Pet names or nicknames, special terms of endearment that convey intimacy and teasing, are common to all languages. In Hausa, one of Africa’s largest languages, these names take particularly intricate patterns, since they are built by copying part of a person’s name. There are several different ways of doing this, as you can see here: […]
My post for today on African indigenous language is on counting. There is much to say on the many complex numeral systems found in West Africa, but one of their areal characteristics is all languages I’m aware of have two different ways of counting. I will get back to later to ‘normal’ numbers and the […]
I have a good excuse for having stayed away from the blog for some time: I was busy getting ready for the 8th European Conference on African Studies which took place at the University of Edinburgh last week. This was my first ECAS, and with 1,500 participants and hundreds of panels, it was almost overwhelming. […]
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, […]
In today’s post on African indigenous languages, I will look again at translatlantic connections. It is not only the Portuguese who have left their imprint across the globe from the first wave of globalisation onwards, which started when they landed on the shores of the Upper Guinea Coast in the 15th century. As we have […]
This blog had a long hiatus – I’ve been too busy adapting to life in Finland and learning one of its official languages, Finnish. It is not without irony that I take up this blog again at the end of a week celebrating the European day of languages. Two years ago at the same time, […]
Surely I’m not the only thinking first and foremost of the Americas and the Caribbean as the regions hosting African diasporas. The transatlantic slave trade that saw so many Africans subjected to the middle passage and violently resettled in the New World has spurred much research and is prominent in the public awareness of slavery […]
I have a good excuse for having stayed away from the blog for some time: I was busy getting ready for the 8th European Conference on African Studies which took place at the University of Edinburgh last week. This was my first ECAS, and with 1,500 participants and hundreds of panels, it was almost overwhelming. […]
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 […]
Writing from the UK, where questions of exiting loom large, I can’t help being affected by the uncertainties of this country about its trajectory. For many, it’s clear what they want to move away from, but where they’re going seems completely in the dark. It’s not the English language that is at fault here, as […]
For researchers looking at transatlantic entanglements, and for traces that link slaves in the Americas to their places of origin, names – for rituals, objects, foods – provide important clues. I have described in earlier posts how the presence of Upper Guineans in Peru and Northeastern Brazil is tangible in family names and names for […]
Surely I’m not the only thinking first and foremost of the Americas and the Caribbean as the regions hosting African diasporas. The transatlantic slave trade that saw so many Africans subjected to the middle passage and violently resettled in the New World has spurred much research and is prominent in the public awareness of slavery […]
For researchers looking at transatlantic entanglements, and for traces that link slaves in the Americas to their places of origin, names – for rituals, objects, foods – provide important clues. I have described in earlier posts how the presence of Upper Guineans in Peru and Northeastern Brazil is tangible in family names and names for […]