Tuesday, September 10, 2013
21KAMENA
UMUNSI MWIZA KURI WOWE MUVANDIMWE UGIZE AMHIRWE YO GUFUNGURA IYI PAJI
URAKOZE KUBANA NA TWE.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
A Man of the People
A Man of the People
A Man of the People is a 1966 satirical novel by Chinua Achebe. It is Achebe's fourth novel. The novel tells the story of the young and educated Odili, the narrator, and his conflict with Chief Nanga, his former teacher who enters a career in politics in an unnamed modern African country. Odili represents the changing younger generation; Nanga represents the traditional customs of Nigeria. The book ends with a military coup, similar to the real-life coups of Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and Yakubu Gowo
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Saturday, January 7, 2012
UTAGANIRIYE NA SE..”
Igihe cyo kwitegura itangira ry’amashuri kigeze ku musozo,abana bamwe bongeye kwerekeza uruhanga ku babyeyi kuko babatezeho urufunguzo rubasubiza ku mashuri.Ababyeyi nabo ntibigeze bakura agatima ku bana kuko inshingano z’umurezi n’umubyeyi utari gito zitagira inzibacyuho;uburere bukanyura mu nzira zitandukanye ariko zose zuzuzanya .
Ibiganiro hagati y’umwana n’umubyeyi bikaba ku isonga ,bigashimangirwa no kubonera umwana iby’ingenzi akanera mu buzim n’imyigire ye hatirengagijwe igenzura umubyeyi akwiye gukora yabitegura cyangwa byamutungura ariko ntikabure nk’imperekeza ngombwa mu burezi.Bikunganirwa n’uko umubyeyi yakira ,yumva imivugire yawe akanitegereza imikorere rusange yawe nk’iyo hari umukoro usabwa kumufasha mu gihe cyihariye nk’ibiruhuko.Aha niho yishushanyiriza intumbero yawe akagira ikizere muri wowe cyangwa ukamuhangayikisha ,agataho agucyaha cyangwa akagushishikaza.
Kuganira n’ababyeyi ni ibyagaciro ,ntibikwiye kuburirwa umwanya;Umwana si nk’igiti cy’ishyamba kimeza ,aho imbuto zisakara ku bw’inyoni na Serwakira nyuma imvura ,akazuba n’akayaga bigasimburana uko bucya bwira,ngo abasaruzi bazabe ibiguruka nibarumbya bagurukire iyo bweze.Uburere ni igikorwa gitegurwa , kigira umugendo kinyuramo kandi giha umusaruro umuryango n’igihugu, haba habaye ikiurumbo n’ubundi bikagenda bityo.
Umubyeyi niwe ufata iyambere ,agatangira inzira yo kurera ,anakeneye urubuga rwo kumenya uko uburere n’uburezi bijyenda ,akabyerekwa n’umusaruro w’amanota mu ishuri n’impinduka mu mikorere n’imyumvire nko kudata igihe !,Kwibwiriza !,Kuyobora abakuri inyuma mu gihe umubyeyi atari bugufi;kuganira n’ukurera bimwereka icyo akwiye kugabanya ,kongera no guhindura mu burezi.
Babyeyi ni byiza ko muboneka, nyuma ya byinshi byiza mukora ,nimutinyure abana banyu bakeneye kubereka ibyo bifuza birenze ibyo bakeneye bibafasha kwiga ,bakeneye kumenya ingero n’imirongo ngenderwaho byabafashije ubwanyu kugera aho mugeze kimwe n’ibyababujije kugera ku nzozi mwari mufite mu gihe nk’icyo barimo ;nk’uko inkuru mbarirano ituba, nibabimenya bivuye ku batari nyirubwite bizabashyikaho byagabanyirijwe icyanga.Mwibukeko iterambere ryose abana bashobora kugeraho ari mwe barikesha maze mu barinde ibiiza bishobora kubangamira uburere bwabo mu gihe ntacyo mutakoze ngo mubahe amafaranga n’ibikoresho byose bifatika.
Bakeneye umurava n’ubunararibonye bibakomokaho ;ntimukemere igisa n’urukuta cyose cyababera urubibi ,bibaza byinshi ,bafite imishinga n’inzozi byinshi nimwe bo kubafasha kubyumva kurushaho.Kwereka abana ko muhuze buri gihe ,bituma nabo baharanira kubaha umutuzo wose mukeneye,”Ubundi njye si mba nifuza kuvugana na papa..!”
Babyeyi ,ntacyo abana bakeneye mutabasha kubabonera ,umuti si ukubima amatwi n’amaso ngo “sakindi izaba ibyara ibindi! ”Hari byinshi bya rwana mwe mwabona ko bitari ngombwa kimwe n’uko iyo umwana yibuka ko uzi ibyo akaneye utari wamubonera ategereza yizeye ,aba azi ko ari umutwaro atitwaje wenyine ,bityo ntanyure mu nzira zamwangiza,nawe ugakora iyo bwabaga ngo umuhe umuti nk’umubyeyi.
Bana ni umugisha,kugira ugutega amatwi ukamwihishurira wese kandi hagati yanyu hari Giteera:ni umugenzo w’ingirakamaro kuganira n’abakuru,ni umuti ukuvura ubufura n’isoko y’ijabo n’ijambo kuko uba uzirikana ko uko ushingura,n’umutimanama wawe wa cyana nyine, bifite umugenzuzi kandi ukaba utamushyika imbere utambaye umwambaro w’ubukwe ,ugahora nyine ureba niba wabukereye.Cyane cyane iyo wabyitoje kare.
Tera intambwe ,wereke umubyeyi ko ari umurezi wawe , ko umujishi ufatiyeho ari we wawukosheje maze ubyaze umusaruro amahirwe yose agushyira hafi ngo utere imbere kuko ni cyo cyonyine agutezeho,nturi igishoro ngo azakungukeho kuko nawe azi ejo he hashize atazi neza aharamuka.Gusa umwijeje utamuryarya ko uzaba umugabo ,ari nayo nyiturano ye, byaba bimuhagije.Ntuzigere urambirwa kumutega yombi,”Aba bana barwaye amatwi?”,inama ze ntizihagwa kandi akanwa ke ntikabeshya!Ni akabando kaciwe mu bisekuruza bya kare kakakwambutsa iminsi ya none,ukazakaraga ubuvivi cyane cyane iyo ubera Imfura umuryango n’igihugu.Ibi ntiwabigeraho uhuzwa n’umubyeyi n’udukaratasi tw’ibyo ukeka ko ukeneye kuri we cyangwa umuha Babyeyi! Ahubwo huzwa na we n’umwanya wo kumwerurira Inzitizi n’intsinzi ,Inyota n’Umwijuto byawe.
Ganira n’abakuru kuko urugamba rwo kuba uwo GUSIGA INKURU IMUSOZI rutsindwa no kugira IMBANZIRIZA MUSHINGA mu bakuru,ABAKURU ni bo bo kugusogongeza ku Ntango y’ABAKURAMBERE ;none se niba utaganiriye na So uzabara nkuru ki?”UTAGANIRIYE NA SE ntamenya icyo Sekuru yasize avuze!.
kajeyson@gmail.com
Languages and Applied Linguistics
INES RUHENGERI
Sunday, October 9, 2011
LINGUISTICA
] Variation and universality
Much modern linguistic research, particularly within the paradigm of generative grammar, has concerned itself with trying to account for differences between languages of the world. This has worked on the assumption that if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained by human biology, then all languages must share certain fundamental properties.
In generativist theory, the collection of fundamental properties all languages share are referred to as universal grammar (UG). The specific characteristics of this universal grammar are a much debated topic. Typologists and non-generativist linguists usually refer simply to language universals, or universals of language.
Similarities between languages can have a number of different origins. In the simplest case, universal properties may be due to universal aspects of human experience. For example, all humans experience water, and all human languages have a word for water. Other similarities may be due to common descent: the Latin language spoken by the Ancient Romans developed into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy; similarities between Spanish and Italian are thus in many cases due to both being descended from Latin. In other cases, contact between languages — particularly where many speakers are bilingual — can lead to much borrowing of structures, as well as words. Similarity may also, of course, be due to coincidence. English much and Spanish mucho are not descended from the same form or borrowed from one language to the other;[13] nor is the similarity due to innate linguistic knowledge (see False cognate).
Arguments in favor of language universals have also come from documented cases of sign languages (such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) developing in communities of congenitally deaf people, independently of spoken language. The properties of these sign languages conform generally to many of the properties of spoken languages. Other known and suspected sign language isolates include Kata Kolok, Nicaraguan Sign Language, and Providence Island Sign Language.
[edit] Structures
Ferdinand de Saussure
It has been perceived that languages tend to be organized around grammatical categories such as noun and verb, nominative and accusative, or present and past, though, importantly, not exclusively so. The grammar of a language is organized around such fundamental categories, though many languages express the relationships between words and syntax in other discrete ways (cf. some Bantu languages for noun/verb relations, ergative-absolutive systems for case relations, several Native American languages for tense/aspect relations).
In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in "the chimpanzee's lips") or a clause to contain a clause (as in "I think that it's raining"). Though recursion in grammar was implicitly recognized much earlier (for example by Jespersen), the importance of this aspect of language became more popular after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures,[14] which presented a formal grammar of a fragment of English. Prior to this, the most detailed descriptions of linguistic systems were of phonological or morphological systems.
Chomsky used a context-free grammar augmented with transformations. Since then, following the trend of Chomskyan linguistics, context-free grammars have been written for substantial fragments of various languages (for example GPSG, for English). It has been demonstrated, however, that human languages (most notably Dutch and Swiss German) include cross-serial dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by context-free grammars.[15]
[edit] Selected sub-fields
[edit] Historical linguistics
Main article: Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics studies the history and evolution of languages through the comparative method. Often the aim of historical linguistics is to classify languages in language families descending from a common ancestor. This involves comparison of elements in different languages to detect possible cognates in order to be able to reconstruct how different languages have changed over time. This also involves the study of etymology, the study of the history of single words. Historical linguistics is also called "diachronic linguistics" and is opposed to "synchronic linguistics" that study languages in a given moment in time without regarding its previous stages. In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. Historical linguistics was among the first linguistic disciplines to emerge and was the most widely practiced form of linguistics in the late 19th century. The shift in focus to a synchronic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant in western linguistics with Noam Chomsky's emphasis on the study of the synchronic and universal aspects of language.
[edit] Semiotics
Main article: Semiotics
Semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems, including the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. Semioticians often do not restrict themselves to linguistic communication when studying the use of signs but extend the meaning of "sign" to cover all kinds of cultural symbols. Nonetheless semiotic disciplines closely related to linguistics are literary studies, discourse analysis, text linguistics, and philosophy of language.
[edit] Descriptive linguistics and language documentation
Main article: Descriptive linguistics
Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics linguists have been concerned with describing and documenting languages previously unknown to science. Starting with Franz Boas in the early 1900s descriptive linguistics became the main strand within American linguistics until the rise of formal structural linguistics in the mid 20th century. The rise of American descriptive linguistics was caused by the concern with describing the languages of indigenous peoples that were (and are) rapidly moving towards extinction. The ethnographic focus of the original Boasian type of descriptive linguistics occasioned the development of disciplines such as Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, disciplines that investigate the relations between language, culture and society.
The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has since become more important outside of North America as well, as the documentation of rapidly dying indigenous languages has become a primary focus in many of the worlds' linguistics programs. Language description is a work intensive endeavour usually requiring years of field work for the linguist to learn a language sufficiently well to write a reference grammar of it. The further task of language documentation requires the linguist to collect a preferably large corpus of texts and recordings of sound and video in the language, and to arrange for its storage in accessible formats in open repositories where it may be of the best use for further research by other researchers.[16]
[edit] Applied linguistics
Main article: Applied linguistics
Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all languages. Applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. Linguistic research is commonly applied to areas such as language education, lexicography and translation. "Applied linguistics" has been argued to be something of a misnomer[who?], since applied linguists focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply "applying" existing technical knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g. conversation analysis) and anthropology.
Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints.
Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim.[17] This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted in either the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter, or in an international lingua franca like English.[17] Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved.[17] Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done by either private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.[17]
[edit] Description and prescription
Main articles: descriptive linguistics and linguistic prescription
Linguistics is descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is "right" or "wrong". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular animal is better or worse than another.
Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favouring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive to society.
[edit] Speech and writing
Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken (or signed) language is more fundamental than written language. This is because:
• Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it, while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication;
• Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;
• People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing;
Linguists nonetheless agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.
The study of writing systems themselves is in any case considered a branch of linguistics.
[edit] History
Main article: History of linguistics
The earliest known linguistic activities date to Iron Age India (around the 8th century BC)) with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pāṇini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who looked back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to. Pāṇini formulates close to 4,000 rules which together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure.
Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries; Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Pāṇini. In the later centuries BC, Pāṇini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartṛhari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.
Western linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important advancement of the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and critic. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument, and his works on rhetoric and poetics developed the understating of tragedy, poetry, and public discussions as text genres.
One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.[18] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.[19] In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.[citation needed]
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.[citation needed]
Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.
In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated Verner's Law
Much modern linguistic research, particularly within the paradigm of generative grammar, has concerned itself with trying to account for differences between languages of the world. This has worked on the assumption that if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained by human biology, then all languages must share certain fundamental properties.
In generativist theory, the collection of fundamental properties all languages share are referred to as universal grammar (UG). The specific characteristics of this universal grammar are a much debated topic. Typologists and non-generativist linguists usually refer simply to language universals, or universals of language.
Similarities between languages can have a number of different origins. In the simplest case, universal properties may be due to universal aspects of human experience. For example, all humans experience water, and all human languages have a word for water. Other similarities may be due to common descent: the Latin language spoken by the Ancient Romans developed into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy; similarities between Spanish and Italian are thus in many cases due to both being descended from Latin. In other cases, contact between languages — particularly where many speakers are bilingual — can lead to much borrowing of structures, as well as words. Similarity may also, of course, be due to coincidence. English much and Spanish mucho are not descended from the same form or borrowed from one language to the other;[13] nor is the similarity due to innate linguistic knowledge (see False cognate).
Arguments in favor of language universals have also come from documented cases of sign languages (such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) developing in communities of congenitally deaf people, independently of spoken language. The properties of these sign languages conform generally to many of the properties of spoken languages. Other known and suspected sign language isolates include Kata Kolok, Nicaraguan Sign Language, and Providence Island Sign Language.
[edit] Structures
Ferdinand de Saussure
It has been perceived that languages tend to be organized around grammatical categories such as noun and verb, nominative and accusative, or present and past, though, importantly, not exclusively so. The grammar of a language is organized around such fundamental categories, though many languages express the relationships between words and syntax in other discrete ways (cf. some Bantu languages for noun/verb relations, ergative-absolutive systems for case relations, several Native American languages for tense/aspect relations).
In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in "the chimpanzee's lips") or a clause to contain a clause (as in "I think that it's raining"). Though recursion in grammar was implicitly recognized much earlier (for example by Jespersen), the importance of this aspect of language became more popular after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures,[14] which presented a formal grammar of a fragment of English. Prior to this, the most detailed descriptions of linguistic systems were of phonological or morphological systems.
Chomsky used a context-free grammar augmented with transformations. Since then, following the trend of Chomskyan linguistics, context-free grammars have been written for substantial fragments of various languages (for example GPSG, for English). It has been demonstrated, however, that human languages (most notably Dutch and Swiss German) include cross-serial dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by context-free grammars.[15]
[edit] Selected sub-fields
[edit] Historical linguistics
Main article: Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics studies the history and evolution of languages through the comparative method. Often the aim of historical linguistics is to classify languages in language families descending from a common ancestor. This involves comparison of elements in different languages to detect possible cognates in order to be able to reconstruct how different languages have changed over time. This also involves the study of etymology, the study of the history of single words. Historical linguistics is also called "diachronic linguistics" and is opposed to "synchronic linguistics" that study languages in a given moment in time without regarding its previous stages. In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. Historical linguistics was among the first linguistic disciplines to emerge and was the most widely practiced form of linguistics in the late 19th century. The shift in focus to a synchronic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant in western linguistics with Noam Chomsky's emphasis on the study of the synchronic and universal aspects of language.
[edit] Semiotics
Main article: Semiotics
Semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems, including the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. Semioticians often do not restrict themselves to linguistic communication when studying the use of signs but extend the meaning of "sign" to cover all kinds of cultural symbols. Nonetheless semiotic disciplines closely related to linguistics are literary studies, discourse analysis, text linguistics, and philosophy of language.
[edit] Descriptive linguistics and language documentation
Main article: Descriptive linguistics
Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics linguists have been concerned with describing and documenting languages previously unknown to science. Starting with Franz Boas in the early 1900s descriptive linguistics became the main strand within American linguistics until the rise of formal structural linguistics in the mid 20th century. The rise of American descriptive linguistics was caused by the concern with describing the languages of indigenous peoples that were (and are) rapidly moving towards extinction. The ethnographic focus of the original Boasian type of descriptive linguistics occasioned the development of disciplines such as Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, disciplines that investigate the relations between language, culture and society.
The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has since become more important outside of North America as well, as the documentation of rapidly dying indigenous languages has become a primary focus in many of the worlds' linguistics programs. Language description is a work intensive endeavour usually requiring years of field work for the linguist to learn a language sufficiently well to write a reference grammar of it. The further task of language documentation requires the linguist to collect a preferably large corpus of texts and recordings of sound and video in the language, and to arrange for its storage in accessible formats in open repositories where it may be of the best use for further research by other researchers.[16]
[edit] Applied linguistics
Main article: Applied linguistics
Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all languages. Applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. Linguistic research is commonly applied to areas such as language education, lexicography and translation. "Applied linguistics" has been argued to be something of a misnomer[who?], since applied linguists focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply "applying" existing technical knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g. conversation analysis) and anthropology.
Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints.
Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim.[17] This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted in either the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter, or in an international lingua franca like English.[17] Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved.[17] Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done by either private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.[17]
[edit] Description and prescription
Main articles: descriptive linguistics and linguistic prescription
Linguistics is descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is "right" or "wrong". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular animal is better or worse than another.
Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favouring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive to society.
[edit] Speech and writing
Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken (or signed) language is more fundamental than written language. This is because:
• Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it, while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication;
• Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;
• People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing;
Linguists nonetheless agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.
The study of writing systems themselves is in any case considered a branch of linguistics.
[edit] History
Main article: History of linguistics
The earliest known linguistic activities date to Iron Age India (around the 8th century BC)) with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pāṇini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who looked back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to. Pāṇini formulates close to 4,000 rules which together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure.
Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries; Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Pāṇini. In the later centuries BC, Pāṇini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartṛhari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.
Western linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important advancement of the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and critic. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument, and his works on rhetoric and poetics developed the understating of tragedy, poetry, and public discussions as text genres.
One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.[18] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.[19] In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.[citation needed]
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.[citation needed]
Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.
In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated Verner's Law
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Incuti magara burya ntabwo zibonekera ntamunoza musangira utwanyu nk’abaguzanya mu gitondo urubanza rwaza ntuhamubone agahimba impamvu’ agamije kwiyerurutsa ati mfite akazi kenshi n’ubu ngubu ndi kure n’ubwo ukwezi kutarapfa ariko ako si ababazo
ndatuma umwaana aze akurebe
Ntutungurwe n’ukw inkuri ishir’utamurabutswe abo utazi mutajya imbibI bikabazindura bagashyika uko bari kose ntacyo baguhishe /ineza ‘aho iri irangwa no guca bugufi ntigirirwa gusa uwuzi ngw’azayikwishyure.
Umuryango ugukuyeho amaboko
Umuvandimwa akakwiyibagiza
Uwo mwonse rimwe akakwihakana
Wo muziranye ati baga wifashe uti mbayuwande?ko binyobeye !
Ugatizw’ ikiganza na rubanda
iZuba rikongera rikarasa .
BAAT CM ft NEG G THE GEN. REACORED 16th june 2011
ndatuma umwaana aze akurebe
Ntutungurwe n’ukw inkuri ishir’utamurabutswe abo utazi mutajya imbibI bikabazindura bagashyika uko bari kose ntacyo baguhishe /ineza ‘aho iri irangwa no guca bugufi ntigirirwa gusa uwuzi ngw’azayikwishyure.
Umuryango ugukuyeho amaboko
Umuvandimwa akakwiyibagiza
Uwo mwonse rimwe akakwihakana
Wo muziranye ati baga wifashe uti mbayuwande?ko binyobeye !
Ugatizw’ ikiganza na rubanda
iZuba rikongera rikarasa .
BAAT CM ft NEG G THE GEN. REACORED 16th june 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)