New Dialects

"Carter's music poses struggles of opposition, for instance in timbre (Double Concerto), space (String Quartet No. 3) or pulse (String Quartet No. 5). His preference for the all-interval tetrachords, 4–Z15 [0, 1, 4, 6] and 4–Z29 [0, 1, 3, 7], is also well known. From these facets of Carter's music, I develop a narrative interpretation of his Petrarch sonnet–inspired solo flute piece, Scrivo in Vento (1991). Specifically, I forge narrative pathways by imagining the two tetrachords as active agents opposed in competition. Previous Scrivo analyses (Capuzzo 2002; Childs 2006) stress continuity by revealing Q-transforms and common-note voice leading between the tetrachords. While acknowledging such features, my analysis emphasises oppositional struggle by tracing the tetrachords as separate entities which cooperate and conflict as they manoeuvre to outdo each other.

The analysis advances three theses: (1) it guides listening to and reading Scrivo in a way which resonates with Carter's concern for the aesthetics of oppositional struggle, his choice of a sonnet as inspiration and his affinity for all-interval tetrachords; (2) it shows that music-analytical detail can be organised into dramatic narratives by (a) projecting dramatic roles onto categories asserted by a formal theory and (b) treating the formal theory's relations metaphorically as actions performed by each role as the musical work unfolds; and (3) it shows how detailed pc-set analysis can support a Heraclitean view of music: a flux of opposing forces seeking and resisting unity."

Le dialecte de Saint-Priest-la-Feuille, petit village limousin du Nord de la Creuse, est encore aujourd'hui un idiome vivant. Une partie importante de la population, surtout parmi les gens âgés de plus de quarante ans, maîtrise le vocabulaire et les conjugaisons de base tout au moins.
Tout le monde n'est pas d'accord sur le nom qu'il faut donner à ce parler. "Marchois", le nom employé ici, dérive de l'ancienne province de la Marche, qui englobait grosso-modo la Creuse actuelle. Ce nom est employé assez couramment par les gens qui s'intéressent à l'occitan.
Cependant, il présente un grave inconvénient: les frontières de la Marche historique ne correspondent pas au marchois tel qu'on l'envisage ici. Le Sud de la Creuse emploie des parlers appartenant aux dialectes occitans limousin (à l'ouest) ou auvergnat (à l'est). Il vaudrait donc mieux parler de "bas-marchois" à propos du dialecte étudié ici, celui de Saint-Priest.

The Chinese provinces are a crazy patchwork quilt of languages and dialects, where the histories of migrations and cultural enclaves, the tides of influence from empire and commerce, the sperm trails that follow rivers and railway lines ... are recorded in a tangle of codes that no one has yet made a serious attempt to untangle. Note that these comments are obviously informal, not a part of systematic research. Chinese scholars themselves are now (2013) taking a much more thorough interest in dialects than was the case even in 2000.

Вопреки распространённому мнению о том, что белорусско-русская смешанная речь (БРСР), известная также под названием «трасянка», совершенно негомогенна (нерегулярна) или даже хаотична в отношении распределения белорусских или русских элементов, т.е. выражений и конструкций, на основе анализа корпуса, состоящего из разговоров, зафиксированных семейном кругу, описывается ряд тенденций к стабилизации предпочтений русских (в большинстве случаев) или же, напротив, белорусских вариантов (реже) на различных структурных уровнях. Также подчёркивается, что именно БРСР в последние десятилетия являлась для миллионов белорусов кодом первой языковой социализации, а усвоение русского и белорусского языков следует понимать как вторичный процесс в смысле изучения блокирования элементов из общего инвентаря, являющихся неприемлемыми в различных социальных контекстах, если требуется говорить по-русски или (реже) по-белорусски. При этом проводится параллель между белорусской ситуацией и языковой ситуацией в южной Германии, где в городах распространены смешанные идиомы, возникшие на основе местных диалектов и немецкого литературного языка.

El presente escrito toma por objeto la lectura que realiza Riccardo Bellofiore del vínculo entre Marx y Hegel. Bellofiore sostiene que el idealismo de Hegel responde a que expresa el movimiento real del capital, atribuyéndole a la dialéctica de lo absoluto una circularidad de la que el capital carece, ya que para alcanzar esta condición debe doblegar la resistencia de la clase obrera. Frente a la propuesta de Bellofiore, nuestra tesis es que Hegel se representa la autonomización del capital como si fuese la del pensamiento respecto de sus determinaciones sociales.

The Bibliography consists of three parts. The last of which is a word index containing those words whose etymology was discussed in 1994-1995. This is preceded by a two-part list of literature. In Part B solutions to the abbreviations used in the index are given. In Part A, however, those bibliographical items are located which are not entered into the index (chiefly monographs and largere articles, particularly those containing their own index or glossary), as well as studies devoted to one word (mentioned in their titles) or a semantic group.

Stop, revive and survive
Ghil'ad Zuckermann
6 June 2012
The Australian
Higher Education

LINGUICIDE (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating) have made Australia the unlucky country. With globalisation, homogenisation and Coca-colonisation there will be more and more groups added to the forlorn club of the lost-heritage peoples.

Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve wellbeing.

There are various ethical, aesthetic and utilitarian benefits of language revival - for example, historical justice, diversity and employability, respectively. There is an urgent need to offer perspicacious insights relevant to language reclamation.

Revival linguistics is a new discipline, being established at Adelaide, studying comparatively and systematically the universal constraints, global mechanisms and local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies apparent in revival attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the world. Revival linguistics combines scientific studies of native language acquisition and foreign language learning. After all, language reclamation is the most extreme case of second-language learning.

Revival linguistics complements the established area of documentary linguistics, which records endangered languages before they fall asleep.

There is a need to revise the fields of grammaticography (writing grammars) and lexicography (writing dictionaries): grammars and dictionaries ought to be written for language reclamation in a user-friendly way, for communities, not only for linguists. For example, we should avoid highfalutin, often Latin-based grammatical terminology.

We should also offer communities a user-friendly spelling. Juxtapose Lutheran missionary Clamor Wilhelm Schurmann's 1844 user-unfriendly spelling "nunyara" for the Barngarla (Parnkalla) word for "recovery". Ignoring the English environment, this spelling resulted in the pronunciation nanYAra rather than NOONyara. While nunyara suits documentary linguistics, NOONyara would be preferred from a revival linguistic perspective.

For linguists, the first stage of any language revival must involve a long period of observation and careful listening while learning, mapping and characterising the specific needs, desires and potentials of an indigenous or minority or culturally endangered community. Only then can one inspire and assist.

That said, there are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would help revivalists and first nations' leaders to work more efficiently. For example, it is easier to resurrect basic vocabulary and verbal conjugations than sounds and word order.
Revivalists should be realistic and abandon discouraging, counter-productive slogans such as "Give us authenticity or give us death!"

Closely related to contact linguistics, revival linguistics changes the field of historical linguistics by, for instance, weakening the family tree-model, which implies that a language has only one parent.

One day we may invent devices to "inject" a language into our brains. But until then, any attempt to reclaim a hibernating language will result in a hybrid that combines components from the revivalists' and documenters' mother tongues and, of course, the target sleeping language. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld, "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

Native tongue title and language rights should be promoted. The government ought to define Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vernaculars as official languages of Australia. We must change the linguistic landscape of Whyalla and elsewhere. Signs should be in both English and the local indigenous language. We ought to acknowledge intellectual property of indigenous knowledge including language, music and dance.

Furthermore, in the future the very insights offered by revival linguistics will become part of Aboriginal intellectual property, when Slovenes or Estonians come to Australia to ask indigenous Australians to assist them in their own European language resurrection.

The punchline? One, if your language is endangered, do not allow it to fall asleep. Two, if your language falls asleep: stop, revive, survive! Three, if you revive a language, embrace the hybridity of the emerging tongue. Four, if your language is healthy, assist others in linguistic need.

Professor Ghil'ad Zuckermann is Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide.

Tahltan is an Athapaskan language with perhaps the world's only three-way consonant harmony system (dental, alveolar, and alveopalatal). Although most explanations have depended on feature analysis, Gafos [1] proposed that differences in tongue grooving could account for the pattern. Here, we use ultrasound to examine the initial plausibility of this argument by determining whether a language without consonant harmony, American English, also shows such groove patterns. Finding such a pattern would support its possible existence in the precursors to Tahltan, from which the harmony system could arise. Coronal sections of the anterior portion of the tongue of three speakers of English uttering CVC syllables were collected via ultrasound and the depths of the groove measured. The data are consistent with Gafos's predictions, with three groove depths differing for the three classes of consonants. This pattern supports the possibility that the consonant harmony derives from this a...

The paper focuses on Belarusian-Russian mixed speech which has not received much attention in the literature up to now. The two langauges in contact, Russian and Belarusian, are structurally very close to each other and, to a certain extent, mutually intelligible, allowing for semi-communication. (Of course, Belarusians have no problems with understanding Russian, due to historical an social reasons. But for Russians not everything in Belarusian is intelligible.) Russian-Belarusian mixed seech can be characterized as a fused lect at least 'in statu nascendi', for which to a certain degree areal herogenity is a factor. There is no sharp lexicon grammar split. Rather a hiercharchy of strength of Russian's impact on Belrusian is proposed, which very much resembles well-known hierarchies of borrowing hierarchies: Belarusian sound structures showing the least, discourse markers the strongest degree of Russian influence. The degree of variance to be found in Belrusian-Russian mixed speech, very much resembles the one in Southern German  regiolects or urban dialects.

A diachronic compilation of different types of texts such as the Helsinki Corpus provides adequate material for a preliminary approach to the degree of diffusion of scientific/technical vocabulary (mainly nouns). The presence of this specific lexicon in writings other than scientific may ...

""La présente étude est la première description systématique du parler occitan alpin de Seyne-les-Alpes (Alpes de Haute-Provence) et des communes avoisinantes (Auzet, Barle, Coulloubroux, Montclar, Le Selonnet, Verdache et Le Vernet). Après une présentation générale de la situation linguistique et historique du Pays Seynois, sont abordés successivement la phonétique et la phonologie (caractéristiques de la prononciation) du parler seynois, puis la morphologie (formation des pluriels, conjugaisons).
Un lexique seynois-français de 1400 mots explicite l'essentiel du vocabulaire courant de l'occitan seynois. Enfin, des textes en seynois permettent de se faire une idée pratique de l'usage actuel.
Le contenu de cet ouvrage est fondé exclusivement sur les résultats d'enquêtes linguistiques faites auprès de locuteurs de langue maternelle seynoise, qui ont ainsi transmis directement leur savoir et l'expérience qu'ils avaient de leur parler.
Ce livre, qui fournit un accès privilégié au patrimoine linguistique et culturel seynois, est destiné aux habitants du Pays de Seyne, et plus généralement à tous ceux que passionnent les cultures alpines, la langue occitane ou la linguistique romane.""