A comprehensive guide on the Lango and Acholi written and spoken language of the Northern Ugandan Region. This book contains an introduction and guide to the Lango and Acholi alphabet and vocabulary. A language spoken by the Langi and Acholi of the Northern Ugandan region through a series of exercises, puzzles and tales told around fire pits passed on through generations.
This volume elucidates various interaction strategies for the Nilotic language Acholi. Based on detailed examples, Maren Rüsch links the structural organization of Acholi conversations to cultural features such as politeness, language socialization and narrations.
A comprehensive dictionary of Lwo/Acholi, a local language spoken mostly in northern Uganda and southern Sudan. Lwo/Acholi is a language of the southern Luo group and the western Nilotic branch of Eastern Sudanic. All entries in the dictionary are given in the Acholi language with definitions in English, and examples of usage in Acholi with parallel translations in English. The Acholi used is drawn from the dialects that have been least affected by external linguistic influence: the Payira, Patiko, Paico, Bwobo and Alero clans. The introductory section provides an overview of the structure and grammar of the language, covering nouns, verbs, vowels, tenses, singular and plural forms and phonetics.
Steven Pinker meets Bill Bryson in this landmark exploration of language. In the author's own words, "How Language Works is not about music, cookery, or sex. But it is about how we talk about music, cookery, and sex-or, indeed, anything at all." Language is so fundamental to everyday life that we take it for granted. But as David Crystal makes clear in this work of unprecedented scope, language is an extremely powerful tool that defines the human species. Crystal offers general readers a personal tour of the intricate workings of language. He moves effortlessly from big subjects like the origins of languages, how children learn to speak, and how conversation works to subtle but revealing points such as how email differs from both speech and writing in important ways, how language reveals a person's social status, and how we decide whether a word is rude or polite. Broad and deep, but with a light and witty touch, How Language Works is the ultimate layman's guide to how we communicate with one another.
Every language includes layers of lexical and grammatical elements that entered it at different times in the more or less distant past. Hence, for periods preceding our earliest historical documentation, linguistic stratigraphy the systematic study of such layers may yield information about the prehistory of a given tradition of speaking in a variety of ways. For instance, irregular phonological reflexes may be evidence of the convergence of diverse dialects in the formation of a language, and layers of material from different source languages may form a record of changing cultural contacts in the past. In this volume are discussed past problems and current advances in the stratigraphy of Indo-European, African, Southeast Asian, Australian, Oceanic, Japanese, and Meso-American languages.
