scholarly journals Linguistic theory in the practical lexicography of the African languages

Lexikos ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
E Chabata
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
African Languages

scholarly journals West African languages. Linguistic theory and communication

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Structural Patterns ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Structural Differences

The monograph covers the main aspects of studies on West African languages related to the diversity of structural patterns and complexity of their linguistic assignment. It includes various topics ranging from linguistic description and conceptualization patterns to the sociolinguistics of contemporary refugee camps. Typological diversity is enriched with the presentation of pidgin structures and sign languages. Structural differences between languages are seen from a comparative perspective, which also indicates the areal dimension of linguistic processes. The presentations of linguists from both Europe and Africa develop the idea of convergence area in West Africa, which is motivated by the contact between languages of different affiliations to language families and common cultural basis of language development.

scholarly journals Nature of English and Tiv Metatheses

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-37
Author(s):  
Terfa Aor ◽  
Pilah Godwin Anyam
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Phonological Process ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Language Pathology ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Secondary Materials

Metathesis, the transposition of letters and syllables, is a minor phonological process that is found in both English and Tiv languages. This phonological process has not received much attention it deserves because most scholars considered it as a figure of misspelling which is not worthy of researching. This paper investigates the nature of English and Tiv metatheses. The objectives of this paper are to classify English and Tiv metatheses, discuss the formation of metatheses in English and Tiv and state the functions of metatheses in English and Tiv languages. This paper used comparative linguistic theory which compares the nature of English and Tiv metatheses. The researcher used participant observation tool for elicitation of data for this study. Secondary materials such as journal articles, textbooks, dictionaries and encyclopaedias and Internet sources were used. This study links phonology, historical linguistics, onomastics and language pathology (speech disorder). The study has established that metathesis has phonological, orthographic, metrical and onomastic relevance. This paper provides an in-depth material for teaching and learning of English and Tiv languages. It has been recommended that lecturers in the National Institute for Nigerian Languages, Departments of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages should write books and critical works on Nigerian or African languages.

A Review and evaluation of Machine Translation methods for Lumasaaba

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Peter Nabende
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
East African ◽  
Data Set ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Translation Methods

Natural Language Processing for under-resourced languages is now a mainstream research area. However, there are limited studies on Natural Language Processing applications for many indigenous East African languages. As a contribution to covering the current gap of knowledge, this paper focuses on evaluating the application of well-established machine translation methods for one heavily under-resourced indigenous East African language called Lumasaaba. Specifically, we review the most common machine translation methods in the context of Lumasaaba including both rule-based and data-driven methods. Then we apply a state of the art data-driven machine translation method to learn models for automating translation between Lumasaaba and English using a very limited data set of parallel sentences. Automatic evaluation results show that a transformer-based Neural Machine Translation model architecture leads to consistently better BLEU scores than the recurrent neural network-based models. Moreover, the automatically generated translations can be comprehended to a reasonable extent and are usually associated with the source language input.

The Arabic Origins of English and Indo-European “Definite Articles”: A Radical Linguistic Theory Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Zaidan Ali Jassem
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Method ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
General Level ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Family ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Definite Articles

This paper traces the Arabic origins or cognates of the “definite articles” in English and Indo-European languages from a radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory perspective. The data comprises the definite articles in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Latin, Greek, Macedonian, Russian, Polish, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Persian, and Arabic. The results clearly indicate that five different types of such articles emerged in the data, all of which have true Arabic cognates with the same or similar forms and meanings, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change, especially lexical, semantic, or morphological shift. Therefore, the results support the adequacy of the radical linguistic theory according to which, unlike the Family Tree Model or Comparative Method, Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit not only belong to the same language family, renamed Eurabian or Urban family, but also are dialects of the same language, with Arabic being their origin all because only it shares the whole cognates with them all and because it has a huge phonetic, morphological, grammatical, and lexical variety. They also manifest fundamental flaws and grave drawbacks which plague English and Indo-European lexicography for ignoring Arabic as an ultimate ancestor and progenitor not only in the treatment of the topic at hand but in all others in general. On a more general level, they also show that there is a radical language from which all human languages stemmed and which has been preserved almost intact in Arabic, thus being the most conservative and productive language

Primi appunti sulla manipolazione dell’assegnazione del genere in sanvalentinese

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 329-350
Author(s):  
Diana Passino
Keyword(s):  
Peculiar Feature ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Gender Shift

"Preliminary Notes on Gender Assignment Manipulation in Sanvalentinese. This contribution draws attention on a peculiar feature of the Italo-Romance dialect spoken in San Valentino in Abruzzo Citeriore, where a subgroup of feminine nouns displays both feminine and masculine plural options. Gender shift to masculine in the plural seems to be exploited to obtain semantic differences related to countability and evaluation, namely to refer respectively to weak differentiation and pejorative meaning. This phenomenon, known as recategorization or gender assignment manipulation, is rather common in African languages of different families, but less pervasive and systematic in Romance. Gender and recategorization in Sanvalentinese are discussed in relation to inflectional classes, of which this contribution provides a sketch. Keywords: gender, number, recategorization, inflectional class, overdifferentiation, collective plural, Romance dialectology, metaphony."

Language and Outer Space

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-87
Author(s):  
Laura Carmen Cuțitaru
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
The Way

Abstract The 2016 much acclaimed American sci-fi movie Arrival is based on (what is in reality an extension of) the so-called “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis, a linguistic theory set forth in the first half of the 20th century, according to which one’s native language dictates the way in which one perceives reality. By taking into account the latest in human knowledge, this paper tries to provide arguments as to why such a claim works wonderfully in fiction, but not in science.

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