Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010)

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Lingoblog continues to provide you with suggestions for your summer readings on various linguistic topics. This week we have found a biography of language researcher Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010).

In January 1999, a few years after I had moved to Denmark, I was astounded to come across an interview in the Danish weekly Weekendavisen with the renowned Danish phonetician Eli Fischer- Jørgensen (henceforth EFJ) and marveled: She is still alive! Having made her name in publications as early as the first half of the past century, in the interview EFJ still appeared intellectually unabated, and full of new writing plans yet. She even remarked that she hoped soon to finish a major work on a special liturgic form of Danish!

In … ↪

‘Microphone in the Mud’ by Laura Robinson

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Lingoblog continues to provide you with suggestions for your summer readings on various linguistic topics. This week we have found a book about fieldwork.

As a linguistic fieldworker you typically travel to a remote place to live with a tribe, you are adopted into the community and you learn a language in order to document and describe it. So you take on many different roles. First and foremost, you’re a linguistic researcher, trying to uncover patterns in an underdescribed or perhaps completely undescribed language. You’re also a data archivist, ethnologist, technician and administrator, just to name a few: fieldwork involves the collection and storage of high-quality data in an ethical manner, typically with ample administrative and bureaucratic hurdles to overcome.… ↪

Deedah dialect words and phrases

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Ey up! In this blog post I am going to be listing and explaining just a small proportion of the words and phrases that were once or still are heard on the streets of Sheffield. I asked the people of Sheffield to tell me about their dialect and they provided me with the goods. The words that have been included have been sent to me by Sheffield people themselves. If you can think of any more or recognize any of the ones that I’m going to share with you then please let me know in the comments.

I have consulted some of the available Sheffield Dialect Glossaries of the past which I could find in the University of Sheffield’s Western … ↪

The menstrual cycle in linguistics?

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When people find out I’m a phonetician who happens to be interested – among other things – also in the potential effects of the menstrual cycle on language and speech, they typically present me with fairly excited reactions. Why would a linguist be interested in anything to do with the menstrual cycle? I’ll attempt to answer this question in this blog entry, with the caveat that my research focuses on phonetics and phonology, i.e. sounds and not, for instance, word order.

Larynx as a sexual organ

The larynx has been called a secondary sexual organ (e.g. Abitbol et al. 1989; Amir & Biron-Shental 2004; Collins & Missing 2003; Hall 1995; Henton & Bladon 1985). This is because the larynx does … ↪

Culture and language of the Kalasha

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Denmark has a special connection with the Kalasha people in northern Pakistan. The Danish scholar of religious sciences Halfdan Siiger visited the Kalasha people in 1948, and he wrote a book – not yet published – about their religion. Later, the anthropologists Mytte Fentz and Svend Castenfeldt undertook field work in the Kalasha valleys. They wrote several articles and books about their observations, in particular Myth Fentz’s wonderful book The Kalasha: Mountain People of the Hindu Kush, published in Denmark at Forlag Rhodes.

The Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus possesses a lot of objects from the people, including some gand’aw, or wooden sculptures of ancestors. In addition, Copenhagen linguist Ida Mørch and Jan Heegård visited the area and studied … ↪

Language attitudes towards Sheng: deterioration or unification?

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This post is a rewritten version of my paper for the course ‘Postcolonial Linguistics’, offered at Linguistics at Aarhus University in the autumn of 2013. I wanted to delve into different language attitudes towards Sheng – and what better way to do it than through Youtube video comments?

Sheng? WTF?

Sheng is as a language variety of Swahili – a mixture of Swahili, English and a host of regional languages of Kenya. The grammatical structure stems from Swahili while incorporating terms from English and indigenous Kenyan tongues (e.g. Dholuo and Kikuyu). Consider the following example (adapted from Abdulaziz and Osinde 1997:56):

Kithora   ma-doo       za      mathee
steal      PL-money    of      mother
‘To steal my mother’s money.’

Here, kithora stems from the Kikuyu … ↪

Snow: the word’s effect

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Back when I was a teenager at Pratt’s Corner in Southington, Connecticut, I grew up in an old homestead built in 1827 by Seth Pratt on seven acres of farmland and an expansive forest. It was perhaps when I was 14, or in 1955, in my early high-school days, there was one dull, overcast day in late October around midday when I was with my mother, Anna Marie Bartusiewicz Masthay, in the plain, unlit kitchen as she did her usual chores. While I was standing functionless by the kitchen table, she looked out the southward driveway-side window and suddenly proclaimed in Polish, “Śnieg pada” (‘snow falls, snow is falling, it’s snowing’), and indeed it had begun to snow, … ↪