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 Encyclopedia of Africa presents the most up-to-date and thorough reference on this region of ever-growing importance in world history, politics, and culture. Its core is comprised of the entries focusing on African history and culture from 2005's acclaimed five-volume Africana - nearly two-thirds of these 1,300 entries have been updated, revised, and expanded to reflect the most recent scholarship. Organized in an A-Z format, the articles cover prominent individuals, events, trends, places, political movements, art forms, business and trade, religions, ethnic groups, organizations, and countries throughout Africa. There are articles on contemporary nations of sub-Saharan Africa, ethnic groups from various regions of Africa, and European colonial powers. Other examples include Congo River, Ivory trade, Mau Mau rebellion, and Pastoralism. The Encyclopedia of Africa is sure to become the essential resource in the field.
"The Geechee Lady", subtitled, "Grandma and the Secret Castas ", is an adaptation from the poem, "Miss Willamina", written by the same author. Although written especially for "young readers", ages 10 - 17+, this is a book which can be enjoyed by any age-group. The true story, written in rhythmic pattern, tells of how a wizened older woman, born in 1885 on one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, relates to a much younger female in the 1950s/1960s' setting of Harlem, New York. Divisive tactics, taught in previous generations to the black slaves by their white "masters", somehow seep their way into the lives of these two people, causing an awkward relationship between the old woman and the young girl. It is an awkwardness which stems from the most sensitive human-dynamic of that post-slavery era;...a dynamic manifested in myriad ways in regard to skin-tones, hair-types, facial features, and other physical traits...bringing about the creation of a very subtle, yet highly sensitive "caste-system" among people of color. This caste-system though well-known among all inhabitants of the colonies in the Americas, ...as well as among its European progenitors, ...is rarely discussed openly, even nowadays in 2010/2011, as it is still kept "hush-hush" as a topic to be discussed "secretively" behind closed doors. Therefore, an exciting,"must-see" section of this book, is Part 4-"Grandma and the Secret Castas", which shows copies of 16th and 17th century paintings which still hang today on the walls of the world's greatest museums. These great revolutionary works of art, in a genre called "La pintura de Casta", or "Casta Paintings", depict the lives of the people who represented the original population and who were contributors to the formation of this dominant, and highly-structured Latin-American "caste-system". This social system, called "Mestizaje", created by the royal monarchy of Spain and Portugal, ...(out of their desire to bring some semblance of order to the new colonies in the Americas), originally existed as an accepted form of concubinage in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies of the Americas, ... then it caught on, ...though not quite as successfully, in the British-owned, 13-original USA colonies, ...and then concurrently in all the English-speaking, Caribbean territorities including Jamaica, Trinidad-Tobago, the Bahamas, Antigua, Barbados, British Honduras, and Bermuda;... in French-speaking Louisiana (USA), and the French-speaking islands of Martinique, Guadalupe, and Haiti;... in the Spanish-speaking islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, ...in Spanish Honduras, and on Roatan Island and Spanish-owned Belize (before it was annexed to the British Empire in the 1800s as British Honduras), ...in the German-speaking / Old-Dutch-speaking islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. ...in the Portuguese-owned colonies of the Azores, Cape Verde, and Brazil, and also on all the smaller islands, such as Nevis, St. Croix, the French, St Martin and the Dutch, Maarten, Grenada, St. John, St. Thomas, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Monserrat, Tortola, and Dominica, etc.
The author tells of cultural rituals which awakened within her a respect for her grandmother's sea island culture. This book introduces the sounds of a creole-idiom which is a Southern lingua-franca that is spoken on the coastlines of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. When colorful and expressive vernacular of the Geechee language is heard on the accompanying voice-tape, it immediately brings to life this creole-language which is nowadays threatened with extinction.
The new edition of Historical Dictionary of Mozambique covers the Bantu expansion; the arrival of the Portuguese navigators and their str competition with local African power centers and coastal Arab-Swahili trading towns; the trade cycles of gold, ivory, and slaves; the establishment of the semi-Africanized prazos along the Zambezi Valley; “pacification” campaigns; and the period of Portuguese weakness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when vast tracts of land were rented to concessionary companies. In the late colonial period the Salazar dictatorship tried to reassert Portuguese power, but after ten years of armed struggle for national liberation, Mozambique gained its independence in 1975. The book contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Mozambique.
Ninety years after W.E.B. Du Bois first articulated the need for "the equivalent of a black Encyclopedia Britannica," Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., realized his vision by publishing Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience in 1999. This new, greatly expanded edition of the original work broadens the foundation provided by Africana. Including more than one million new words, Africana has been completely updated and revised. New entries on African kingdoms have been added, bibliographies now accompany most articles, and the encyclopedia's coverage of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean has been expanded, transforming the set into the most authoritative research and scholarly reference set on the African experience ever created. More than 4,000 articles cover prominent individuals, events, trends, places, political movements, art forms, business and trade, religion, ethnic groups, organizations and countries on both sides of the Atlantic. African American history and culture in the present-day United States receive a strong emphasis, but African American history and culture throughout the rest of the Americas and their origins in African itself have an equally strong presence. The articles that make up Africana cover subjects ranging from affirmative action to zydeco and span over four million years from the earlies-known hominids, to Sean "Diddy" Combs. With entries ranging from the African ethnic groups to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana, Second Edition, conveys the history and scope of cultural expression of people of African descent with unprecedented depth.
This book is the first work to address the question of what kinds of words get borrowed in a systematic and comparative perspective. It studies lexical borrowing behavior on the basis of a world-wide sample of 40 languages, both major languages and minor languages, and both languages with heavy borrowing and languages with little lexical influence from other languages. The book is the result of a five-year project bringing together a unique group of specialists of many different languages and areas. The introductory chapters provide a general up-to-date introduction to language contact at the word level, as well as a presentation of the project's methodology. All the chapters are based on samples of 1000-2000 words, elicited by a uniform meaning list of 1460 meanings. The combined database, comprising over 70,000 words, is published online at the same time as the book is published. For each word, information about loanword status is given in the database, and the 40 case studies in the book describe the social and historical contact situations in detail. The final chapter draws general conclusions about what kinds of words tend to get borrowed, what kinds of word meanings are particularly resistant to borrowing, and what kinds of social contact situations lead to what kinds of borrowing situations.
These volumes constitute the Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Soft Computing Applications, or SOFA 2014, held on 24-26 July 2014 in Timisoara, Romania. This edition was organized by the University of Belgrade, Serbia in conjunction with Romanian Society of Control Engineering and Technical Informatics (SRAIT) - Arad Section, The General Association of Engineers in Romania - Arad Section, Institute of Computer Science, Iasi Branch of the Romanian Academy and IEEE Romanian Section. The Soft Computing concept was introduced by Lotfi Zadeh in 1991 and serves to highlight the emergence of computing methodologies in which the accent is on exploiting the tolerance for imprecision and uncertainty to achieve tractability, robustness and low solution cost. Soft computing facilitates the use of fuzzy logic, neurocomputing, evolutionary computing and probabilistic computing in combination, leading to the concept of hybrid intelligent systems. The combination of such intelligent systems tools and a large number of applications introduce a need for a synergy of scientific and technological disciplines in order to show the great potential of Soft Computing in all domains. The conference papers included in these proceedings, published post conference, were grouped into the following area of research: · Image, Text and Signal Processing “li>Intelligent Transportation Modeling and Applications Biomedical Applications Neural Network and Applications Knowledge-Based Technologies for Web Applications, Cloud Computing, Security, Algorithms and Computer Networks Knowledge-Based Technologies Soft Computing Techniques for Time Series Analysis Soft Computing and Fuzzy Logic in Biometrics Fuzzy Applications Theory and Fuzzy Control Bussiness Process Management Methods and Applications in Electrical Engineering The volumes provide useful information to professors, researchers and graduated students in area of soft computing techniques and applications, as they report new research work on challenging issues.
