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Antipassive Voice
The antipassive voice ( abbreviated or ) is a type of grammatical voice that either does not include the object or includes the object in an oblique case. This construction is similar to the passive voice, in that it decreases the verb's valency by one – the passive by deleting the agent and "promoting" the object to become the subject of the passive construction, the antipassive by deleting the object and "promoting" the agent to become the subject of the antipassive construction. Occurrence The antipassive voice is found in Basque, in Mayan, Salishan, Northeast Caucasian, Austronesian, and Australian languages, and also in some Amazonian languages (e.g. Cavineña, Kanamarí). Dixon, R.M.W. & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds) (1990). ''The Amazonian Languages''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Antipassive voice predominantly occurs in ergative languages where the deletion of an object "promotes" the subject from ergative case to absolutive case. In certain ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Glossing Abbreviations
This article lists common abbreviations for grammatical terms that are used in linguistic interlinear glossing of oral languages in English. The list provides conventional glosses as established by standard inventories of glossing abbreviations such as the Leipzig Glossing Rules, Leipzig Glossing rules, the most widely known standard. Synonymous glosses are listed as alternatives for reference purposes. In a few cases, long and short standard forms are listed, intended for texts where that gloss is rare or uncommon. Conventions * Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap (frequently abbreviated to ) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning. Similarly, (small) cap might be a locative suffix used in nominal inflections, prototypically indicating direction downward b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Koyraboro Senni
Koyraboro Senni (Koroboro Senni, Koyra Senni or Gao Senni) is a member of the Songhay languages of Mali and is spoken by some 400,000 people along the Niger River from the town of Gourma-Rharous, east of Timbuktu, through Bourem, Gao and Ansongo to the Mali–Niger border. The expression "''koyra-boro senn-i''" denotes "the language of the town dwellers", as opposed to nomads like the Tuareg people and other transhumant people. Although Koyraboro Senni is associated with settled towns, it is a cosmopolitan language which has spread east and west of Gao, to the Fula people living at the Mali–Niger border and to the Bozo people of the Niger River. East of Timbuktu, Koyra Senni gives way relatively abruptly to the closely related Koyra Chiini. Geographic distribution The majority of speakers live in the Gao Region of Mali. It is also spoken in other parts of Mali and in other countries. Phonology Consonants Vowels Nasalized realizations of vowel sounds may also occu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Songhay Languages
The Songhay, Songhai or Ayneha languages (, or ) are a group of closely related languages/dialects centred on the middle stretches of the Niger River in the West African countries of Mali, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. In particular, they are spoken in the cities of Timbuktu, Djenné, Niamey, Gao, Tillaberi, Dosso, Parakou, Kandi, Natitingou, Djougou, Malanville, Gorom-Gorom, In-Gall and Tabelbala. They have been widely used as a ''lingua franca'' in that region ever since the era of the Songhai Empire. In Mali, the government has officially adopted the dialect of Gao (east of Timbuktu) as the dialect to be used as a medium of primary education. Some Songhay languages have little to no mutual intelligibility between each other. For example, Koyraboro Senni, spoken in Gao, is unintelligible to speakers of Zarma in Niger, according to ''Ethnologue''. However, Songhoyboro Ciine, Zarma, and Dendi have high mutual intelligibility within Niger. For linguists, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Krongo Language
Krongo, also spelled ''Korongo'' or ''Kurungu'' and known as ''Dimodongo, Kadumodi,'' or ''Tabanya'' after local towns, is a Kadu language spoken in the South West of the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan, Sudan. ''Ethnologue'' lists Angolo, Tabanya, and Toroji in Krongo hills; and Buram, Damaguto, Dar, Dimadragu, and Dimodongo villages. The speakers themselves refer to the language as “nìinò mó-dì”, meaning “language from home”. According to research from 1985, Krongo speakers are usually farmers and live off of cultivating crops like sorghum, beans, sesame, peanuts and corn as well as keeping animals like cattle, sheep, pigs, goats and chickens. A survey from the year 1976 states that other languages spoken in the surveyed region (here referred to as “Krongo” as well) are Arabic, Dinka, Hausa and very small amounts of other African languages. The most common of these is Arabic with 70% of the 443 surveyed people stating to speak the language, although most of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johanna Nichols
Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Career She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation titled "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax". Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic prehistory, and languages of the Caucasus, chiefly Chechen and Ingush. She has made fundamental contributions to these fields. Honors A festschrift in her honor, ''Language Typology and Historical Contingency: In honor of Johanna Nichols'', was published in 2013. Nichols's best known work, ''Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time'', won the Linguistic Society of America's Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for 1994. In 2013 Nichols was inducted as a Fellow of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cahuilla Language
Cahuilla , or Ivilyuat ( or ), is an endangered Uto-Aztecan language, spoken by the various tribes of the Cahuilla Nation, living in the Coachella Valley, San Gorgonio Pass and San Jacinto Mountains region of southern California."Cahuilla." ''Ethnologue Report for the Language Code: chl.'' (retrieved 13 December 2009) The Cahuilla demonyms include or –speakers of Ivilyuat (Iviɂa)–or ''táxliswet'' meaning "person." A 1990 census revealed 35 speakers in an ethnic population of 800. With such a decline, Ivilyuat is classified as "critically endangered" by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger as most speakers are middle-aged or older with limited transmission ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Comanche Language
Comanche (, endonym ) is a Uto-Aztecan languages, Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Comanche, who split from the Shoshone soon after the Comanche had acquired horses around 1705. The Comanche language and the Shoshoni language are quite similar, but certain consonant changes in Comanche have inhibited mutual intelligibility. The name ''Comanche'' comes from the Ute language, Ute word "enemy, stranger". Their own name for the language is , which means "language of the people". Use and revitalization efforts Although efforts are now being made to ensure its survival, most speakers of the language are elderly. In the late 19th century, Comanche children were placed in American Indian boarding schools, indigenous boarding schools where they were discouraged from speaking their native language, and even severely punished for doing so. The second generation then grew up speaking English, because of the belief that it was better for them not to know Comanche. The Comanche language ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maasai Language
Maasai (previously spelled ''Masai'') or Maa ( ; autonym: ''ɔl Maa'') is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania by the Maasai people, numbering about 1.5 million. It is closely related to the other Maa varieties: Samburu (or Sampur), the language of the Samburu people of central Kenya, Chamus, spoken south and southeast of Lake Baringo (sometimes regarded as a dialect of Samburu); and Parakuyu of Tanzania. The Maasai, Samburu, il-Chamus and Parakuyu peoples are historically related and all refer to their language as . Properly speaking, "Maa" refers to the language and the culture and "Maasai" refers to the people "who speak Maa". Phonology The Maasai variety of as spoken in southern Kenya and Tanzania has 30 contrasting phonemes, including a series of implosive consonants. In Maasai, tone has a very productive role, conveying a wide range of grammatical and semantic functions. Consonants In the table of consonant phonemes bel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Affix
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are Morphological derivation, derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as ''un-'', ''-ation'', ''anti-'', ''pre-'' etc., introduce a semantic change to the word they are attached to. Inflectional affixes introduce a syntactic change, such as singular into plural (e.g. ''-(e)s''), or present simple grammatical tense, tense into present continuous or past tense by adding ''-ing'', ''-ed'' to an English word. All of them are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes. Affixes, infixes and their variations Changing a word by adding a morpheme at its beginning is called ''prefixation'', in the middle is called ''infixation'', and at the end is called ''suffixation''. ''Prefix'' and ''suffix'' may be subsumed under the term ''adfix'', in contrast to ''infix.'' When marking text for interlinear gl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
