This is the first dictionary of Seychelles Creole to focus upon translation into English. Seychelles Creole is the mother tongue of Seychellois and the language is strongly promoted by the Seychelles Government. However, the government also recognises the global importance of English and schools teach students the language to a high degree of competence. Today, Creole remains the language most commonly used in the home and between Seychellois in all situations. However, most Seychellois are very competent in English. A reasonable command of both languages is extremely useful in Seychelles.
Haitian Creole (HC) is spoken by approximately 11,000,000 persons in Haiti and in diaspora communities in the United States and throughout the Caribbean. Thus, it is of great utility to Anglophone professionals engaged in various activities—medical, social, educational, welfare— in these regions. As the most widely spoken and best described creole language, a knowledge of its vocabulary is of interest and utility to scholars in a variety of disciplines. The English-Haitian Creole Bilingual Dictionary (EHCBD) aims to assist anglophone users in constructing written and oral discourse in HC; it also will aid HC speakers to translate from English to their language. As the most elaborate and extensive linguistic tool available, it contains about 30 000 individual entries, many of which have multiple senses and include subentries, multiword phrases or idioms. The distinguishing feature of the EHCBD is the inclusion of translated sentence-length illustrative examples that provide important information on usage.
In the 1970s, the newly independent Seychelles government took the landmark decision to make Seychellois Creole (SC) an official language. The Seychelles thus became the first Creole-speaking country worldwide to give its Creole the status of a national language and to use it as a medium of instruction. The decision to use SC in the school system has resulted in many positive developments such as increasing rates in public literacy. Despite these advances, there are many critics who contend that formal instruction in SC interferes with the speedy and necessary acquisition of English and French, which are internationally associated with socio-economic power and prestige. This book assesses the attitudes of SC speakers towards their mother tongue, in relation to the colonial history of the country. Its objectives are twofold: firstly to shed light upon the attitudes which modern Seychellois hold towards their mother tongue and its use in the education system; and secondly to demonstrate how these attitudes may affect the achievement of the government's educational agenda. The findings of this book are directly relevant for other investigators interested in globalization, multilingual education, pluriliteracy, minority language maintenance, language policy, and teacher training. Moreover, the implications of this research are applicable to other post-colonial settings throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas where the pursuit of sensitive yet effective multilingual educational policies remains acute.
Covering the political, social and historical background of each language, Dictionary of Languages offers a unique insight into human culture and communication. Every language with official status is included, as well as all those that have a written literature and 175 'minor' languages with special historical or anthropological interest. We see how, with the rapidly increasing uniformity of our culture as media's influence spreads, more languages have become extinct or are under threat of extinction. The text is highlighted by maps and charts of scripts, while proverbs, anecdotes and quotations reveal the features that make a language unique.
THE RANDOM HOUSE CROSSWORD PUZZLE DICTIONARY MORE THAN 700,000 CLUES AND ANSWER WORDS! THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE POCKET CROSSWORD DICTIONARY ON THE MARKET! COMPREHENSIVE More clue words, special categories, and subcategories than any comparable dictionary In-depth coverage of people, places, and things AUTHORITATIVE Extensive coverage of modern history, popular culture, politics, literature, sports, and much more General vocabulary and synonyms checked against the voluminous Random House dictionary and thesaurus files CLEARLY ORGANIZED Clue words and clue information printed in easy-to-spot bold typeface All answer words grouped by their number of letters
The handbook includes elements of Grenadian folklore, proverbs, and sayings. Much more work needs to be done in those areas. In fact, the proverbs and sayings are already the object of a separate publication that is well underway. A special section on French names and their meanings has also been included for primary school pupils and teachers, as well as foreigners to our shores. It deals with the names of places, people, patois nicknames, and French-sounding names. Keywords, key expressions, or entries in the lexeme section and in other sections of the book are in bold type. Some of these terms may also be noted by an asterisk. The part of speech of the terms is noted, their pronunciation where deemed necessary for this particular publication, the origin of the term, and their meaning in SE/GCE. As a general rule, the most popular meanings of terms are in descending order of importance. The cultural and folkloric values of certain entries are noted in an effort to document such information and/or beliefs. Synonyms, antonyms, and cross references are given due prominence to show the richness of the language. Omitted from this work are terms considered to be too vulgar in nature, particularly the wealth of those referring to human sexual organs and expletives. A comparative grammar section juxtaposes grammatical similarities and differences between SE and GCE. It is a scratching of the surface and is intended to show, first of all, that GCE has a grammar of its own, where traditionally certain linguistic performances were and may still be seen or written off as errors. In fact, they may be standard grammatical features of GCE and Creole English. This section explores as well the nature and origin of some of the syntactic structures used by Grenadians with a view to facilitate the transition from SE to GCE, or vice versa.
It is generally assumed that Creole languages form a separate category from the rest of the world’s languages. The papers in this volume, written by internationally renowned scholars in the field of Creole studies, seek to explore more deeply this commonly held assumption by comparing the linguistic properties of specific Creole languages to each other and also to non-Creole languages. Using a variety of methodological and analytical approaches, the contributions to this volume show that the linguistic classification of Creole languages continues to be a topic of intense debate that requires the re-examination of the premises of linguistic typology. What is the linguistic motivation for considering that languages are related or unrelated? How and why do common linguistic properties arise? Are Creoles indeed exceptional? This volume examines these questions and provides a strong foundation for continued research into the phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic features found in Creole languages. Most of these articles were previously published in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 26:1 (2011). The article by Jeff Good was previously published in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 27:1 (2012).
This book reflects an ongoing shift in the study of contact languages: After a period of history-free universalism, it directs the attention to the individual historical circumstances under which the pidgin and creole languages arose. The contributions deal with different areas of language structure including phonology, morphology, and syntax, providing a wealth of structural and sociohistorical data that any comprehensive theory of contact languages will have to account for. Each of the papers provides a thorough description of a structural phenomenon against the background of the sociohistorical contact situation. The languages covered in the book are: Guiné-Bissau Creole, Haitian Creole, Hawai‘i Creole, Indo-Portuguese creoles, Jamaican Creole, Lingua Franca, North American French, Mauritian Creole, Santomense, Saramaccan, Seychelles Creole, Sranan, Surinamese Maroon creoles, Vincentian Creole, and Zamboangueño Chavacano.
For several reasons, mostly inherent to the different developments of generative grammar, an increasing number of publications have dealt with reduplication in the past 20 years. Reduplication lends itself perfectly as a test field for theories that opt for a non-segmental organization of phonology and morphology. As it happens frequently, then, the discussion centers around a rather small set of data for which alternative analysis are offered, and which themselves are intended to contribute to the foundation of new theoretical developments. The present volume (which goes back to a conference on reduplication at the University of Graz, Austria) offers a broader approach to reduplication not only from different theoretical viewpoints, but especially for its phenomenology. Across theories a number of highly qualified authors deal with formal and functional perspectives, with typological properties, with semantics, comparative issues, the role of reduplication in language acquisition, the acquisition of reduplicative systems, sign languages, creoles and pidgins, general grammatical and cognitive principles; the picture is completed by a series of language or language-family specific studies as on Uto-Aztecan, Salish, Tupi-Guarani, Moroccan and Cairene Arabic, various African languages, Chinese, Turkish, Indo-European, languages from India, etc. The overall scope of the conference was to contribute to a new level of discussion of the phenomenon, across theories and across specializations and interests. Update on Contributor's addresses (PDF)
