Colloquial Elements in Oirat Script Documents of the 19th Century (original) (raw)
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African indigenous languages have suffered setbacks for inability of the language users to develop their orthographies. Some African languages, specifically Nigerian indigenous language that have been termed the 'minority languages' are either extinct already or on the verge of extinction. This is because many of them have not been developed orthographically and codified phonemically. The need to arrest this drift is what has led to the emergence of this study. Given the fact that English is a major global language, comparing its orthography with that of the Gwandara language enables the researchers to appreciate some striking similarities and, or differences capable of elevating the Gwandara language to a higher level. It is hoped that the reader will find this descriptive research worthwhile for its contribution to the development of one of the Nigeria's indigenous languages to a standard level.
Towards a Dialect History of the Baggara Belt
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The Baggara Belt constitutes the southernmost periphery of the Arabic-speaking world. It stretches over 2500 km from Nigeria to Sudan and it is largely inhabited by Arab semi-nomadic cattle herders. Despite its common sociohistorical background, the ethnography of Baggara nomads is complex, being the result of a long series of longitudinal migrations and contacts with different ethnolinguistic groups. Thanks to a number of comparative works, there is broad agreement on the inclusion of Baggara dialects within West Sudanic Arabic. However, little or nothing is known of the internal classification of Baggara Arabic. This paper seeks to provide a comparative overview of Baggara Arabic and to explain dialect convergences and divergences within the Baggara Belt in light of both internally and externally motivated changes. By providing a qualitative analysis of selected phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features, this study demonstrates that there is no overlapping between the et...
The Ormuri Language in Past and Present
2011
Dr. V.A. (Valentin Aleksandrovič) Efimov was born on 22 March, 1933, in the interior countryside of Russia. As a young man he moved to Moscow to study at the State University there. He successfully pursued an academic career at the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where he worked for the larger part of his life as an expert of the languages of Afghanistan, and of Iranian linguistics in general. He died on 27 March, 2007, after a painful illness, at the age of 74. At the time of his death, he was professor and chair of the Iranian languages department of the Institute of Linguistics, as well as a member of the academic council of the Institute. Dr. Efimov conducted his fieldwork on the Ormuri language in the summer of 1971 in the Logar valley in Afghanistan. One of his Ormuri language consultants from Logar, Mr. Khalilullah Ormur, came to Moscow for university studies during the 1970s, thus providing Dr. Efimov with the opportunity for further work with a native speaker. Dr. Efimov‘s main work on Ormuri was published as a monograph in 1986, written in Russian. A literal translation of its title is, The Ormuri Language in a Historical and Synchronic Light. True to its title, the book pairs an in-depth synchronic analysis and description of Ormuri phonology and morphology to an equally in-depth historical-comparative analysis of the same. The purpose of publishing an English translation of The Ormuri Language is, on the one hand, to enhance the accessibility of Dr. Efimov‘s important work to the professional linguistic community outside of Russia. On the other hand, the purpose is also to call attention once again to the fate of this interesting language. It has, amazingly, persisted over many centuries in the face of pressure from the surrounding predominant Persian and Pashto languages. Nowadays, however, it is on the verge of extinction in Afghanistan (where only a few members of the older generations are still able to speak it), and it is still alive but seriously endangered in Pakistan.
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