This handbook is suitable for anyone wishing to study Tigrinya - the most widely used of the various languages spoken in Eritrea which is also used in the neighbouring Tigrai region of Ethiopia and some parts of Begemeder and Wollo. Originally conceived by the Intermission Language Council in 1968, this new edition has been updated and revised to reflect the demands of modern times.
This combination Tigrinya phrasebook and two-way Tigrinya-English dictionary is an essential reference while traveling in Eritrea and Ethiopia. The Hippocrene Dictionary & Phrasebook series allows you be a traveler, not a tourist, by connecting with the local culture and people in their native language. Tigrinya (also written as Tigrigna) is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken by about 7 million people, primarily in Eritrea and Ethiopia. Tigrinya is written in the same Ge'ez script used for the Ethiopic language Amharic, but Tigrinya grammar and usage differs significantly from Amharic.This unique, two-part resource provides travelers to Eritrea and Ethiopia with the tools they need for daily interaction. The bilingual dictionary has a concise vocabulary for everyday use, and the phrasebook allows instant communication on a variety of topics. Ideal for businesspeople, travelers, students, and aid workers, this guide includes: 4,000 dictionary entries Phonetics that are intuitive for English speakers Essential phrases on topics such as transportation, dining out, and business Concise grammar and pronunciation sections
In The Tigre Language of Gindaˁ, Eritrea, David L. Elias documents the dialect of the Tigre language that is spoken in the town of Gindaˁ in eastern Eritrea. While the language of Tigre is spoken by perhaps one million people in Eritrea and Sudan, the population of Gindaˁ is fewer than 50,000 people. Elias describes basic aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicography. In contrast to other dialects of Tigre, of which approximately a dozen have been identified, Tigre of Gindaˁ exhibits the only recorded examples in Tigre of gender-specific first person possessives, e.g. ʕənye ‘my eye’ (masc) vs. ʕənče ‘my eye’ (masc/fem), and a new form of the negative of the verb of existence, yahallanni ‘there is not’. Contact with Arabic and Tigrinya has resulted in numerous loanwords and a few biforms in Tigre of Gindaˁ.
Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches.
This comprehensive bilingual student dictionary includes over 25,000 Word-to-Word dictionary entries, and is approved for ESL/ELL students to use for standardized testing. Tigrinya (also written as Tigrigna) is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken by about 7 million people, primarily in Eritrea and Ethiopia. Tigrinya is written in the same Ge'ez script used for the Ethiopic language Amharic, but Tigrinya grammar and usage differs significantly from Amharic. This comprehensive bilingual student dictionary includes over 25,000 Word-to-Word dictionary entries and is perfect for ESL/ELL students to use for standardized testing. The Tigrinya Student Dictionary is also useful to English speakers (students, travelers, businesspeople, and aid workers) who need to communicate in Tigrinya, as it includes simple Romanization/phonetic pronunciation for all Tigrinya words.
This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured.
The history of Eritrea is told in this reference through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of Eritrea's history from the earliest times to the present. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Eritrea.
