Book Chapters

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Browsing Book Chapters by Subject "African languages"

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    Lessons From The Field: An Insight Into The Documentation Of Gurenɛ Oral Genres
    (2022-03-29) Atintono, Samuel Awinkene
    The paper discusses my eight months fieldwork experience of documenting endangered Gurenɛ (Mabia, Niger-Congo) oral genres which include riddles and folktales, sung folktales, songs and ritual performances between 2010 and 2012 in Bolga and Bongo in northern Ghana. It presents the documentary corpus of close to 100 hours of both audio and video recordings and discusses the strategies and challenges of documenting these genres. It is argued in this paper that though Gurenɛ with a speaker population of over 600,000 is not endangered, its oral genres such as riddles and folktales are vanishing and deserves attention to be documented. The paper draws attention of linguistic field workers and language documenters to pay attention to such languages and not to focus only on endangered or moribund languages. The documentation corpus from this project has been archived at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS, London. The lessons in this project can be used to document these genres in other Ghanaian or African languages for revitalization and preservation of these linguistic and cultural resources of language communities.
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    Tone, Orthographies, And Phonological Depth In African Languages
    (2019-10-28) Cahill, Michael
    Marking of tone in African orthographies has historically been a challenge, not only for linguistic and analytical reasons, but also because most designers of these orthographies have been educated in non-tonal languages. After a review of lexical vs. grammatical tone, this paper examines various strategies that have been used for marking both lexical and grammatical tone in several East and West African languages, as well as cases in which tone is not marked. The question of the desired phonological depth of an orthography is discussed, especially when applied to tonal processes. Many phonologists do not apply theory more recent than Chomsky and Halle & Chomsky (1968) to orthographies. However, the more recent bifurcation of rules into lexical and postlexical provides a psycholinguistically supported phonological level at which tone marking can be based: the output of the lexical level. Experimental evidence supports this lexical level as more readable than either a phonemic or a deep level. A tonal typology of languages also guides what types of languages more predictably would need lexical tone marking. Recommendations for orthographical implementation are given in the conclusion.