A Dictionary of Mah Meri as Spoken at Bukit Bangkong PDF Download

Author: Nicole Kruspe
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082486056X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
Mah Meri is an Aslian (Austroasiatic: Mon-Khmer) language spoken in scattered settlements along a section of the southwest coast of Selangor in Peninsular Malaysia. The Mah Meri are the only Aslian speakers who live in a coastal environment. Their language, which may have about 2,000 speakers, has no written language and is highly endangered. This is the first comprehensive dictionary of Mah Meri and is based on the author’s extensive field research and consultation with members of the community over the last ten years. The dialect presented here is spoken by about 600 people at Bukit Bangkong, the most southerly Mah Meri settlement. The dictionary contains around 4,000 entries, each with a phonetic transcription and translations in both English and Malay. Many entries are further complemented by illustrative examples, notes on usage, derivations, ethnographic information, and illustrations—all provide insight into the world of Mah Meri speakers. Two finder lists (English–Mah Meri and Malay–Mah Meri) are included, giving access to the intended audience of international and local scholars and community members. The volume also includes a general introduction to the Mah Meri, notes to assist the reader in using the dictionary, and a short grammatical description.

Author: Salasiah Che Lah
Publisher: Penerbit USM
ISBN: 967461379X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
This book gives readers a present and critical view of different language and linguistic issues in selected Asian contexts. The language aspect of the manuscript explores various areas of English language learning and teaching while the linguistic aspect looks at different fields such as sociolinguistics, semantics, stylistics, corpus-based studies, translation studies and cultural studies. These aspects also provide distinct tangents in researching language for they offer significant points of view and outcomes in understanding the influence and/or the function of cultures when dealing with either spoken or written discourses involving native or non-native speakers. Such dynamics are instrumental in bringing about wider range of topics pertinent to the transdisciplinary nature of the current research theme in this part of the world. Substantially, the major sub-disciplines included in the manuscript frame both theoretical and hands-on implications for more rigourous innovations and expansions in the respective area of investigation.

Author: Nicholas Thieberger
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824890515
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
This is a dictionary of Nafsan, the language spoken in Vanuatu in the south of Efate Island in the villages of Erakor, Pango, and Eratap. Nafsan is one of 130 distinct languages spoken in Vanuatu. Over several decades, linguist Nicholas Thieberger worked in close collaboration with the Erakor community to record this unique language and to refine its written presentation. The resulting publication offers insight into the diversity of meanings available to speakers of Nafsan, providing some 3,400 senses for Nafsan words and an English-Nafsan finderlist. In addition, the book gives an overview of the Nafsan sound system, provides a list of existing literature on the language dating back to early missionary translations, and includes maps of Efate locating nearly 200 place names. Readers will also find South Efate cultural knowledge embedded in the explanations of the Nafsan words and their usages. A welcome companion to Thieberger’s A Grammar of South Efate (2006), this book complements and significantly augments other multimedia resources made available online by the author.

Author: Paul Sidwell
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004283579
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1358

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Book Description
This Handbook presents the typology, classification and historical reconstruction of this important language family of South and Southeast Asia. The work includes 21 grammar sketches presenting each branch, plus extensive overview chapters.

Author: Nicholas Evans
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027286620
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Reciprocals are an increasingly hot topic in linguistic research. This reflects the intersection of several factors: the semantic and syntactic complexity of reciprocal constructions, their centrality to some key points of linguistic theorizing (such as Binding Conditions on anaphors within Government and Binding Theory), and the centrality of reciprocity to theories of social structure, human evolution and social cognition. No existing work, however, tackles the question of exactly what reciprocal constructions mean cross-linguistically. Is there a single, Platonic ‘reciprocal’ meaning found in all languages, or is there a cluster of related concepts which are nonetheless impossible to characterize in any single way? That is the central goal of this volume, and it develops and explains new techniques for tackling this question. At the same time, it confronts a more general problem facing semantic typology: how to investigate a category cross-linguistically without pre-loading the definition of the phenomenon on the basis of what is found in more familiar languages.

Author: Tom Güldemann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107003687
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 747

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Book Description
Offers a linguistic window into contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, looking at how they survive and interface with agricultural and industrial societies.

Author: Valérie Guérin
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824836391
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Spoken on Mavea Island by approximately 32 people, Mavea is an endangered Oceanic language of Vanuatu. This work provides grammatical descriptions of this hitherto undescribed language. Fourteen chapters, containing more than 1,400 examples, cover topics in the phonology and morphosyntax of Mavea, with an emphasis on the latter. Of particular interest are examples of individual speaker variation presented throughout the grammar; the presence of three linguo-labials (still used today by a single speaker) that were unexpectedly found before the rounded vowel /o/; and a chapter on numerals and the counting system, which have long been replaced by Bislama’s but are remembered by a handful of speakers. Most of the grammatical descriptions derive from a corpus of texts of various genres (conversations, traditional stories, personal histories, etc.) gathered during the author’s fieldwork, conducted for eleven months between 2005 and 2007.

Author: Paul Bouissac
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262543
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Personal pronouns have a special status in languages. As indexical tools they are the means by which languages and persons intimately interface with each other within a particular social structure. Pronouns involve more than mere grammatical functions in live communication acts. They variously signal the gender of speakers as parts of utterances or in their anaphoric roles. They also prominently indicate with a range of degrees the kind of social relationships that hold between speakers from intimacy to indifference, from dominance to submission, and from solidarity to hostility. Languages greatly vary in the number of pronouns and other address terms they offer to their users with a distinct range of social values. Children learn their relative position in their family and in their society through the “correct” use of pronouns. When languages come into contact because of population migrations or through the process of translation, pronouns are the most sensitive zone of tension both psychologically and politically. This volume endeavours to probe the comparative pragmatics of pronominal systems as social processes in a representative set from different language families and cultural areas.

Author: Paul Sidwell
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311055612X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 1261

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Book Description
The handbook will offer a survey of the field of linguistics in the early 21st century for the Southeast Asian Linguistic Area. The last half century has seen a great increase in work on language contact, work in genetic, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics, and since the 1990s especially documentation of endangered languages. The book will provide an account of work in these areas, focusing on the achievements of SEAsian linguistics, as well as the challenges and unresolved issues, and provide a survey of the relevant major publications and other available resources. We will address: Survey of the languages of the area, organized along genetic lines, with discussion of relevant political and cultural background issues Theoretical/descriptive and typological issues Genetic classification and historical linguistics Areal and contact linguistics Other areas of interest such as sociolinguistics, semantics, writing systems, etc. Resources (major monographs and monograph series, dictionaries, journals, electronic data bases, etc.) Grammar sketches of languages representative of the genetic and structural diversity of the region.

Author: Rugayah Hashim
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9814585459
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
This book of proceedings collects fifty-one papers presented at the inaugural Colloquium of Administrative Science and Technology (CoAST 2013) event, held at Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. It has been reviewed by 750 experts world-wide and covers three main areas – Administrative Science and Technology, Management, and Arts and Humanities. The papers in this volume reflect: • the importance of the social sciences in academia and in the nations’ social-economic growth; • the multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary nature of academia that transcends the broad areas of the social sciences; • the increasing trend towards fundamental studies in the social sciences, management, and the arts and the humanities, which have been characterized under the overarching theme of administrative science and technology; • the growing demand for research outcomes affecting the public and private sectors’ service processes. The other overlapping niche areas affecting the civil service scope will ensure more interest in and readability of the findings showcased in this proceedings book; • the popular and contemporary measurement techniques and methodologies employed within the scopes of the social sciences and humanities; • the noticeably changing trends in administrative science and technology, which will greatly impact the governments of the world, allowing the development of a better understanding of governmental processes and their impact on key performance and e-service deliveries. The reporting on technology-based services will improve the public sector’s agility; • a knowledge-sharing agenda for other developing and less developed nations to emulate; • some of the major generic developments that have taken place in these thematic areas of CoAST 2013.