scholarly journals The Ethiopic Script: Linguistic Features and Socio-cultural Connotations

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronny Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Writing System ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Comprehensive Description ◽  
Cultural Connotation ◽  
Linguistic Modification ◽  
Cultural Connotations ◽  
The Last Two Millennia ◽  
Large Corpus

During the last two millennia, a large corpus of texts were produced in the Ethiopic script. This ancient African writing system is peculiar to the Ethio-Eritrean region at the Horn of Africa, particularly to the Ethiosemitic language Gǝʿǝz. The present paper is concerned with the origin, linguistic modification and spread of the Ethiopic script, as well as its socio-cultural connotation vis-à-vis other scripts in the region. For this purpose, previous studies related to these topics have been assessed and summarised in a comprehensive description.

scholarly journals THE COLOR TERMS FOR BLACK AND WHITE IN BULGARIAN, POLISH AND LITHUANIAN PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-82
Author(s):  
Nadelina IVOVA
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Color Terms ◽  
Figurative Meaning ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Cultural Connotation ◽  
Color Term ◽  
Cultural Connotations ◽  
The Way

The present paper is contrastive analysis of Bulgarian, Polish and Lithuanian phraseological units containing a color term naming black or white. It traces the way these components reflect the figurative meaning of the unit - through their color semantics or through their function as a cultural signs. The study classiffiеs Bulgarian, Polish and Lithuanian expressions as to their belongings to several groups, which refer to different concepts. In each group the comparison of the examples found in the three phraseological subsystems is based on their semantics, their lexical components and structure. Under observations are substantive, adjectival, adverbial and verbal phraseological units where the colors are used only as an adjective component. The analysis takes into consideration that black has negative symbolism and cultural connotations. Thus the phraseological units with black are linked mainly to the concepts such as death, sorrow, bad life, misfortune. The text suggests that color term for black is rarely used to express neutral or positive meanings. The white has a positive cultural connotation associated to whiteness, light, good life, goodness, but its meaning can vary to neutral or negative in phraseological system of the three languages. The present paper observes similarities of collected phraseological expressions and emphasizes their nation-specific features.

scholarly journals PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE KRYMCHAK DZHONK SCRIPT AND THE KRYMCHAK WRITTEN LANGUAGE TRADITION

Movoznavstvo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 315 (6) ◽  
pp. 22-31
Author(s):  
O. O. TYSHCHENKO-MONASTYRSKA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Speaker ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Turkish Origin ◽  
Special Value ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Crimean Tatar

The subject of the present publication is to bring to the light some orthographic features of the Yosyf Gabai’s Krymchak manuscript, called jonk, from Crimean Ethnographic Museum (Simferopol). Fragments of the manuscript were first transcribed, translated into Russian and published by David Rebi, who was a teacher of Krymchak and native speaker. However, the jonk has never been edited before. A special value of this manuscript lies in its language (or even languages), as well as styles represented. The manuscript is multilingual, contains folklore texts (poetry and narrative) of the Crimean and Turkish origin, written in Hebrew script, diary notes both in Krymchak and Russian, prayers and religion texts in Hebrew partially translated into Turkic written in the early XX century in Feodosia. This research is dedicated to Turkic linguistic features and their orthography. Despite of using Hebrew script Krymchak writing system developed in close relation to pre-reform Crimean Tatar writing tradition, both variants in their turn connected to Ottoman and pre-Ottoman orthographic traditions. Several orthographic features point to that, for instance principles of writing some vowels, consonants ( in initial, central, final positions), grammatical and word-formation suffixes (connected or separate writing), morphonological change, ways of transcription and adopting loanwords. Language of Yosyf Gabai’s jonk reflects orthographic and colloquial features of Krymchak and shares them with other Crimean Turkic manuscripts of this period. Schematically marked suffixes, together with some archaic morphonological changes, graphically reflected in the text, such as disrupted vowel harmony, alternations in labial harmony, syncope, epenthesis, protheses, disrupted consonant change between morphemes characterize orthography of the Krymchak manuscript.

Dimensions of variation across American television registers

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Berber Sardinha ◽  
Marcia Veirano Pinto
Keyword(s):  
Mass Communication ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Multidimensional Analysis ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
American Television ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
Dimension 2 ◽  
Dimensions Of Variation ◽  
Large Corpus

Abstract The goal of this study is to identify the dimensions of variation across American television programs, following the multidimensional analysis (MD) framework introduced by Biber (1988). Although television is a major form of mass communication, there has been no previous large-scale MD study of television dialogue. A large corpus containing the key types of contemporary American television programs was collected, annotated with the Biber tagger, and subjected to multi-dimensional analysis, which indicated four factors of statistically correlated linguistic features. Each of these factors was interpreted communicatively to reveal the underlying dimensions of variation on American television, namely “Exposition and discussion vs. Simplified interaction” (Dimension 1), “Simulated conversation” (Dimension 2), “Recount” (Dimension 3) and “Engaging presentation” (Dimension 4). This article presents, illustrates, and discusses each of these dimensions, showing the macro linguistic patterns in use across hundreds of American television programs.

Anthropolinguistic Analysis of Igbo Metaphorical Expressions

Anthropos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-114
Author(s):  
Chimaobi Onwukwe
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Interview Method ◽  
Beliefs And Values ◽  
Key Informant ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
Key Informant Interview ◽  
Cultural Connotations

The study examines metaphorical expressions in Igbo. It specifically analyzes the linguistic and cultural values, and beliefs in Igbo metaphors. The study adopted the Key Informant Interview method in data collection as well as introspection as a native speaker of Igbo. It was discovered that interpretation of Igbo metaphorical expressions involves the linguistic features of implicature, inference and referencing well as understanding of the cultural nuances of the referents used in Igbo metaphors. The study identified that metaphorical expressions concretize the Igbo worldview. This worldview, beliefs and values are represented in the cultural connotations of referents of Igbo metaphors. The study identified some referents with their cultural connotations such as animals, and natural/physical objects. The author concludes that understanding of metaphor in Igbo entails knowledge of cultural and contextual nuances of the referent of the metaphor in the Igbo language and culture.

scholarly journals Linguistic and cultural connotations of the lexeme BIRCH in Russian and the lexeme BAMBOO in Chinese

2021 ◽  
pp. 60-70
Author(s):  
Sun Yunuo
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Modeling ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Historical Materials ◽  
Cultural Connotation ◽  
Perception Process ◽  
Cultural Connotations

The paper studies the historical and cultural associative meanings of the lexeme BIRCH in the Russian culture and the lexeme BAMBOO in Chinese by analyzing the results of the perception process of these objects, their concepts and images by native speakers of the Russian and Chinese languages. The relevance of the research is due to the growing attention of modern linguistics to comparative cultural studies, including the number of comparative works on the Russian and Chinese languages, the importance of describing linguistic and cultural differences for the development of international economic and cultural relations between China and Russia. The research material involves phraseological units, proverbs, myths, poems and literary works, as well as historical materials, customs and traditions of the two nations. This paper uses research methods such as descriptive, contextual, comparative, the method of component analysis and cognitive modeling. As a result, it was determined that birch occupies a significant place in the Russian culture with the meanings of “motherland”, “mother”, “woman”, “bride”, “girl”. Bamboo in Chinese has only positive connotations, including “unshakable quality”, “spiritual purity”, “humble character”, “high aspirations.” It is concluded that birch as a symbol of Russia is a lacunar concept in the Chinese culture, while bamboo as the personification of a “perfect gentleman” in Chinese has no cultural connotation in Russian. Despite mismatched meanings in two languages, birch and bamboo must be recognized as equivalents in terms of cultural significance and the high frequency of symbolic use in poetry and other precedent texts.

scholarly journals Description of Number, Person and Tense Features in the Verbal Morphologies of Jibbāli and Lari

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Khalsa Al Aghbari ◽  
Me. Muhammad Ourang
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Personal Communication ◽  
Morphological Features ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Sultanate Of Oman ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
System 2 ◽  
Official Languages ◽  
Internal Change ◽  
Linguistic Aspect

The study describes a few linguistic features in the verbal morphologies of two understudied languages: Jibbāli and Lari. Jibbāli, a Modern South Arabian language spoken in the southern part of the Sultanate of Oman and Lari, an Indo-Iranian language spoken in Iran, are at risk of being endangered due to the facts that (1) they lack a writing system, (2) they are not taught at schools, (3) they are not the official languages in Oman and Iran and, most importantly, (4) there is no effort recorded to preserve these languages. Therefore, the study aims at exposing the linguistic richness of Jibbāli and Lari through describing the tendencies of their verbal morphologies. This may help revitalize a substantial linguistic aspect of these languages. However, since this study is limited in space, it only focuses on certain morphological features which make these languages stand out. The researchers observe a few undocumented linguistic tendencies in Jibbāli and Lari which may attract attention for further studies. For example, Lari, unlike other Iranian languages, lacks an auxiliary on the progressive tense which is largely expressed via morphemes. Jibbāli also exhibits some linguistic tendencies manifested by having a pronoun that refers to the speaker and another (exclusive) person in the conversation. Jibbāli is also characterized by abundant verbs which exhibit internal change along with a few affixes. Where relevant, features from the verbal morphologies of the two languages are delineated with examples collected through fieldworks and personal communication. Findings revealed that Lari is, by and large, a linear language in which affixes dock on bases to express grammatical contrasts while Jibbāli is highly inflectional with verbal affixes (number, person and tense) and morpho-phonological changes. In addition, affixes were found to play a crucial role in marking tenses and mood in Lari while Jibbāli employed a dual system in marking number. 

scholarly journals Representation of Suffering in the Vocabulary of the Dialect Language Personality of a Siberian Peasant Woman

2021 ◽  
pp. 14-21
Author(s):  
Anna A. Vasilchenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emotional State ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Spiritual Power ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Comprehensive Description ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Semantic Classes ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
Expression Of Emotions

The article examines the semantic field “suffering” that represents a fragment of the emotional and sensual existence of a language personality. The linguopersonological research based on the material of the idiolectal vocabulary of Vera Vershinina, a Siberian old resident, continues the comprehensive description of a dialect language personality made by Tomsk dialectologists. The research sources are A Complete Dictionary of a Dialect Language Personality edited by E.V. Ivantsova, transcripts of the informant’s speech made through participation in the linguistic existence of the speaker. The article focuses on 52 lexical and phraseological units. The research aims to describe a fragment of an individual linguistic worldview representing suffering. The view on the research object develops in the following way: word – definition – examples represented in the dictionary – text – idiolectal discourse. At the first stage of the research, the lexical and phraseological units are divided into seven functional semantic classes (FSC) according to the categorial lexical seme uniting them. The researcher examines the numerical composition of each class, the linguistic features of its elements (presence of figurative units, features of the use of the examined words). The most developed is the FSC of emotional state, since suffering is perceived as a long and deep feeling caused by a certain reason, but infinite. Classes of emotional impact and receiving the emotional state characterize suffering as a feeling hurting physically, exhausting with its length and intensity. A large number of units with the semantics of weeping in the FSC of external expression of emotions can indicate that the informant replaces reflection with a detailed description of external manifestations of suffering. Classes of emotional characterization and attitude show the informant as a person deeply empathetic to the grief of others. The last FSC demonstrates that names of the feeling and the situation causing this feeling coexist in one unit, which is typical for representatives of the folk speech culture. At the second stage of the research, the author describes the most frequent situations associated with the actualization of the semantic field “suffering” in the informant’s speech. These situations include: disease or death; disability caused by an injury; difficult living conditions, etc. It corresponds to the core values of the traditional peasant culture: life and health of a person, wealth, stability of a family’s life. The material shows that, for the dialect speaker, suffering is one of the dominants of reality, a constant of everyday life fully accepted by the speaker. However, the informant does not ignore other people in her grief, she is empathetic towards their life because of such personal qualities as optimism and spiritual power.

scholarly journals A Linguistic Study of Contemporary Efforts of Arabic Spelling (Orthography) System

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 121
Author(s):  
Mohammed Abu Eid
Keyword(s):  
Writing System ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Dialectal Variation ◽  
Arabic Orthography ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
Linguistic System

This study aims at investigating the contemporary efforts of Arabic writing system from a linguistic perspective. The study is distinguished from previous studies by treating the writing system as a linguistic one with its own linguistic features. Thus, the study has revealed the consonant feature of Arabic writing and its relation to derivation, inflection, and dialectal variation. Therefore, the researcher concludes that proposals of replacing Arabic alphabet by Latin alphabet or modification of Arabic orthography are non-linguistic which are related to contemporary issues like learning, the printing, translation and culture. These efforts should have examined Arabic writing as a representative of a linguistic system. Consequently, the researcher concludes that Arabic orthography system can preferably represent the linguistic system 

Using Sub-character Level Information for Neural Machine Translation of Logographic Languages

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Longtu Zhang ◽  
Mamoru Komachi
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Level Information

Logographic and alphabetic languages (e.g., Chinese vs. English) have different writing systems linguistically. Languages belonging to the same writing system usually exhibit more sharing information, which can be used to facilitate natural language processing tasks such as neural machine translation (NMT). This article takes advantage of the logographic characters in Chinese and Japanese by decomposing them into smaller units, thus more optimally utilizing the information these characters share in the training of NMT systems in both encoding and decoding processes. Experiments show that the proposed method can robustly improve the NMT performance of both “logographic” language pairs (JA–ZH) and “logographic + alphabetic” (JA–EN and ZH–EN) language pairs in both supervised and unsupervised NMT scenarios. Moreover, as the decomposed sequences are usually very long, extra position features for the transformer encoder can help with the modeling of these long sequences. The results also indicate that, theoretically, linguistic features can be manipulated to obtain higher share token rates and further improve the performance of natural language processing systems.

Oral Approach Avoidance

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (5) ◽  
pp. 355-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Godinho ◽  
Margarida V. Garrido ◽  
Oleksandr V. Horchak
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Oral Movements ◽  
Motivational States ◽  
Oral Approach ◽  
Approach Avoidance ◽  
Abstract Words ◽  
European Family

Abstract. Words whose articulation resembles ingestion movements are preferred to words mimicking expectoration movements. This so-called in-out effect, suggesting that the oral movements caused by consonantal articulation automatically activate concordant motivational states, was already replicated in languages belonging to Germanic (e.g., German and English) and Italic (e.g., Portuguese) branches of the Indo-European family. However, it remains unknown whether such preference extends to the Indo-European branches whose writing system is based on the Cyrillic rather than Latin alphabet (e.g., Ukrainian), or whether it occurs in languages not belonging to the Indo-European family (e.g., Turkish). We replicated the in-out effect in two high-powered experiments ( N = 274), with Ukrainian and Turkish native speakers, further supporting an embodied explanation for this intriguing preference.

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