Download or read book Mother of Writing written by William A. Smalley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1990-06-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February of 1971, in the Laotian village of Nam Chia, a forty-one year old farmer named Shong Lue Yang was assassinated by government soldiers. Shong Lue claimed to have been descended of God and given the mission of delivering the first true Hmong alphabet. Many believed him to be the Hmong people's long-awaited messiah, and his thousands of followers knew him as "Mother (Source) of Writing." An anthropological linguist who has worked among the Hmong, William A. Smalley joins Shong Lue's chief disciple, Chia Koua Vang, and one of his associates, to tell the fascinating story of how the previously unschooled farmer developed his remarkable writing system through four stages of increasing sophistication. The uniqueness of Shong Lue's achievement is highlighted by a comparison of Shong Lue's writing system to other known Hmong systems and to the history of writing as a whole. In addition to a nontechnical linguistic analysis of the script and a survey of its current use, Mother of Writing provides an intriguing cultural account of Shong Lue's life. The book traces the twenty-year-long struggle to disseminate the script after Shong Lue's death, first by handwriting, then by primitive moveable type, an abortive attempt to design a wooden typewriter, and finally by modern wordprocessing. In a moving concluding chapter, Smalley discusses his own complex feelings about his coauthors' story.
Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by Library of Congress and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 2002 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book African Languages Langues Africaines written by P. Akụjụobi Nwachukwu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 2 of African Languages includes articles originally published in 1976, written in French and English on educational, literary, cultural, historical and socio-linguistic aspects of language in Africa, as well as descriptive and comparative studies. Among others there are chapters on an early Vai manuscript from Liberia, John Clarke's unidentified Nago dialect and swahili secondary education in Tanzania.
Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by Library of Congress. Cataloging Policy and Support Office and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 1662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Liberia written by Patricia Levy and published by Marshall Cavendish. This book was released on 2010 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrates the diversity of life through the exploration of cultures around the world.
Download or read book A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe written by John D. Nichols and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Presented in Ojibwe-English and English-Ojibwe sections, this dictionary spells words to reflect their actual pronunciation with a direct match between the letters used and the speech sounds of Ojibwe. Containing more than 7,000 of the most frequently used Ojibwe words."--P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book Status Change of Languages written by Ulrich Ammon and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 1992 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Human Earth System Dynamics written by Rongxing Guo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-16 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the factors and mechanisms that may have influenced the dynamic behaviors of earliest civilizations, focusing on both environmental (geographic) factors on which traditional historic analyses are based and human (behavioral) factors on which anthropological analyses are usually based. It also resurrects a number of common ancestral terms to help readers understand the complicated process of human and cultural evolution around the globe. Specifically, in almost all indigenous languages, the words ‘wa’ and any variants of it were originally associated with the sound of crying of – and certainly were selected as the common ancestral word with the meanings of “house, home, homeland, motherland, and so on” by – early humans living in different parts of the world.This book provides many neglected but still crucial environmental and biological clues about the rise and fall of civilizations – ones that have largely resulted from mankind’s long-lasting “Win-Stay Lose-Shift” games throughout the world. The narratives and findings presented at this book are unexpected but reasonable – and are what every student of anthropology or history needs to know and doesn't get in the usual text. “Professor Guo explores the dynamics of civilizations from the beginnings to our perplexingly complex world. There are lots of thought-provoking ideas here on the rise and decline of civilizations and nations... Anyone wishing to understand global developments should give this book serious consideration.” ----John Komlos, University of Munich, Germany, and Duke University, USA “It is interesting to see a Chinese perspective on the questions of deep history that have engaged Jared Diamond, Yuval Harari and David Christian. Guo argues that understanding cyclical threats has been the key to human progress, which is driven by the dialectic of material privation and human ingenuity.” ----Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University, USA
Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings P Z written by Library of Congress. Subject Cataloging Division and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 1546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mande Languages and Linguistics 2nd International Conference written by Vydrin, Valentin and published by MeaBooks. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proceedings include abstracts, 2 to 9 pages, of communications for the 2nd worldwide conference on Mande languages. The presentations are subdivided into chapters: Lexicography, Corpora, Concordances; Comparative studies and typology; Manding and Mokole; Southern Mande languages; Eastern Mande; Soninke-Bozo & Susu; South-Western Mande. Various spheres of Mande linguistics are concerned: dialectology, tonology, morphology and syntax, pragmatics. The book provides a survey of the state of the art in the Mande linguistics at the end of the first decade of the 21 century.
Download or read book Atlas of the World s Languages written by R.E. Asher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 1090 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the first appearance of the Atlas of the World's Languages in 1993, all the world's languages had never been accurately and completely mapped. The Atlas depicts the location of every known living language, including languages on the point of extinction. This fully revised edition of the Atlas offers: up-to-date research, some from fieldwork in early 2006 a general linguistic history of each section an overview of the genetic relations of the languages in each section statistical and sociolinguistic information a large number of new or completely updated maps further reading and a bibliography for each section a cross-referenced language index of over 6,000 languages. Presenting contributions from international scholars, covering over 6,000 languages and containing over 150 full-colour maps, the Atlas of the World's Languages is the definitive reference resource for every linguistic and reference library.
Download or read book The Languages of West Africa written by Frederick William Hugh Migeod and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Introduction to African Languages written by G. Tucker Childs and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003-12-19 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 western, eastern, and southern Africa allow for both a broad perspective and considerable depth in selected areas. The original examples are often the author’s own but also come from other sources and languages not often referenced in the literature. This text also includes a set of sound files illustrating the phenomena under discussion, be they the clicks of Khoisan, talking drums, or the ideophones (words like English lickety-split) found almost everywhere, which will make this book a valuable resource for teacher and student alike.
Download or read book The Garland Handbook of African Music written by Ruth M. Stone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-04-02 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Garland Handbook of African Music is comprised of essays from The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: Volume 1, Africa, (1997). Revised and updated, the essays offer detailed, regional studies of the different musical cultures of Africa and examine the ways in which music helps to define the identity of this particular area. Part One provides an in-depth introduction to Africa. Part Two focuses on issues and processes, such as notation and oral tradition, dance in communal life, and intellectual property. Part Three focuses on the different regions, countries, and cultures of Africa with selected regional case studies. The second edition has been expanded to include exciting new scholarship that has been conducted since the first edition was published. Questions for Critical Thinking at the end of each major section guide and focus attention on what musical and cultural issues arise when one studies the music of Africa -- issues that might not occur in the study of other musics of the world. An accompanying audio compact disc offers musical examples of some of the music of Africa.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets written by George L Campbell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets is a unique reference to the main scripts and alphabets of the world. The Handbook presents over 60 alphabets covering an enormous scope of languages; from Amharic and Chinese to Thai and Cree. Full script tables are given for every language and each entry is accompanied by a detailed overview of its historical and linguistic context. New to this second edition: enhanced introduction discussing the basic principles and strategies utilized by world writing systems expanded to include more writing systems improved presentation of non-Roman scripts. organised into ancient, contemporary and autochthonous writing systems many new entries on fascinating and lesser-known writing systems This handy resource is the ideal reference for all students and scholars of language and linguistics. It has been brought to our attention that in some of the copies of the book there is an alignment error in the tables for Cyrillic Scripts (pages 88-90) and Roman Scripts (pages 140-44). Please contact us at [email protected] to receive replacement copies of the corrected tables, free of charge. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Download or read book Journal of the African Society written by African Society and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Journal of the Royal African Society written by Royal African Society and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
