Hilde Gunnink

Call collaborators Call for collaborators MapLE project The NWO Vici project ‘Mapping Linguistic Epistemicity’ (MapLE) invites 5 collaborators to help with data collection and analysis. Come join the MapLE team! Desc…

CALL FOR COLLABORATORS
The MapLE project is looking for 5 collaborators working on African languages, to collect and analyse data on the speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge in grammar. Will you join our project?
See the website for details:
epistemicity.net/call-collabo...

✨New issue alert (Vol 34, No 3)!✨

As always, NJAS is fully free and #OpenAccess. Check it out now!
⬇️⬇️⬇️
njas.fi/njas/issue/v...

Come join us in Ghent next year for #Bantu11! The first cfp is out, with workshop proposals due October 15th (the next deadline will be December 1st for abstract submissions, which can be to a workshop or the general session)

www.bantugent.ugent.be/bantu11/

"She was living in her Updown world"

At least Namibia is a reasonable place for alveolar click insertion

Why does this wine have a bilabial click? It's not even South African!

Why does this racist student club have an alveolar click in their name?

Click insertions in the wild (thread)

New level unlocked: whenever I see "languages" spelled correctly my first thought is that it is a typo.

We're collecting fun trivia about African languages to put on a calendar and share with the wider public. Help us promoting African languages and share your favourite African linguistic data.

Share your favourite words, etymologies, idioms, proverbs and riddles in African languages!
stemmenvanafrika.nl/contact/

I have now progressed to misspelling "likelihood" as "likelihoofd"

Who invented wine glasses? Who designed the most instable type of glass and said right, let's put the stuff that make you clumsy in it

Yes this is a very important point that we seem reluctant to admit. Language shift is often paired with all sorts of economic progress that people are eager to embrace. In Africa language shift is also often not perceived as traumatic by those involved.

I have now progressed to "lanugages"

This one is more subtle: apartheid-era grammars of South African languages always have a diachronic phonology chapter. This seems like a harmless side-quest but is probably related to the apartheid goal of classifying the Bantu-speaking population into separate, linguistically based groups.

1970's South African linguistics: Mr Volschenk, Mr ǁowaseb and Mr Satyo are all mentioned, but only Mr Volschenk is praised for his kindness and excellence

Why is it always "my collaborators don't speak English" and never "I don't speak isiZulu"?
(from Corrigan et al. 2011, "Ethnobotanical plant uses in the KwaNibela Peninsula, St Lucia, South Africa", South African Journal of Botany 77: 346-359)

Subtle (and not so subtle) racism in old (and not so old) publications on South African languages: a thread

Translators were used to communicate with the experts, who were not familiar with the English language.

Why is it always "my collaborators don't speak English" and never "I don't speak isiZulu"?
(from Corrigan et al. 2011, "Ethnobotanical plant uses in the KwaNibela Peninsula, St Lucia, South Africa", South African Journal of Botany 77: 346-359)

Auer (1977: 459) reconstructs the word *ngamote 'room' to Proto-Sotho, whose perfect regularity clearly proves that Afrikaans contact predated the break-up of Proto-Sotho. 🙃

Metalinguistic data only it's data about which linguists hate each other, which linguists are married to each other, etc.

No Turnitin, the student did not "swap letters with similar characters from another alphabet". They're called phonetic symbols

How many South African place names are relics from languages that are no longer spoken there? Well, since 15% of recorded place names don't have an etymology in a known South African language, my guess is close to 15%.

I just read and graded a thesis in less time than it took Turnitin to check it for plagiarism, but please, do tell me about how AI will make humans obsolete.

I have two review speeds: right away and never.

NguNini lo; This is Nini; NguNtlang' ozibhene lo; This is the dispersed tribe; Ntlambo-mathanjana; Valley of bones; Gcunise le nkankanka; Heaps of bones the result of spearing; Mnt' omkhulu lo. The grown-up person this.

Came across three versions of a Xhosa children's song played while counting the fingers in the Greater Xhosa Dictionary. Version three is a bit disturbing:

Spoken in the area where Sesotho is spoken now. Are these untraceable click words relics from a now vanished languages such as "Seroa"? If we can exclude all other sources, I am tempted to say yes...

5) For more than half of the Sesotho click lexicon, we have no idea where these words come from. Many may have been adopted from Khoisan languages for which we have little to no documentation. Historical sources document languages such "Seroa" (which simply means "Khoisan language" in Sesotho)...

4) Very few click words can be traced to Khoekhoe, a Khoe language historically spoken on the South African coast. Some of the apparent Khoekhoe loans also occur in Zulu, suggesting that they entered Sesotho via Zulu. There is therefore no clear evidence for direct Sesotho/Khoekhoe contact.