Many of you may be familiar with Sequoyah, alias George Guess or Gist, a North American Cherokee who invented the Cherokee script in 1821. This script is a syllabary – it has a character for each syllable of the Cherokee language. But why would I write about a North American writing system from Georgia in […]
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you have seen many examples already of how languages can structure meaning in different ways. The fields of eating and drinking are no exception. In Many Mande languges, for example, there is no special verb for smoking, one drinks cigarettes, as in Bambara: N tɛ sigareti […]
Happy Easter, dear readers! Whether you observe this Christian holiday or not, you may be interested in the regional entanglements and semantic changes of the Latin word pascha ‘Easter” as it travelled through the Mediterranean and beyond. With pronounced as [k] in Latin, the word bears resemblance to many words designating a major religious celebration, […]
Back in London it is, sadly, much easier to write on African languages than from the continent itself. The obstacles do not only concern internet access, a major hurdle to equitably shared information, but also access to and awareness of printed research. In this regard, African researchers are much more excluded from information flows and […]
Emotions are not universal. They are expressed in cultural scripts reflected in language, sometimes over wide areas, but drawing on very diverse sources. The metaphors used to describe feelings often can focus on particular body parts as the locus of an emotion. In the Kwa language Ewe of Ghana, some emotional expression – those roughly […]
The language-based outlook of linguistics means that often, we capture only the reality of one language. But sometimes, as soon as one starts looking across language boundaries, stories of shared cultural practices, and in this case, fears, emerge. I had such an experience when, inspired by research on Casamance Creole by Noël Bernard Biagui, Joseph […]
My first post on indigenous African languages is dedicated to Sulemaana Kantè, the Guinean inventor of the N’ko script for the writing of Manding languages. He has been called a cultural fundamentalist by Jean-Loup Amselle, because he created a script and linguistic standard aiming at unifying a Manding language out of a cluster of closely […]
Africa hosts a wealth of scripts and writing traditions. I have mentioned some of them in earlier posts, for instance the Bamum script from Foumban in Cameroon, the N’ko alphabet from Guinea, Ajami writing, and the Vai script from Liberia. Before introducing you to other African writing practices, I have to share the news with […]
Happy Easter, dear readers! Whether you observe this Christian holiday or not, you may be interested in the regional entanglements and semantic changes of the Latin word pascha ‘Easter” as it travelled through the Mediterranean and beyond. With pronounced as [k] in Latin, the word bears resemblance to many words designating a major religious celebration, […]
I bet many of you don’t know Sigismund Koelle. But I also bet that among those of you who know this German missionary of the Church Missionary Society, hardly anyone will know Sam Cole of Freetown. Of course you wouldn’t – the Reverend Koelle was the researcher, and his interlocutor was the informant. So far, […]
A while ago I posted on Sigismund Koelle whose Polyglotta Africana remains the earliest comprehensive word list of African languages. In mid-19th century Freetown, he had occasion to interview many liberated slaves, traders and brokers who flocked to this cosmopolitan place. I have decided to dedicate blog posts to his “informants”, as he called the […]
A while ago I posted on Sigismund Koelle whose Polyglotta Africana remains the earliest comprehensive word list of African languages. In mid-19th century Freetown, he had occasion to interview many liberated slaves, traders and brokers who flocked to this cosmopolitan place. I have decided to dedicate blog posts to his “informants”, as he called the […]
Another taster typed on my phone and posted while the internet gods are in a good mood. True to its name it brings you a snack straight from the streets of Bamako… or Lagos… or Accra… or even Salvador de Bahia: Akara: the snack that conquered the Atlantic world These little morsels made from black-eyed […]
From a social point of view, languages come into being as a crystallisation of particular imaginations of identities linked to particular ways of speaking. Sometimes these ideas grow over long periods of times. In other cases, particular encounters, with people or ideas, act as catalysts for language movements that radically alter the status quo. In […]