Translation of the week: Aphasia in West Greenlandic
This week we’re bringing you the English translation of Johanne Nedergård’s Lingoblog post on aphasia in West Greenlandic! The original Danish version can be found here.
Aphasia in West Greenlandic affects syntax but leaves morphology intact
Many linguists are interested in linguistic deficits (i.e. aphasia) that arise after brain injury. By investigating them, we can potentially infer something about how language is organised in people without brain damage – both which components comprise language and where the different components are located in the brain. We hope to answer questions like: Is there a difference between grammar and lexicon? Are language comprehension and language production located in different brain areas? How do we access the meanings of words, and are words with similar meanings also close to each other in the brain? The problem with a lot of research on aphasia, however, is that it has primarily focused on European languages that are structurally very similar.
This … ↪
African languages in the 1700s Danish West Indies
Most of the Danish West Indian population during the colonial era did not come from Denmark, but had African roots. Even though the African languages only survived as traces in the creoles of the islands, we know that they were used (recessively) in the Virgin Islands for centuries. Danish slave ships transported around 100,000 Africans to the West Indies between 1673 and 1807, and census data from the Danish National Archives (Rigsarkivet) shows that in 1841 – just seven years before the emancipation – close to 10 percent of the unfree population on Saint Croix was born in Africa.
So, which African languages were spoken in the former Danish West Indies?
Since there are somewhere between 1,500 and … ↪
An exciting month awaits Lingoblog’s English speaking readers…
Lingoblog publishes new, original blog posts about language(s) and linguistics every week, but as regular readers may have noticed, most of our posts are in Danish.
This summer, we are making more posts accessible to our non-Danish speaking readers as we publish English translations of blog posts originally written in Danish! There will be a new translation on the blog each Tuesday during the next five weeks, starting today with Kristoffer Friis Bøegh’s post on African languages in the 1700s Danish West Indies.
Not enough summer reading for you? Then check out our holiday-reading recommendations for English-language books on languages and linguistics!
We wish all of our readers a wonderful summer – and happy reading!
Cover photo by rawpixel.com
How do learners make use of foreign language learning materials?
How do learners make use of foreign language learning materials? This was the question that I set out to answer in my ph.d. thesis. Along the way, I learned to use to methods for evaluating usability of a product (think-aloud protocols and constructive interaction), learned how to analyze the results quantitatively (which was scary), and found new ways to look at the data qualitatively (conversation analysis). Especially through detailed qualitative analyses of how our study participants made use of the learning materials in our usability test settings, I learned more about the sequential organization of such sessions, how instructions are realized, and how different visual and other aspects of the learning material drafts were made relevant.
In this blog post, … ↪
Global live presentations on linguistics on the net: Lingoblogger featured on June 7th
Interested in language and linguistics? We thought so! Want to attend an almost three month long global event with talks from some of the world’s leading linguists for free? Of course you do! And now you can!
The Brazilian Linguistics Association (Abralin), in a joint project with the Permanent International Committee of Linguists, the Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina, Sociedad Argentina de Estudios Lingüísticos, the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée, the Societas Linguistica Europaea, the Linguistic Society of America, the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, and the Australian Linguistic Society, is organizing a virtual event: Abralin ao Vivo – Linguists Online. The event takes place from May 4th… ↪
COVIDictionary. Your go-to dictionary in times of Coronavirus and COVID-19
Lingoblog.dk goes viral! Ideas worth spreading! Please send this link: https://www.lingoblog.dk/en/covidictionary-your-go-to-dictionary-in-times-of-coronavirus-and-covid-19/ to all your isolated friends, relatives and colleagues who can be uplifted by some COVID-19 humor.
by Peter Bakker and Joshua Nash
COVIDictionary 20: your go-to dictionary in times of Coronavirus and COVID-19
© Peter Bakker and Joshua Nash
| COVIDeology: | The idea to shut down the world in order to prevent that hospitals shut down. |
| COVIDiotic:
| (1) The process of closing down the world for no real and apparent reason. (2) The process of opening up the world for no real and apparent reason after a lockdown. (3) The process of taking no measures for no real and apparent reason. |
| COVIDe: | The feeling of emptiness during lockdown. |
| COVIDiosity: |