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Tok Pisin is one of the most important languages of Melanesia and is used in a wide range of public and private functions in Papua New Guinea. The language has featured prominently in Pidgin and Creole linguistics and has featured in a number of debates in theoretical linguistics. With their extensive fieldwork experience and vast knowledge of the archives relating to Papua New Guinea, Peter Mühlhäusler, Thomas E. Dutton and Suzanne Romaine compiled this Tok Pisin text collection. It brings together representative samples of the largest Pidgin language of the Pacific area. These texts represent about 150 years of development of this language and will be an invaluable resource for researchers, language policy makers and individuals interested in the history of Papua New Guinea.
The First International Conference on Pidgins and Creoles in Melanesia was planned mainly for Tok Pisin, but no predetermined theme(s) had been proposed to the participants. Nevertheless, in this collection of papers several principal themes stand out.One is that of a revived interest in substratology, both for Tok Pisin and for Bislama. Another is what in fact amounts to a change in perspective from universalism, as supposedly competitive with the substratological orientation, towards a generalist approach to typology, which reduces the apparent polarity, from a theoretical point of view. A third is the pervasive interest of contributors in wider language issues in the social and political life of Papua New Guinea.These interests go back to the linguistic and social experience of the participants, most of whom have a long record of living among the people whose languages they have studied on a day-to-day basis, and to the relative remoteness of their inspiration from the more theoretical and perhaps ultimately untestable issues which surround the universalist approach and its claims for a bioprogram foundation for language.
Tok Pisin is the Pidgin English language that was introduced to Papua New Guinea in the late 19th century as a way for this linguistically complex society to communicate with a common language. This book provides the historical background for this language and a detailed account of the changes that are taking place in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar as it is increasingly adopted as the first language of young people throughout the country.
Tayap is a small, previously undocumented Papuan language, spoken in a single village called Gapun, in the lower Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. The language is an isolate, unrelated to any other in the area. Furthermore, Tayap is dying. Fewer than fifty speakers actively command it today. Based on linguistic anthropological work conducted over the course of thirty years, this book describes the grammar of the language, detailing its phonology, morphology and syntax. It devotes particular attention to verbs, which are the most elaborated area of the grammar, and which are complex, fusional and massively suppletive.The book also provides a full Tayap-English-Tok Pisin dictionary. A particularly innovative contribution is the detailed discussions of how Tayap’'s grammar is dissolving in the language of young speakers. The book exemplifies how the complex structures in fluent speakers’ Tayap are reduced or reanalyzed by younger speakers. This grammar and dictionary should therefore be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the mechanics of how languages disappear. The fact that it is the sole documentation of this unique Papuan language should also make it of interest to areal specialists and language typologists.
“Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature.” —The Wall Street Journal “If you want to experience a profoundly different culture without the exhausting travel (to say nothing of the cost), this is an excellent choice.” —The Washington Post As a young anthropologist, Don Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language, Tayap. He arrived knowing that you can’t study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, he returned again and again to document Tayap before it disappeared entirely, and he found himself inexorably drawn into their world, and implicated in their destiny. Kulick wanted to tell the story of Gapuners—one that went beyond the particulars and uses of their language—that took full stock of their vanishing culture. This book takes us inside the village as he came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people, carved out like a cleft in the middle of a tropical rainforest. But A Death in the Rainforest is also an illuminating look at the impact of Western culture on the farthest reaches of the globe and the story of why this anthropologist realized finally that he had to give up his study of this language and this village. An engaging, deeply perceptive, and brilliant interrogation of what it means to study a culture, A Death in the Rainforest takes readers into a world that endures in the face of massive changes, one that is on the verge of disappearing forever.
Every language has been influenced in some way by other languages. In many cases, this influence is reflected in words which have been absorbed from other languages as the names for newer items or ideas, such as perestroika, manga, or intifada (from Russian, Japanese, and Arabic respectively). In other cases, the influence of other languages goes deeper, and includes the addition of new sounds, grammatical forms, and idioms to the pre-existing language. For example, English's structure has been shaped in such a way by the effects of Norse, French, Latin, and Celtic--though English is not alone in its openness to these influences. Any features can potentially be transferred from one language to another if the sociolinguistic and structural circumstances allow for it. Further, new languages--pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages--can come into being as the result of language contact. In thirty-three chapters, The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact examines the various forms of contact-induced linguistic change and the levels of language which have provided instances of these influences. In addition, it provides accounts of how language contact has affected some twenty languages, spoken and signed, from all parts of the world. Chapters are written by experts and native-speakers from years of research and fieldwork. Ultimately, this Handbook provides an authoritative account of the possibilities and products of contact-induced linguistic change.