Download or read book A Grammar of Warrongo written by Tasaku Tsunoda and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-12-23 with total page 783 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Warrongo is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language that used to be spoken in northeast Australia. This volume is largely based on the rich data recorded from the last fluent speaker. It details the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language. In particular, it provides a truly scrutinizing description of syntactic ergativity - a phenomenon that is rare among the world's language. It also shows that, unlike some other Australian languages, Warrongo has noun phrases that are configurational. Overall this volume shows what can be documented of a language that has only one speaker.

Download or read book Morphology and Language History written by Claire Bowern and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume aims to make a contribution to codifying the methods and practices linguists use to recover language history, focussing predominantly on historical morphology. The volume includes studies on a wide range of languages: not only Indo-European, but also Austronesian, Sinitic, Mon-Khmer, Basque, one Papuan language family, as well as a number of Australian families. Few collections are as cross-linguistic as this, reflecting the new challenges which have emerged from the study of languages outside those best known from historical linguistics. The contributors illustrate shared methodological and theoretical issues concerning genetic relatedness (that is, the use of morphological evidence for classification and subgrouping), reconstruction and processes of change with a diverse range of data. The volume is in honour of Harold Koch, who has long combined innovative research on understudied languages with methodological rigour and codification of practices within the discipline.

Download or read book Loanwords in the World s Languages written by Martin Haspelmath and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 1104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This landmark publication in comparative linguistics is the first comprehensive work to address the general issue of what kinds of words tend to be borrowed from other languages. The authors have assembled a unique database of over 70,000 words from 40 languages from around the world, 18,000 of which are loanwords. This database allows the authors to make empirically founded generalizations about general tendencies of word exchange among languages." --Book Jacket.

Download or read book The Languages of Australia written by R. M. W. Dixon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking 1980 study of over 200 Australian languages is still valuable, especially for its non-technical opening chapters.

Download or read book Australian Languages written by R. M. W. Dixon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-14 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Dixon presents a comprehensive study of the indigenous languages of Australia.

Download or read book Forty Years on written by Jane Simpson and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Statistics in Historical Linguistics written by Sheila M. Embleton and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Language and History written by Luise Anna Hercus and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on a range of linguistic, anthropological and demographic topics including oral histories in honour of Luise Hercus; individual essays separately annotated.

Download or read book The Origin and Diversification of Language written by Morris Swadesh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Morris Swadesh, one of this century's foremost scientific investigators of language, dedicated much of his life to the study of the origin and evolution of language. This volume, left nearly completed at his death and edited posthumously by Joel F. Sherzer, is his last major study of this difficult subject.Swadesh discusses the simple qualities of human speech also present in animal language, and establishes distinctively human techniques of expression by comparing the common features that are found in modern and ancient languages. He treats the diversification of language not only by isolating root words in different languages, but also by dealing with sound systems, with forms of composition, and with sentence structure. In so doing, he demonstrates the evidence for the expansion of all language from a single central area. Swadesh supports his hypothesis by ""exhibits"" that conveniently present the evidence in tabular form. Further clarity is provided by the use of a suggestive practical phonetic system, intelligible to the student as well as to the professional.The book also contains an Appendix, in which the distinguished ethnographer of language, Dell Hymes, gives a valuable account of the prewar linguistic tradition within which Swadesh did some of his most important work.

Download or read book The Duun idjawu Language of the Southeast Queensland written by Suzanne Kite and published by Pacific Linguistics. This book was released on 2004 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, before he began work on the languages of New Guinea, Stephen Wurm undertook considerable fieldwork on languages of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. His fullest materials were on Duu_idjawu, spoken just to the northwest of Brisbane, and were recorded between 1955 and 1964. Wurm was generous in making his materials available to selected researchers, and in 1997, an arrangement was made with Wurm for Suzanne Kite to write an MA thesis analysing these materials. These consisted of tapes and transcriptions, with Wurm's translations of these in his own shorthand, which only he could read. When he was in Canberra, Wurm would spend one or two afternoons each week going over these materials with Kite, explaining the shorthand and reviving his knowledge of the language. He had never written a draft grammar of Duungidjawu, but effectively had one in his head. It was hard to remember things exactly after a period of almost forty years and Kite sometimes mediated between what was on the tapes and Wurm's explications during their collaboration. Stephen Wurm passed away in late 2001, after the thesis had been approved but before this work could be published. This is a slightly revised version of Kite's thesis. It comprises an invaluable record of the language of the Duungidjawu people, and through this of their traditions, customs and laws. It is the only substantial record of a language which differs in various respects from prototypical non-prefixing Australian languages. It has five vowels and a fair number of monosyllabic words. Pronouns and nouns referring to humans or to dogs have distinct case forms. Following the grammar sketch are all the texts recorded by Wurm and a full vocabulary and thesaurus. All Wurm's information was provided by Willie McKenzie, believed to be about eighty years old in October 1955. He died in 1965.