Repost of an article by H. Samy Alim and Imani Perry originally written for the The Grio blog: http://www.thegrio.com/opinion/why-the-deas-embrace-of-ebonics-is-lost-in-translation.php When the headlines appeared this week… Read More »DEA and Ebonics
Reposted from Celso Alvarez Cáccamo 2010/08/24 at 3:13 am Catalonia’s educational system is one of immersion in Catalan. Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children alike (as well… Read More »Haitian Kreyòl and Catalan
Sometime in the early 17th century in Northern Peru, a Spaniard jotted down some notes on the back of a letter. Four hundred years later, archaeologists dug up and studied the paper, revealing the first traces of a lost language.
“It’s a little piece of paper with a big story to tell,” says Dr. Jeffrey Quilter, who has conducted investigations in Peru for more than three decades, and is director of the archaeological project at Magdalena de Cao Viejo in the El Brujo Archaeological Complex, where the paper was excavated in 2008. Quilter explains this simple list offers “a glimpse of the peoples of ancient and early colonial Peru who spoke a language lost to us until this discovery.”
Many things happening with SLA members…
Some interesting comments on the education system in general in a New York Times Editorial on Haitian Education These comments were posted in response to… Read More »More on Haitian Kreyòl and the education system
Posted for: Michel DeGraff, MIT Linguistics & Philosophy
Dear friends and colleagues,
We ask that you please take time to read, sign and distribute Professor Yves Dejean’s urgent public petition about school reform in Haiti.
The petition is available online at:
Why I find “geek”, when used as a slur, more offensive than words which may commonly be viewed as quite foul and offensive.
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… Read More »The Making of the AAA Meetings
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.… Read More »Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #10
Short bio for Lindsay Bell, the SLA’s graduate student representative
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’.
This week’s Roundup comes from the sports department.
Caster Semenya, gender tests, and bodies out of place
Sumo scandal
World Cup woo woo
From Claire Bowern:
Some colleagues at the University of Auckland and I are conducting a survey on North American English and trialling the use of flash web recording for phonetic analysis. If you would like to participate by recording a short wordlist, please visit our web site.
Taping marriages One of the most frequent uses of linguistic anthropology is to help us understand how people in marriages communicate with each other. Article… Read More »Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #8
Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chairman of BP, has apparently upset some Americans with his reference to “the small people.” My first reaction when I heard Svanberg’s remarks was that he must have been aiming for “the little guy” and produced a near miss.
Dear SLA Colleagues, I’m posting this message on behalf of my fellow SLA Executive Committee Member at Large, Jillian Cavanaugh, who is organizing this year’s… Read More »Deadline extended for SLA Annual Student Paper Prizes
Arizona on Our Minds Arizona lawmakers have been on our minds, recently. In Roundup #5, Leila talked about their ban on ethnic studies classes and… Read More »Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #7
The Arizona Department of Education is asking school districts to remove teachers who speak “heavily accented or ungrammatical” English from classrooms where students are learning English. In response, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona has drafted a statement summarizing research on language variation and its effects on language acquisition.
On May 27, AAA President Virginia Dominguez sent a letter to the Census Bureau regarding its language questions and classifications, which you can find through… Read More »Letter to the Census Bureau
In this edition of our bi-weekly Roundup: the satirical journal Speculative Grammarian tackles fieldwork; the Muscogee (Creek) Nation is discussing a resolution condemning Arizona’s new immigration law; work summarized in Science Daily suggests that loss of hearing in one ear affects children’s scores on language tests.