The Making of the AAA Meetings
This year’s AAA meetings have the highest number of registrants on record. As one of the student assistants on the Executive Program Committee, the level of interest was both reassuring and daunting. Last month, I traveled to Washington DC to the AAA offices to help with the enormous task of scheduling the academic program. It [...]
Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #10
Rounding Up the Web It seems to be common practice among bloggers, at least among academic ones, to summarize interesting items from recent online texts. For instance, our colleagues over at Neuroanthropology have their longstanding “Wednesday Round Up” feature. And those at Savage Minds have “Around the Web.” In some ways, these SLA roundups are [...]
Introducing Lindsay Bell, Graduate Student Representative
Short bio for Lindsay Bell, the SLA’s graduate student representative
South African languages
About the vuvuzela term: first, the suffix -ela is an “applicative” extension in isiZulu. The suffix “ela” means “an action… performed for, on behalf of, or in the direction of something or someone” (Mbeje 2005:229). Second, there are a large number of ideophones in isiZulu (in fact, the term was first invented as a grammatical category for the linguistic analysis of isiZulu). An ideophone is basically type of onomatopoeia. Thus the term “vuvuzela” can be understood as ‘the thing with which you make the vuvu sound for someone or something’.
Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #9
This week’s Roundup comes from the sports department.
Caster Semenya, gender tests, and bodies out of place
Sumo scandal
World Cup woo woo
