Implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) on the Development of Indigenous Languages of South Africa

Indigenous languages are the carriers of the communication, culture, and identity. It is through language that one expresses one's thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Unfortunately, colonialism created serious problems and obstacles in the development of African indigenous languages. European languages are used in Africa, rated as official languages of African countries while indigenous languages are sidelined and marginalized. Africa's own vision of decolonization, self-realization, and African Renaissance will always be a dream if African languages don't reclaim their rightful position in Africa. Intellectual decolonization is prudent for the realization of emancipation of the indigenous languages.

Human Behaviour in Organizations

It is crucial to grasp individual behaviour in organizations. This can shed light on evaluation of organizational outcomes. The evaluation can assist in deciding changes required. This chapter investigates organizational behaviour models. The investigation aims to develop a better comprehension of human behaviour. The chapter examines the most reviewed organizational behaviour models. These models are the human relation, the system perspective, productivity perspective, the human resource approach, the contingency approach, and finally, the situation approach. These models are argued to be elementalistic. The elementalism leads to perceive humans and their behaviour in a partial manner. The Aristotelian structure of language underpinning Indo-European languages upholds such elementalism. The structure is built on three laws. These are “is” of identity, two value orientation, and excluding middle stance. The chapter presents some principles of Islam to transform organizational behaviour models. The model enriched by Islam is argued to be in flux.

The National Specificity of the Proverbial Fund: Basic Concepts and Procedure for Determining

The article presents an attempt to define the basic concepts and proposes a methodology for identifying the national specificity of the proverbial fund of a given language in the synchronic plan. In modern linguistics, more and more attention is paid to the study of interlingual specificity / generality of proverbs, both in the theoretical (typological, language and cultural), and in the applied (linguodidactic, lexicographic) terms. However, in linguistics there is no special methodological apparatus for establishing and describing the national specificity of proverbs. The aim of the research is to develop and test the basic concepts and methodology for identifying the national specificity of the proverbial fund of the language in the synchronic plan. Research methods - interlingual comparison, structural and semantic modeling, ethnolinguistic analysis, language and cultural description. The research material was over 1,500 of the most actively used Belarusian proverbs (from its paremiological minimum, the main paremiological fund, the corpus of literary texts), as well as proverbs of the Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, Romanic, Finno-Ugrian languages (more than 220,000 proverbs from the most authoritative paremiographic sources in 34 modern European languages). As a result of the study, it was found that for the differentiation of common with other languages and specific units of the proverbial fund of the language, the synchronic analysis based on the structural and semantic modeling of proverbs is the most objective. The linguistic content of the concepts national specificity of a proverbial fund, unique, international, universal proverb, national specificity of a proverb, national and language specificity, national and cultural marking of a proverb has been determined and verified. The methodology for describing the national specificity of a proverbial fund has been developed and tested. It includes the principles and methods of selecting the most representative units for analysis, the determination of the interlingual specificity / generality of proverbs, the ascertainment of their national and language, national and cultural specificity, the identification of the degree and nature of the national marking of the exact language proverbs. It is proved that the national specificity of the proverbial fund is qualitatively and quantitatively determined not by proverbs that are unique against the background of other languages, but by the national and language and / or national and cultural marking common (international and universal) proverbs of other languages.

Revisiting Subject–Object Asymmetry in the Production of Cantonese Relative Clauses: Evidence From Elicited Production in 3-Year-Olds

Emergentist approaches to language acquisition identify a core role for language-specific experience and give primacy to other factors like function and domain-general learning mechanisms in syntactic development. This directly contrasts with a nativist structurally oriented approach, which predicts that grammatical development is guided by Universal Grammar and that structural factors constrain acquisition. Cantonese relative clauses (RCs) offer a good opportunity to test these perspectives because its typologically rare properties decouple the roles of frequency and complexity in subject- and object-RCs in a way not possible in European languages. Specifically, Cantonese object RCs of the classifier type are frequently attested in children’s linguistic experience and are isomorphic to frequent and early-acquired simple SVO transitive clauses, but according to formal grammatical analyses Cantonese subject RCs are computationally less demanding to process. Thus, the two opposing theories make different predictions: the emergentist approach predicts a specific preference for object RCs of the classifier type, whereas the structurally oriented approach predicts a subject advantage. In the current study we revisited this issue. Eighty-seven monolingual Cantonese children aged between 3;2 and 3;11 (Mage: 3;6) participated in an elicited production task designed to elicit production of subject- and object- RCs. The children were very young and most of them produced only noun phrases when RCs were elicited. Those (nine children) who did produce RCs produced overwhelmingly more object RCs than subject RCs, even when animacy cues were controlled. The majority of object RCs produced were the frequent classifier-type RCs. The findings concur with our hypothesis from the emergentist perspectives that input frequency and formal and functional similarity to known structures guide acquisition.

Mori Arimasa’s Concept of Experience

The article introduces and reconstructs the main ideas of the book Experience and Thought by Mori Arimasa. Released in the form of journal publications in 1970–1972, it has never been translated into European languages. The Japanese philosopher who spent a large part of his life in France undertakes a comparative analysis of the socio-cultural and linguistic foundations of the experience of the Japanese and Europeans. The article examines the main aspects of Mori’s concept of experience: understanding experience as a reality and as a subject, separation of two forms of experience — universal and personal, the relationship between experience and language and between experience and thought, the theory of binary connections and second person world, designed to identify and explain the underlying prerequisites that determine the specific character of the experience of the Japanese. The author of the article shows that Mori confirms his own thesis that the primary experience of a person is conditioned by original cultural deep predisposition and linguistic affiliation. Notwithstanding his life abroad and passion for Western philosophy, Mori thinks in about the same way as his fellow philosophers who lived in Japan, sharing their empiricism, understanding the subject as a relatum, perceiving an individual subjective experience as a segment of the universal experience, interpreting a subject as a sum total of relations. In conclusion, Mori’s ideas are assessed in terms of ethno-epistemological approaches. Undoubtedly, Mori’s analysis of the experience provides arguments for epistemological pluralism. It allows us to talk about the variability of the perception of reality in different cultural and historical contexts and about the possibility of different ways and perspectives of its comprehension, the spatial and temporal dynamics of epistemological terminology, despite the apparent commonality. Mori Arimasa taking experience as the starting point and the main task of his analysis, by his own example, demonstrated the importance of the empirical form of acquiring knowledge for Japanese epistemic culture, along with its inherent specificity of understanding experience. His linguistic studies of the structures of the native language resulted in the creation of a memorable image of the second person world and outlined the field of joint collective experience without a clearly expressed single autonomous subject of cognitive activity. Mori demonstrated an approach to cognition, in which the knower feels oneself a part of the cognized reality, and is not alienated from it, as a result the cognition turns into self-cognition of reality.

Komunikacja językowa w osiemnastowiecznych francuskich wyprawach naukowych do Laponii, Peru i Afryki Południowej

Interlingual Communication during French Scientific Expeditions to Lappland, Peru and South Africa in the 18th Century In this paper, I try to outline the image of the interlingual communication during scientific expeditions by detecting and analysing remarks about such instances in the narratives by the expeditions’ commanders. I analyse a narrative of Maupertuis on his geodesic mission to Lappland (1734- 1735), two narratives of La Condamine on his geodesic mission to Peru (1735-1743), and two narratives of Le Vaillant on his travels across South Africa (1781-1784). During his short stay in Lappland, Maupertuis was assisted by a Swedish astronomer and by a Laponian, both speaking French and Finnish. La Condamine and Le Vaillant learned local languages (Spanish, Quechua; Hottentot, Namaqua) in order to eliminate the intermediation of an interpreter. In linguistically fragmented areas, they worked with random natural interpreters. French scientists also made use of the native inhabitants’ familiarity with European languages: official languages of the colonies (Spanish in Peru, Dutch in South Africa) and French, the language of social, cultural and scientific discourse in the 18th century, which they acquired for pleasure.

Language and the African Philosophical Traditions

Are there universal principles, categories, or forms of reasoning that apply to all aspects of human experience—irrespective of culture and epoch? Numerous scholars have explored this very question from Africana perspectives: Kwasi Wiredu (1996) explored the philosophical issue of whether there are culturally defined values and concepts; Hallen and Sodipo (1986) examined the question of whether there are unique African indigenous systems of knowledge; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1994) evaluated the role of colonialism in the language of African literature; Oyerò nkẹ ́ ́ Oyěwumi (1997) argued that “gender” is a Western cultural invention that is foreign to Yorùbá systems of sociation; and Helen Veran (2001) argued that even though science, mathematics, and logic are not culturally relative, “certainty” is nonetheless derived from cultural practices and associations. Building on these and other works, this essay argues that: (i) incommensurability of “worldviews,” “perspectives,” “paradigms,” or “conceptual schemes” springs from deeper, more fundamental cognitive categories of logic that are coded into natural languages; and that (ii) consequently, as long as African reflective reasoning is expressed solely (or predominantly) in European languages, the authenticity of the “African” in African philosophy is questionable.