Study on the Interaction of the Sinicization of Christianity and the Reconstruction of Cross-border Ethnic Minorities Cultures in Yunnan

"I'm Sinicization of Christianity? which is the developing strategy and practice to make Christianity adapt to Chinese culture. It corresponds to the Christianization of Chinese ethnic minority people who believed in Christianity. From the perspective of cultural interaction, borrowing and blending, the study explores the motivation, process and characteristics of the interactive development between the localization and contextualization of Christianity in Yunnan ethnic minorities ' areas and the Christianization of ethnic minorities' cultures by historical com bi ng and synchronic comparison. Mostly between Christianity and ethnic minorities' traditional cultures had experienced from the estrangement, and coexisted with each other and blending process > and finished the Christian from "in" to the transition of “again”, so as to realize the Sinicizational characteristics of the regional > national > but also make the border ethnic cultural reconstruct.

Italian preconsonantal s-voicing is not regressive voice assimilation

In the literature of laryngeal phonology Romance languages are considered voice languages, exhibiting a binary distinction between a voiced lenis and a voiceless fortis set of obstruents. Voice languages are characterised by regressive voice assimilation (RVA) due to the phonological activity of [voice]. Italian manifests a process similar to RVA, called preconsonantal s-voicing; that is, /s/ becomes voiced before voiced consonants. Since /sC/ is the only obstruent cluster in Italian phonotactics, Italian seems to fulfil the requirements for being a prototypical voice language. However, this paper argues that s-voicing is not an instance of RVA, at least from a synchronic phonological point of view. RVA and Italian preconsonantal s-voicing essentially differ at every level of a synchronic comparison: in the input, in the trigger, in the domain of application and in the frequency of the processes. In Italian only sibilant fricatives may undergo voicing before consonants; however, other obstruents (which mostly appear in loanwords) do not assimilate for [voice]. Italian preconsonantal s-voicing does not take place at the word boundary or at morpheme boundaries, and it seems to be optional is new loanwords; thus, it is not a postlexical process like RVA. The synchronic differences between the two phenomena are analysed in Classical Optimality Theory. The laryngeal system of Italian prefers faithfulness over markedness, which means that non-/sC/ obstruent clusters surface with underlying voice values; while the voicing of /s/ before voiced consonants is seen as phonetic and not phonological.

Animal husbandry from the Middle Bronze Age through the Iron Age in the Shephelah—faunal remains from the new excavations at Lachish

Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir) is located in the southern part of the Judean foothills, known as the Shephelah, and is one of the larger and most extensively excavated multi-period sites in the southern Levant. We present the faunal results of the first three seasons of the most recent excavations, the Austrian-Israeli Expedition to Tel Lachish. The expedition focusses on two areas of the tell encompassing the Middle Bronze Age III through the Iron Age II, area S (deep section) and area P (palace area). The aims for the faunal analysis are threefold: comparing the results between the two areas, seeing how our results compare to previous analyses, and comparing Lachish to other synchronous sites in the Shephelah. We observe differences in subsistence strategies between the areas in addition to diachronic differences. Ovicaprids dominate all assemblages, but we see shifts in the sheep to goat ratio and mortality profiles through time indicating changes in subsistence strategies. Our new results largely agree with the results from previous analyses, showing the value of previous studies and their potential compatibility with newer research. A synchronic comparison of Lachish within the Shephelah shows the occupants of the site were largely self-sufficient but possibly engaged in an exchange of resources in the vicinity.

Old English law-codes

Law language is a cover-term for different genres of legal texts. The genre of law is characterized as being written, legislative and formal. Quantitative studies on the textual and linguistic structure of Old English (oe) law-codes are lacking so far, but both aspects are analysed in this paper on the basis of a corpus of about 20,000 words. The results of the quantitative-qualitative analysis are compared to oe wills on the one hand, and to Early Modern English (emode) and Present-Day English (pde) statutes on the other. The synchronic comparison of oe law-codes and oe wills reveals that the text structure and the linguistic profile of the genres are very similar. The conclusion to be drawn from this result is that genre properties largely determine the textual and linguistic profile of texts in a given period. The diachronic comparisons show marked differences in the linguistic profile of oe law-codes and statutes of later periods.

Comparative Ethnic Territorially Based Autonomy in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Yakutia of Russia: An Analytical Framework

This article proposes an analytical framework to address why implemented autonomy outcomes may differ across ethnic republics in the Russian Federation. Composed of a long-range factor, inter-ethnic boundary making, and a short-term factor, titular elites’ representation in the ethno-regional state, the framework is applied to a synchronic comparison of three republics of Russia with differing autonomy outcomes for the 2010s, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Yakutia, reliant upon state-generated data and fieldwork. Titular elites’ representation in the ethnoregional state is used as a proxy for titular elites’ bargaining capacity with the central state. It is argued that an “integration–distinction balance,” or rather, higher inter-ethnic integration combined with robust consciousness of inter-ethnic distinction, can contribute to titular elites’ bargaining capacity with the center, which can lead to greater autonomy outcome for the ethnic republic.

Global value relations and local labour control regimes in rice farming in Uganda and Tanzania

This study presents evidence on the organisation of farm work in rice farming areas in Uganda and Tanzania, where farms of different scale co-exist, drawing on the same pool of workers. Here, local labour regimes have been rapidly reorganised following the creation and expansion plans of mega-farms after the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, characterised as land grabs. The synchronic comparison of two rice mega-farms is based on the history of relations of production in rice farming areas in the region. With post-crisis global restructuring, shifting global value relations have driven the reorganisation of control within the labour process in frontiers of capitalist accumulation. This article argues that local labour process and farm labour regimes are important elements in the process of mediation with global value relations in the study areas. Labour control within the labour process and local labour regimes across farm scale are at the core of the additional reasons leading local workers to see employment on mega-farms undesirable, compared to gang work on local farms of different size. Work on mega-farms, alongside its highly exploitative character, is undesirable for workers because of the tight system of disciplining at the basis of labour control, which creates conflicts with the social reproduction system. The devalorisation and exploitation of labour is enabled by disciplining and control over workers in the production process.

Origin and future of medicine

Based on the comprehensive observation of medicine, we made a diachronic summarization and synchronic comparison on medicine, including traditional medicine and modern medicine as well as Chinese traditional medicine (CTM) and Western traditional medicine. We focused on the connotation of several predominant medicines, the evolution of medical civilization, the problems and challenges of medicine at present, the prospect and framework of medicine in the future, and finally put forward the new system of CTM together with the integration of traditional medicine and modern medicine so as to contribute to the thinking, research and construction of medicine for mankind, which will add to its positive development and scientific practice.

The ‘Common Core’ of administrative laws in Europe: A framework for analysis

This essay presents the framework for new comparative research in the field of administrative law, with a focus on the European legal area. It is divided into two parts. In Part I, we argue that some difficulties that beset the traditional uses of the comparative method are even more evident when considering the field of administrative law. Accordingly, a methodological shift is needed in more than one sense. First, instead of focusing on either similarities or differences between national legal systems, both analogies and differences must be considered. Second, legal comparison, properly intended, differs from a mere juxtaposition of national administrative laws. Third, the overemphasis on legislation is even less justified in the field of administrative law, which calls for careful attention to judicial and institutional practices. In this perspective, we briefly illustrate the methodology grounded in a factual approach that has been developed in the field of comparative private law in the last few decades and the way we are going to apply it into our research on administrative law, viewed through a procedural lens. In Part II we discuss the main pillars that characterize our research concerning administrative law: first, its goal, which is the advancement of knowledge; second, the choice to focus on administrative procedure, instead of judicial review of administrative action; third, the methodology, which combines a synchronic comparison, concerning modern legal systems, with a diachronic comparison, that is to say a retrospective on some aspects of the history of legal institutions that look particularly relevant; and fourth, the choice of the legal systems selected for comparison, including a variety of states and a non-state, the European Union.

Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande

The study addresses the relationship between diachronic change and synchronic polysemy based on the use of diminutives in four closely related Southeastern Mande languages. It explores the synchronic patterns of use of cognate diminutive markers deriving from the word ‘child’, and accounts for differences between the languages in terms of a Radial Category network, which is designed to capture in one representation both mechanisms of diachronic change and mechanisms of regular meaning extension. The study argues that the same approach can be used to account for the ways diminutive markers acquire new meanings and for the ways an old diminutive category disintegrates, when new markers start replacing the old one in some of the core diminutive functions. The invasion and expansion of new markers may result in discontinuous semantic structures that can only be understood when the diachrony is taken into account (in this particular case study, the evidence for historical change comes from a synchronic comparison with closely related languages).

Eenders en anders: Die leksikons van Afrikaans en Nederlands in die een-en-twintigste eeu —’n loodsstudie

Early research into the Afrikaans vocabulary was mainly diachronic and comparative (Dutch being the “mother” language from which Afrikaans developed) and the relationship between the lexicons of the two languages was not explored in any great detail towards the end of the twentieth century. This state of affairs changed with the publication of Groot Woordeboek Afrikaans en Nederlands (“Great Dictionary Afrikaans and Dutch”) in 2011, a dictionary with an amalgamated lemma list. One of the outcomes of the lexicographic project was the realisation that less than fifty percent of the lemmas in the dictionary were absolute cognates, words which are similar in both form and meaning. This finding prompted a synchronic comparison of word forming processes in Afrikaans and Dutch, using two small newspaper corpora from 2009 as well a selection of neologisms. Analysis of the data shows that although Afrikaans and Dutch differ in the way in which loan words are incorporated—Dutch speakers prefer to take over the words as they are, whereas Afrikaans speakers make use of calques— the morphosemantic process of compounding is still the most productive way for adding words to the lexicon. The two languages do not make use of each others’ coinages, one indication that their lexicons are increasingly growing apart.