Thursday, September 07, 2006

Some links

I'm finishing up my thesis, so don't expect a posting for the next week, but in the meantime here's a couple of links:

LinguaMongolica - a site dedicated to classical Mongolian.
Academic Grammar of New Persian

The paper that more or less founded modern typology: Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements (Greenberg 1963).

BBC readers' attitudes to African languages. An interesting range of opinions - probably enough for a small sociolinguistics article right there:
"Whether you were educated in French, English, Spanish or in whatever western language, on this small piece of God's earth called Rwanda, everything is done in Kinyarwanda. In this context, English may be as obscure a language as any other."
"Democracy is such a complex issue that it requires educated people. This being the case, my argument has always been that popular education cannot be achieved relying on a foreign language with which one doesn't have any link other than the fact that it was imposed on you."
"English in my opinion is the most widely spoken language in the world, but the most important language for me is that with which I can speak to my mother, my father, my grand-parents without having to bother if I was making the right sense. This language is Igbo. You can have your own view, but mine is mine."
"African Language are fantastic its makes you feel at home when you speak it. To be taught as a subject could be a big waste of time in school because it can't take you anywhere."
"In Cameroon we have almost 300 different languages beside English and French which are our official language. I am proud to able to read and write both English and French. I don't deem it necessary to learn to learn or know any other language because they cant help me in any way."

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love you! I am most likely to do some work on Farsi & Pashto Syntax, this kind of resource is greatly appreciated! شكلاان كثيرا

On a side note, I found those quotes about Igo great, I will be linking back to this site.

Dave said...

Congrats on finishing up your thesis!

I'm jealous--I've yet to start mine on some aspect of Biloxi.

Dave

bulbul said...

My congratulations and wishes of good luck, Lameen. May I enquire as to the subject of the thesis?

Anonymous said...

"Whether you were educated in French, English, Spanish or in whatever western language, on this small piece of God's earth called Rwanda, everything is done in Kinyarwanda. In this context, English may be as obscure a language as any other."

French, though, is not so obscure in Rwanda...

Lameen Souag الأمين سواق said...

I'm working on the cartography of subject and object positions in Algerian Arabic. This turns out to be in many ways rather too large a topic for a three-month master's thesis, so thanks for the good wishes - I may need them! The most interesting finding is that AA shows clear signs of a single postverbal position which is usually occupied by either a subject or an object, and rarely left vacant - I'll give more detail sometime when I'm finished.