African Languages and Societies Commons^™

Why Dogs Have No Names (Part 2), George Tucker Childs

Mani, a Disappearing Language of Sierra Leone and Guinea

Part 2 of "Why dogs have no names," as told by Kaba Camara in Palatougou. The audio version of this folk tale can be found here.

A Man And His Four Wives (Part 2), George Tucker Childs

Mani, a Disappearing Language of Sierra Leone and Guinea

The second of four parts of the telling of the folk tale "A man and his four wives."

A Man And His Four Wives (Part 3), George Tucker Childs

Mani, a Disappearing Language of Sierra Leone and Guinea

The third of four parts of the telling of the folk tale "A man and his four wives."

The S-Aux-O-V-Other Syntagm In Atlantic, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

As the largest language phylum in the world and the most geographically widespread (Williamson & Blench 2000), Niger-Congo understandably exhibits some variation at all grammatical levels. Basic word order stands as no exception to this generalization, and there have been partisans for both an SOY and an SVO reconstructed word order. Gensler 1994 attempts to reconcile the two by claiming that neither proposal is correct; he suggests that both SOY and SVO are derived from Proto-Niger-Congo *S-AUX-O-V-Other. Because of the pattern's "quirkiness" (being found virtually nowhere else in the world) and because it is so widely attested in geographically widely …

Mani History, George Tucker Childs

Mani, a Disappearing Language of Sierra Leone and Guinea

Audio and transcriptions of an interview with Morlaye Boyo Keita, who describes the history of the Mani people, and how they came to be situated in their current location

The Atlantic And Mande Groups Of Niger-Congo: A Study In Contrasts, A Study In Interaction, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents the effects of long-lasting and pervasive contact between two major language groups of Niger-Congo, both of which diverged relatively early from the parent stock. The influence has been asymmetrical: Mande has more deeply influenced Atlantic than vice versa. The details come from two profoundly influenced languages, Kisi, now completely surrounded by Mande, and Mmani, a closely related language, from which all speakers have switched to the Mande language Soussou.

Le contact entre les locuteurs des langues atlantiques et les locuteurs des langues mande est de longue durée et profond. Les deux ensembles sont très différents typologiquement. À …

Borrowings Into Kisi As Evidence Of Mande Expansionism And Influence, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Strong claims have been made as to the influence of Mande languages on the languages of the Atlantic Group. This paper analyzes Mande borrowings in one Atlantic language in order to understand the nature of that influence. The Atlantic language of focus is Kisi, a member of the Southern Branch, spoken primarily in Guinea. The Kisi people have separated from their closest relatives on the Atlantic Coast in historic times, probably due to the second Mande expansionist wave of the sixteenth century at the collapse of the Mali Empire. Today the Kisi are completely surrounded and interpenetrated by speakers of …

Predicate Clefting In Kisi, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper examines the focus construction of Kisi, an Atlantic language (Niger-Congo) spoken by some half a million people primarily in Guinea but also in nearby Sierra Leone and Liberia. The data come from work done in 1983-84 on the southern dialect spoken in the Foya area of Upper Lofa County, Liberia. Of particular interest is the presence of what has been known in the literature as "predicate clefting'', e.g., DeGraff 1996. Its interactions and complementarity with negation, an inherently focusing construction (Marchese 1983), evince some complexity. Despite some superficial similarity, however, substantial syntactic differences exist. More similarities exist in …

Where Have All The Ideophones Gone? The Death Of A Word Category In Zulu, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The first step in the discussion is to demonstrate that ideophones constitute a word class, a relatively uncontroversial claim for Southern Bantu. The second is to show that native speakers of Zulu do not share equal knowledge of ideophones and how this knowledge correlates with social factors. Measured knowledge of ideophones is evaluated against the social factors of age, sex, education, residence patterns, and rusticity, a parameter to be elaborated below. The conclusion is that just as for pidgins and creoles (Childs 1994) the knowledge and use of ideophones serves as a reliable barometer for language typing and language change, …

Language Typology And Reconstruction: The Prenasalized Stops Of Kisi, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The findings of language typologists can contribute to understanding synchronic variation where no diachronic facts are available. By establishing what happens universally, one can extrapolate as to the past and perhaps as to the future of a language on the basis of synchronic evidence. One approach within such a framework concentrates on a typologically unusual or marked feature on the assumption that its derivation may be established from less highly marked features. This paper discusses the typologically unusual prenasalized stops of Kisi, a Mel language belonging to the Southern Branch of (West) Atlantic. The approach adopted here is based on …

Lexicography In West Africa: Preparing A Bilingual Kisi-English Dictionary, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents some of the issues involved in preparing a bilingual dictionary for Kisi, an underdocumented language spoken in West Africa. Because the language possesses little in the way of literacy materials, fundamental issues as to orthography, word division, etc., had to be considered. In addition, no grammar of the language (or its closest congeners) was available and thus basic grammatical analysis had to be performed simultaneously. I briefly consider some of these problems, discussing the use of the lexical data base programs known as LEXWARE. I then focus on the specific problems raised by the expressive word class …

Nasality In Kisi, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents the various manifestations of nasality in Kisi, a Mel language belonging to the Southern Branch of (West) Atlantic. In this language, as in many West African languages, nasality plays a prominent role in the language's sound system and grammar. Nasality in Kisi is realized phonetically on both consonants and vowels and phonologically on consonants. There are even cases of 'spontaneous nasalization', situations in which there is no nearby nasal segment to contribute the nasal feature. Nasality may also function in the morphology and is used expressively for emphasis. The findings reported here will be of use to …

Where Do Ideophones Come From?, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper begins with an analysis of ideophones in Kisi (West Atlantic, Guinea). This examination leads to consideration of the diachrony of ideophones, but because of the lack of data with any real time depth, we are limited to finding clues in the synchronic data. This study looks first at verbs, the class of words which Kisi ideophones resemble most closely. Such is also the case in other African languages, where ideophones can often be analyzed as verbs, as has been done for several Southern Bantu languages. I then demonstrate how Kisi ideophones can be derived from verbs, illustrating several …

The Political Evolution Of Cameroon, 1884-1961, Victor Julius Ngoh

Dissertations and Theses

The research problem is an analysis of the political evolution of Cameroon from a colony in 1884 to an independent state in 1961. It involves not only the transition of the country from a colony to an independent state per se, but also the various factors which kindled the rise of nationalism in the country. The problem is rendered more interesting and complex by the fact that the country had, at different times in its colonial history, been a German colony, as well as British and French colonies – although technically Britain and France administered their respective portions of the …

Restitution Of Cultural Material To Africa, E. Kofi Agorsah

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

As African nations search for means to establish viable and authentic cultural identities, an increasing number of demands have been made on European Governments to return art objects, archives and antiquities taken during the colonial era. In a sense these demands come as attempts to turn back history, the history which denuded Africa of its culture in order to impress the fact of colonial subjugation.

For centuries, the movement of African art and antiquities has been an outward flow and as thousands of military and political conquerors, administrators, missionaries and adventurers took home souvenirs of their African experiences, and with …

"Nkrumism: The Correct Ideology For The African Revolution", Stokely Carmichael

Special Collections: Oregon Public Speakers

No abstract provided.