A serendipitous wormhole into #EMCA history. I picked up Sudnow’s piano course online and diligently work through the lessons. Guess…
Few historical maps of Ghana’s Volta and Oti regions have been invested with so much political and sociohistorical meaning as Hans Gruner’s 1913 map of the Togo Plateau. Gruner, stationed for over twenty years at Misahöhe in present-day Togo, was a long-time colonial administrator known as much for his ethnographical and historical knowledge of the area as for being a petty tyrant with a powerful grip on ‘his’ district. The map is obscure and hard to find, and I make available some digital versions here.
Just out in Glossa, the premier open access journal of general linguistics: Dingemanse, Mark. 2018. “Redrawing the Margins of Language:…
Here are some insights from J.R. Firth in 1935 that offer an interesting early outlook on language use in social…
Last year Sabine Reiter defended an interesting PhD thesis on ideophones in Awetí, a Tupian language spoken in the Upper…
“A struggle for life is constantly going on among quotations in academic writings. The better, the shorter, the easier forms…
With the help of the Radboud University and MPI Nijmegen librarians I’ve been tracking down an obscure but historically important…
One of the earliest English sources on the geology of what is today the Volta Region in eastern Ghana is…
Travel journals provide some of the first written sources on Akpafu. I have previously posted an excerpt from a 1887 journal by David Asante. This here is an excerpt from a similar journey two years later. The whole journey took three months, but this excerpt relates only a trip to two Akpafu towns on 17-18 December 1889. Nicolas Clerk, an indigenous missionary born in Aburi, was alone during the first part of the journey and accompanied by his colleague Hall from Dec. 30 onwards.
One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known…
The first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu was written by David Asante, a Twi pastor who travelled throughout today’s Volta Region in the company of some white missionaries. The journey took place in January 1887; the date of the visit to Akpafu was January 25th, 1887. The account was originally written in Twi, and translated in German in 1889 by the eminent linguist J.G. Christaller, who published it in a German geographical journal. This post provides an English translation.
One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example, I have suggested that we may call the 1850’s the decade of the discovery of ideophones in African linguistics. But we can push back the linguistic discovery of ideophones a little further by looking to other traditions. Today we look at Japanese, for which I have found some early 17th century grammatical treatises that offer information on ideophones.
Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years: he published the first large-scale comparison of some 200 African languages (the famed Polyglotta Africana), but also a corpus of Kanuri folklore, a grammar of Vai, and a grammar of Kanuri. In the latter, he wrote about “singular adverbs which seem to be common in African languages” — one of the first comparative statements on the type of words that would later come to be known as ideophones.
The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898). This post relates how I traced a mangled 1898 fragment of a song to a hard-to-get modern-day MA thesis, and how I was able to translate it with the help of the Rev. Albert Wurapa.
In pursuit of early written sources about Kawu I came across a useful summary of explorations in the Volta Basin…
The steady influx of vocabularies of ‘exotic’ languages during the nineteenth century caused a veritable flowering of comparative philology in…
Part two of our series on early sources (part one is here) is dedicated to Reverend O. E. Vidal, M.A.…
The earliest description of Kawu (Akpafu) I have found so far is quite special in that it was written by…
In an excellent post over at Greater Blogazonia, Lev Michael unravels a spectacular error which led several eminent specialists of…
Today’s posting brings you the second part of Pfisterer’s 1904 article (see the previous posting for details on the context…