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This is a comprehensive manual intended to teach students the basics of communicating in Swahili at an elementary level. It is designed to teach major communicative skills such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Moreover, the text strives to impart fundamental knowledge about East African and Swahili culture.
The Sabaki languages form a major Bantu subgroup and are spoken by 35 million East Africans in Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and the Comoro Islands. The authors provide a historical/comparative treatment of Swahili (and other Sabaki languages), an account of the relationship of Swahili to Sabaki and to other Bantu languages, and some data on contemporary Sabaki languages. Data sets, appendices, maps, and figures present essential information on phonology, lexical makeup, and tense/aspect morphology. The final chapter is a synthesis describing the linguistic and historical relationship of the Sabaki dialects to each other and to hypothetical proto-stages.
For more than a quarter of a century the Annual conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) has provided a lively forum for the confrontation of ideas on theoretical linguistics with descriptive data on African languages.
This is a comprehensive manual intended to teach students the basics of communicating in Swahili at an elementary level.
This volume describes aspects of word- and sentence-formation in Nuuchahnulth (formerly known as Nootka), a language spoken on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Aspects included are polysynthetic word formation, word classes, and clause structure. The morphosyntactic regularities are examined in the context of general structural characteristics of the language in an attempt to contribute to the language an internally and typologically accurate understanding of Nuuchahnulth morphosyntactic structures.
This study advances a new approach to the history of Russian aspect, integrating recent work on aspectology with contemporary theories of language changes and development. Using data from five Old Russian texts, the author traces the development of the aspectual opposition from its early lexical roots to the sixteenth century, when contextual and discourse concerns came to the fore.
00 This work examines the morphological and syntactic dimensions of ergativity (i.e., an intransitive subject is treated in the same manner as a transitive object and differently from the transitive subject) in Coast Tsimshian (Sm'algyax). This language is very highly morphologically ergative and the distribution of ergativity is conditioned by several different factors that are related through their coding of transitivity. Syntactically, the language is not highly ergative, but none of the cross-linguistic definitions of subject can account for the ergativity that does exist. This work examines the morphological and syntactic dimensions of ergativity (i.e., an intransitive subject is treated in the same manner as a transitive object and differently from the transitive subject) in Coast Tsimshian (Sm'algyax). This language is very highly morphologically ergative and the distribution of ergativity is conditioned by several different factors that are related through their coding of transitivity. Syntactically, the language is not highly ergative, but none of the cross-linguistic definitions of subject can account for the ergativity that does exist.
This work provides the first truly comprehensive and systematic reconstruction of proto-Afroasiatic (proto-Afrasian). It rigorously applies, throughout, the established canon and techniques of the historical-comparative method. It also fully incorporates the most up-to-date evidence from the distinctive African branches of the family, Cushitic, Chadic, and Omotic. Using concrete and specific evidence and argument, the author proposes full vowel and consonant reconstructions and a provisional reckoning of tone. Each aspect of these reconstructions is substantiated in detail in an extensive etymological vocabulary of more than 1000 roots. The results, while confirming some previous views on proto-Afroasiatic (proto-Afrasian), revise or overturn many others, and add much that is new.
This book introduces beginning students and non-specialists to the diversity and richness of African languages. In addition to providing a solid background to the study of African languages, the book presents linguistic phenomena not found in European languages. A goal of this book is to stimulate interest in African languages and address the question: What makes African languages so fascinating? The orientation adopted throughout the book is a descriptive one, which seeks to characterize African languages in a relatively succinct and neutral manner, and to make the facts accessible to a wide variety of readers. The author's lengthy acquaintance with the continent and field experiences in we...
This innovative handbook takes a fresh look at the currently underestimated linguistic diversity of Africa, the continent with the largest number of languages in the world. It covers the major domains of linguistics, offering both a representative picture of Africa’s linguistic landscape as well as new and at times unconventional perspectives. The focus is not so much on exhaustiveness as on the fruitful relationship between African and general linguistics and the contributions the two domains can make to each other. This volume is thus intended for readers with a specific interest in African languages and also for students and scholars within the greater discipline of linguistics.