Skip to content
Home » Blog (hidden)

Blog (hidden)

Complex orthography and advertising

I continue my observations on Japan’s complex writing system with notes on two texts: the cardboard covers enclosing two six-packs of happoshu, or low-cost beer.

Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #15

There hasn’t been a Roundup post made since September, and I have a horrible sinking feeling that the person who was meant to post the missing Roundups was me. So with apologies and without further delay, here is Roundup #15.

Multikulti in context

Ingrid Piller at Language on the Move looks and English-medium news coverage of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent declaration, “Multikulti ist absolut gescheitert.” Piller says that the English language press largely seems to misunderstand the comments.

Romansh

Discussion of the revitalization of and resistance to Romansh, the fourth official Swiss language related to Latin used during Roman times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/world/europe/29swiss.html?_r=2&hp

The Naming of Africa

Steven Black, UCSD

This morning (Sept. 20, 2010) while drinking my coffee I did a perfunctory survey of the news on Africa, only to be jolted out of my pre-coffee stupor by an article on cnn.com with the title, “Group: Use of ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ Disparaging.” This immediately concerned me. While I prefer to describe ‘southern Africa’ generally or ‘South Africa’ specifically, I myself have unquestioningly used the term ‘sub-Saharan’ in past work in order to indicate the boundary of Arabic-dominant cultural practices. Some academics prefer the (inevitably more bulky) phrase, “Africa south of the Sahara,” but I wonder if this shift in terminology is really enough for the phrase to point to a different set of indexical meanings.