxonomic generative position is the not-always-clearly-defined distinction between the phonetic and phonological (or "underlying") character of Impressionistically-based, pre-theoretical taxonomies, such as many developing speech sounds. We will comment on this in more detail below. scientific disciplines use, are a mixed blessing. On the one hand they serve the We will show that the question of whether labiovelars are primarily labial or essential, useful function of helping to organize what would otherwise be an unwieldy velar is a pseudo-problem necessitated by the largely taxonomic approach taken by mass of unrelated data but on the other hand they tend to petrify the thinking of those phonologists. We will do this in two ways. First, by demonstrating that the using the taxonomies, making it difficult for them to deal with the data except insofar 'pigeonhole-filling' approach does not yield convincing results and, second, by as they fit into the pigeonholes which have been set up. -
Some Terms from Liberian Speech
Cornell University ILR School DigitalCommons@ILR Faculty Publications - Labor Relations, Law, and History Labor Relations, Law, and History 1-1-1979 Some Terms From Liberian Speech Michael Evan Gold Cornell University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cbpubs Part of the Linguistic Anthropology Commons Thank you for downloading an article from DigitalCommons@ILR. Support this valuable resource today! This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Labor Relations, Law, and History at DigitalCommons@ILR. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications - Labor Relations, Law, and History by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@ILR. For more information, please contact catherwood- [email protected]. If you have a disability and are having trouble accessing information on this website or need materials in an alternate format, contact [email protected] for assistance. Some Terms From Liberian Speech Abstract Written by Warren L. d’Azevedo as revised and enlarged by Michael Evan Gold. Disciplines Linguistic Anthropology Comments http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cbpubs/10/ This article is available at DigitalCommons@ILR: https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cbpubs/10 . '? / / v. ' / ~. ,_:)t/1<.t C Ct~ G,A';Z. .'-L l,~O;;:70/S:'-- , ,i ~.~~~~iJ fJ£ 0 3 c./'I Z- Some Terms From Liberian Speech Lr 0&'7 by /q7i Warren L. d'Azevedo As Revised and Englarged by Michael Evan Gold 1979 Professor d'Azevedo's Introduction Like many rapidly changing countries in the world, Liberia's unique history and complex society has created a culture of great variety and richness.