Download Free A Reference Grammar Of Oshindonga Wambo Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online A Reference Grammar Of Oshindonga Wambo and write the review.

This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction.
Das Kwanyama ist eine Wambo-Sprache und gehört somit zur Bantu-Sprachgruppe. Sie wird in Süd-Angola und Namibia gesprochen, in Namibia wird sie gemäß dem offiziellen Standard als "Oshikwanyama" bezeichnet. Die Sprecherzahl liegt bei ca. einer halben Million. Die Wambo-Sprachen sind bisher nur sehr unzureichend untersucht, die Tonsysteme im besonderen enorm vernachlässigt worden. Die vorliegende Studie ist die erste Grammatik des Kwanyama mit einer systematischen Beschreibung der tonalen Strukturen. Dabei wird lexikalischer Ton als inhärente Eigenschaft eines Lexems ebenso untersucht wie grammatischer Ton, welcher grammatische Eigenschaften und Kategorien markiert. Die gesamten Darstellungen werden hierbei in diverse Bereiche der Grammatik eingebettet. Die Autorin lebte über ein halbes Jahr in einer Kwanyama-sprechenden Gemeinschaft und konnte so ihre sprachlichen Kenntnisse optimieren. Als Linguistin folgt sie der Tradition der Generativen Phonologie, sie überführt das Tonmuster regelfolgend aus der zugrunde liegenden Repräsentation in eine binäre Oberflächenstruktur und demnach in Toneme. Diese Arbeit behandelt die segmentalen und tonalen Ebenen möglichst separat, damit der Leser den Argumentationen der Analysen leichter folgen kann. Bei Nomen und Verben wird Ton ausführlich behandelt, bei den anderen Wortarten gut skizziert. Die Studie nimmt außerdem Bezug zur Erforschung der anderen Sprachen aus Guthries R-Gruppe. Abschließend finden sich nominale und verbale Paradigmen, einige Texte sowie eine Kwanyama-Englisch-Wortliste mit ca. 6.000 Einträgen.
This volume explores the rich and complex pattern of morphosyntactic variation in the Bantu languages, providing a comprehensive overview of the wealth of empirical and conceptual work in the field. The chapters discuss data from some 80 Bantu languages as well as drawing on a wider comparative set of more than 200 languages from across Central, Eastern and Southern Africa: some studies focus on one specific language in a comparative context; some investigate fine-grained variation among a close-knit group of languages; and others present large-scale comparative studies spanning the whole of the Bantu-speaking area. The contributors address a range of topics from a micro-variation perspective, primarily in the areas of nominal and verbal morphology and syntax and information structure. The volume highlights key aspects of contemporary research in Bantu morphosyntax and outlines distinct and novel approaches to prominent questions; it combines the most recent thinking on morphosyntactic variation in Bantu with different theoretical and methodological approaches and novel empirical data from a wide range of languages.
This book explores a domain of discourse processing referred to as 'interactive grammar', based on an analysis of grammatical descriptions of over 100 languages spoken across the world. While much previous work has treated interactive grammar as a fairly marginal part of language, Bernd Heine describes it here as a distinct category that contrasts with sentence grammar both in its functions and its structural behavior. He identifies ten types of interactives - i.e. extra-clausal expressions of linguistic discourse: attention signals, directives, discourse markers, evaluatives, ideophones, interjections, response elicitors, response signals, social formulae, and vocatives. The analysis reveals that speakers make use of two contrasting modes for structuring their discourses, both of which are needed for successful communication: one is sentence grammar, which has a propositional format and analytic organization; the other is interactive grammar, which has a holophrastic organization and a focus on social communication. While the argument structure of sentence grammar is shaped by the propositional format of sentences, that of interactive grammar is shaped by the indexical nature of the situation of discourse. This distinction shows interesting correlations both with findings from neurolinguistic studies on differential activity in the two hemispheres of the human brain, and with observations from social psychology on the differences between systems of reasoning and judgment.
"The Emergence of Distinctive Features will be of essential interest to phonologists and typologists, as well as to syntacticians, cognitive scientists, and scholars outside linguistics interested in the nature of language and its acquisition."--BOOK JACKET.
When Namibia gained its independence from South Africa in 1990, the new government began dismantling the divisive apartheid state and building a unified nation-state. What does this new nation look like from the perspective of ordinary citizens? In Lyrical Nationalism in Post-Apartheid Namibia, Wendi Haugh provides an ethnographic portrayal of the nation as imagined by people living in the former ethnic homeland of Ovamboland, with a particular focus on the lyrics of songs composed and performed by Catholic youth. The author argues that these youth draw on conflicting ideologies—hierarchical and egalitarian, nationalist and cosmopolitan—from multiple sources to construct a multi-faceted sense of national identity. She reveals how their vision of the nation—framed as neutrally national—is deeply rooted in specific local histories and cultures.
What are the most popular names of the Ambo people in Namibia? Why do so many Ambos have Finnish first names? What do the African names of these people mean? Why is the namesake so important in Ambo culture? How did the long independence struggle affect personal naming, and what are the latest name-giving trends in Namibia? This study analyses the changes in the personal naming system of the Ambo people in Namibia over the last 120 years, starting from the year 1883 when the first Ambos received biblical and European names at baptism. The central factors in this process were the German and South African colonisation and European missionary work on the one hand, and the rise of African nationalism on the other hand. Eventually, this clash between African and European naming practices led to a new and dynamic naming system which includes elements of both African and European origin.