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This book explores a relatively little investigated area of creole languages, word-formation. It provides the most comprehensive account so far of the word-formation patterns of an English-based creole language, Sranan, as found in its earliest sources, and compares them with the patterns attested in the input languages. One of the few studies of creole morphology based on historical data, the book discusses the theoretical problems arising with the historical analysis of creole word-formation and provides an analysis along the lines of Booij's (2005, 2007) Construction Morphology in which the assumed boundaries between affixation, compounding and syntactic constructions play a very minor role. It shows that Early Sranan word-formation is characterised by the absence of superstrate derivational affixes, the use of free morphemes as derivational markers and of compounding as the major word-formation strategy. The emergence of Early Sranan word-formation involved multiple sources (the input languages, universals, language-internal development) and different mechanisms (reanalysis of free morphemes as derivational markers, adaptation of superstrate complex words, transfer from the substrates and the creation of innovations). The findings render untenable theoretical accounts of creole genesis based on one explanatory factor, such as superstrate or substrate influence.
A Comparative Phonology of Gbe (Publications in African Languages and Linguistics, No 14).
How realistic is it to expect translation to render the world intelligible in a context shaped by different historical trajectories and experiences? Can we rely on human universals to translate through the unique and specific webs of meaning that languages represent? If knowledge production is a kind of translation, then it is fair to assume that the possibility of translation has largely rested on the idea that Western experience is the repository of these human universals against the background of which different human experiences can be rendered intelligible. The problem with this assumption, however, is that there are limits to Western claims to universalism, mainly because these claims were at the service of the desire to justify imperial expansion. This book addresses issues arising from these claims to universalism in the process of producing knowledge about diverse African social realities. It shows that the idea of knowledge production as translation can be usefully deployed to inquire into how knowledge of Africa translates into an imperial attempt at changing local norms, institutions and spiritual values. Translation, in this sense, is the normalization of meanings issuing from a local historical experience claiming to be universal. The task of producing knowledge of African social realities cannot be adequately addressed without a prior critical engagement with how translation has come to shape our ways of rendering Africa intelligible.
By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events. In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one’s relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved—they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities. Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts—British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas—bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences.
First published in 1988, this book provides an easily accessible handbook of knowledge about the languages of Ghana; their geographical distribution, their relationships with each other, the social patterns of their use, and their structures. Besides the general introduction, it contains chapters on each of the individually recognised families of languages spoken in Ghana: Gur, Volta-Comoé, Gbe, Ga-Dangme, Central-Tongo and Mande. An additional chapter outlines the use of non-indigenous languages in the country.