Language Contact, Culture Contact and Intergenerational Conflict

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Intergenerational Conflict ◽  
Culture Contact

Tongues of Fire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Farriss
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Culture Contact ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Indigenous Church ◽  
Cultural Gaps

Language and translation governed the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. This study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role in the Dominican evangelizing program to the larger frame of culture contact in postconquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts is used to reveal the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse and combines with an examination of language contact in different social contexts. A major aim is to spotlight the role of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity. As translators, chief catechists, and parish administrators they made evangelization in many respects an indigenous enterprise and the Mexican church it created an indigenous church.

scholarly journals Some of Them Just Die Like Horses. Contact-Induced Changes in Peripheral Nahuatl of the Sixteenth-Century Petitions from Santiago de Guatemala

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 344-377
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Brylak
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Culture Contact ◽  
Time Span ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Central Mexico ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Induced Changes ◽  
Morphological System

The aim of this paper is to examine contact-induced changes, visible on lexical and lexico-syntactical levels, in the set of twenty sixteenth-century petitions in Nahuatl from the region of Santiago de Guatemala. They comprise such phenomena as the creation and usage of neologisms, extentions of meaning, the adoption of loans in the morphological system of Nahuatl and the usage of calques. The material is divided in three parts. The first one focuses on specific traits of the Nahuatl language in which the Guatemalan petitions were composed, taking into account an ongoing discussion among researchers concerning the identification of this language or languages. The second part focuses on the presentation of selected lexical and lexico-syntactic changes in Nahuatl due to the influence of the Spanish language, as compared with similar contact-induced phenomena from Central Mexico and attested within the same time span. In the last part of the paper the interdependence of language contact and culture contact is discussed within the perspective of a presumed conceptual equivalency and interchangeability of the Spanish and Nahuatl terms for deer and horse, which appears in one of the studied documents.

scholarly journals Italian-Spanish Contact in Early 20th Century Argentina

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-145
Author(s):  
Juan Antonio Ennis
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Culture Contact ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
Ruling Elites ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Set Up

This article attempts to provide a general approach to the exceptional language contact situation that took place in Argentina from the end of the 19thcentury until the first decades of the 20thcentury, in which an enormous immigration flow drastically modified the sociolinguistic landscape. This was most evident in urban environments—and among them especially the Buenos Aires area—and led the local ruling elites to set up a complex and massive apparatus for the nationalisation of the newcomers, which included a language shift in the first stage. Given that the majority of immigrants came from Italy, the most widespread form of contact was that between the local varieties of Spanish and the Italian dialects spoken by the immigrants, which led to the creation of a contact variety called Cocoliche that arose, lived then perished. Although this contact variety did not survive the early years, at least not as a full-fledged variety, the history of its emergence and the ways in which it can be studied today nevertheless make it an object of special interest for research perspectives oriented around the question of the early years of language contact. This article gives an account of this history so as to provide an analysis of a series of documents that, in a highly mediated way, can be used as an unreliable but nonetheless interesting corpus for the study of language and culture contact.

[review of:] Vyacheslav Ivanov & Peter Arkadiev, eds. 2013. Studies in the Typology of Slavic, Baltic and Balkan Languages

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 221-239
Author(s):  
Ilja Seržant
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
General Meeting ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Primary Reference ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Vyacheslav Ivanov

Вячᴇᴄлᴀʙ Вᴄ. Иʙᴀнов (отв. ред.), Пᴇᴛᴘ М. Аᴘкᴀдьᴇв (сост.), Исследования по типологии славянских, балтийских и балканских языков (преимущественно в свете языковых контактов). Санкт-Петербург: Алетейя, 2013. / Vʏᴀᴄʜᴇsʟᴀv Ivᴀɴov & Pᴇᴛᴇʀ Aʀᴋᴀᴅɪᴇv, eds., Studies in the Typology of Slavic, Baltic and Balkan Languages (with primary reference to language contact). St Petersburg: Aletheia, 2013. ɪsʙɴ 978-5-91419-778-7. The main focus of the book is on various language contact situations as well as areal interpretations of particular phenomena against a wider typological background. The idea is to provide a broader overview of each phenomenon discussed, bringing in comparisons with the neighbouring languages. Two major linguistic areas are in the focus of the book: the Balkan and Eastern Circum-Baltic areas. The book is an important contribution to these fields as well as to areal typology and the theory of language contact in general, meeting all standards for a solid scientific work.

Modern Greek V V dvandva compounds: A linguistic innovation in the history of the Indo-European languages

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Ralli
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Compound Formation ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Internal Change ◽  
Contact Situation ◽  
Asian Languages

This paper deals with [V V] dvandva compounds, which are frequently used in East and Southeast Asian languages but also in Greek and its dialects: Greek is in this respect uncommon among Indo-European languages. It examines the appearance of this type of compounding in Greek by tracing its development in the late Medieval period, and detects a high rate of productivity in most Modern Greek dialects. It argues that the emergence of the [V V] dvandva pattern is not due to areal pressure or to a language-contact situation, but it is induced by a language internal change. It associates this change with the rise of productivity of compounding in general, and the expansion of verbal compounds in particular. It also suggests that the change contributes to making the compound-formation patterns of the language more uniform and systematic. Claims and proposals are illustrated with data from Standard Modern Greek and its dialects. It is shown that dialectal evidence is crucial for the study of the rise and productivity of [V V] dvandva compounds, since changes are not usually portrayed in the standard language.

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