scholarly journals Creole Prosodic Systems Are Areal, Not Simple

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kofi Yakpo

This study refutes the common idea that tone gets simplified or eliminated in creoles and contact languages. Speakers of African tone languages imposed tone systems on all Afro-European creoles spoken in the tone-dominant linguistic ecologies of Africa and the colonial Americas. African speakers of tone languages also imposed tone systems on the colonial varieties of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese spoken in tonal Africa. A crucial mechanism involved in the emergence of the tone systems of creoles and colonial varieties is stress-to-tone mapping. A typological comparison with African non-creole languages shows that creole tone systems are no simpler than African non-creole tone systems. Demographic, linguistic, and social changes in an ecology can lead to switches from tone to stress systems and vice versa. As a result, there is an areal continuum of tone systems roughly coterminous with the presence of tone in the east (Africa) and stress in the west (Americas). Transitional systems combining features of tone and stress converge on the areal buffer zone of the Caribbean. The prosodic systems of creoles and European colonial varieties undergo regular processes of contact, typological change and areal convergence. None of these are specific to creoles. So far, creoles and colonial varieties have not featured in work on the world-wide areal clustering of prosodic systems. This study therefore aims to contribute to a broader perspective on prosodic contact beyond the narrow confines of the creole simplicity debate.

Author(s):  
Hanétha Vété-Congolo

The Euro-enslavement enterprise in America expanded the European geography temporarily, and, more lastingly, its culturo-linguistic and philosophical influence. The deportation of millions of Africans within that enterprise similarly extended the African presence in this part of the world, especially in the Caribbean. Africans deported by the French Empire spoke languages of the West Atlantic Mande, Kwa, or Voltaic groups. They arrived in their new and final location with their languages. However, no African language wholly survived the ordeal of enslavement in the Caribbean. This signals language as perhaps the most important political and philosophical instrument of colonization. I am therefore interested in “Pawòl,” that is, the ethical, human, and humanist responses Africans brought to their situation through language per se and African languages principally. I am also interested in the metaphysical value of “Pawòl.”


Author(s):  
Oyuna Tsydendambaeva ◽  
Olga Dorzheeva

This article is dedicated to the examination of euphemisms in the various-system languages – English and Buryat that contain view of the world by a human, and the ways of their conceptualization. Euphemisms remain insufficiently studied. Whereupon, examination of linguistic expression of the key concepts of culture is among the paramount programs of modern linguistics, need for the linguoculturological approach towards analysis of euphemisms in the languages, viewing it in light of the current sociocultural transformations, which are refer to euphemisms and values reflected by them. The subject of this research is the euphemisms in the English and Buryat languages, representing the semiosphere “corporeal and spiritual”. The scientific novelty consists in introduction of the previously unexamined euphemism in Buryat language that comprise semiosphere “corporeal and spiritual” into the scientific discourse. The analysis of language material testifies to the fact that in various cultures the topic of intimacy and sex is euphemized differently. The lexis indicating the intimate parts of the body is vividly presented in the West, while in Buryat language – rather reserved. The author also determines the common, universal, and nationally marked components elucidating the linguistic worldview of different ethnoses and cultures.


Worldview ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 14-16
Author(s):  
Lionel Gelber

When the United States fostered the recovery and underwrote the security of Western Europe she had more than sentiment to impel her. That salient zone is a pivotal sector of the world balance, and while she may station fewer of her own troops upon its soil, she can entertain no total disengagement from it. But there is another West European item, the future of the Common Market, which calls for a fresh American scrutiny. The West will be better off if Western Europe acquires more of an ability to stand on its own feet. Gaullism, however, revealed a less modest goal, one that was not confined to France and did not vanish with the departure of General de Gaulle. On the contrary, it may have gained new leverage from his downfall.


Author(s):  
Eric Russell Webb

Pidgin and creole languages are found throughout the world, with relatively greater concentrations in the Caribbean basin, the Indian Ocean, the coast of Western and Central Africa, and Oceania. In most literature, pidgins and creoles are grouped according to respective lexifiers, from which the bulk of their vocabulary derives. Emerging in contact environments, pidgins and creoles have been profoundly influenced by sociolinguistic forces and offer compelling evidence of the extent to which extra-grammatical factors contribute to the shape of language. This chapter pursues two questions. What is the interest of these languages to contemporary sociolinguistics? And how can the adoption of a sociolinguistic posture better address the distinction of creole from non-creole?


1951 ◽  
Vol 1 (9) ◽  
pp. 504-507
Author(s):  
Maxwell Gage

AbstractThese glaciers are in a district that was seldom visited before the great expansion of recreational tramping and mountaineering in New Zealand during the past twenty years, but the record extends back for eighty-five years. During this time the chief glaciers have receded considerably but irregularly, and for one of them the records indicate a vertical downwasting and thinning. Although this glacier shows no sign yet of recovery it is fed from the same snowfield as that which supplies another glacier descending west from the main divide and which may have begun to advance. An appreciable re-advance of the Franz Josef Glacier has already been given notice in the, Journal of Glaciology, and it may be that the steep gradients of the west-flowing glaciers of the Southern Alps enable them to respond to short-term climatic fluctuations, whereas the flatter east-flowing streams continue to shrink, in keeping with the world-wide trend.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 202321
Author(s):  
Metod Jazbec ◽  
Barna Pàsztor ◽  
Felix Faltings ◽  
Nino Antulov-Fantulin ◽  
Petter N. Kolm

We quantify the propagation and absorption of large-scale publicly available news articles from the World Wide Web to financial markets. To extract publicly available information, we use the news archives from the Common Crawl, a non-profit organization that crawls a large part of the web. We develop a processing pipeline to identify news articles associated with the constituent companies in the S&P 500 index, an equity market index that measures the stock performance of US companies. Using machine learning techniques, we extract sentiment scores from the Common Crawl News data and employ tools from information theory to quantify the information transfer from public news articles to the US stock market. Furthermore, we analyse and quantify the economic significance of the news-based information with a simple sentiment-based portfolio trading strategy. Our findings provide support for that information in publicly available news on the World Wide Web has a statistically and economically significant impact on events in financial markets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Olusola A. Akanbi ◽  
Oluyinka O. Opaleye ◽  
Adekunle O. Olowe ◽  
Olusola Ojurongbe

Since Decem ber 2019, a novel Cor onavir us nam ed Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been implicated in an outbreak of SARSlike illness, which began in a wild animal market of Wuhan in Hubei province of China and the World Health Organization (WHO) was alerted on the 31st December 2019 of this public health threat. On the 11th March 2020, the WHO announced that this disease termed COVID-19 has become pandemic, the first for any coronavirus. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause illness such as the common cold to more severe diseases such as SARS. To date, the virus has spread to over 100 countries, including 40 countries in Africa, including Nigeria. As at the time of this publication over 300,000 cases has been reported world-wide with over 14,000 deaths mostly from China and Italy. The Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has since put in place measures to contain and prevent the further spread of the virus. This review highlights the current situation and knowledge of the newly emerged SARS-CoV-2 and its epidemiological trends.


Author(s):  
Kavitha Ranganathan

The leapfrogging theory claims that instead of following the conventional digital trajectory set by the west, emerging regions can straightaway use cutting-edge technology to “leapfrog” the digital-divide. To explore the possibility of digital leapfrogging by an emerging region, this study looks at the three domains of hardware, software and connectivity. In each domain the default technology and its potential is evaluated as a digital inclusion tool while being juxtaposed with the latest “cutting-edge” alternative that could be used instead for “leapfrogging”. Three specific scenarios are developed in telephony, banking and the World Wide Web, which illustrate how a combination of these different technologies help emerging regions ‘leapfrog the digital divide.’ Finally, the paper suggests certain leapfrogging trajectories that ICT4D projects should explore.


Author(s):  
Michael Lang

Although its conceptual origins can be traced back a few decades (Bush, 1945), it is only recently that hypermedia has become popularized, principally through its ubiquitous incarnation as the World Wide Web (WWW). In its earlier forms, the Web could only properly be regarded a primitive, constrained hypermedia implementation (Bieber & Vitali, 1997). Through the emergence in recent years of standards such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML), XLink, Document Object Model (DOM), Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) and WebDAV, as well as additional functionality provided by the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Java, plug-ins and middleware applications, the Web is now moving closer to an idealized hypermedia environment. Of course, not all hypermedia systems are Web based, nor can all Web-based systems be classified as hypermedia (see Figure 1). See the terms and definitions at the end of this article for clarification of intended meanings. The focus here shall be on hypermedia systems that are delivered and used via the platform of the WWW; that is, Web-based hypermedia systems.


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