It’s easy to forget amidst a rising tide of synthetic text, but language is not actually about strings of words, and language scientists would do well not to chain themselves to models that presume so. For apt and timely commentary we turn to Bronislaw Malinowski
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.
I loved Daniel Tammet’s second book Embracing The Wide Sky (2009). In his own words, Embracing The Wide Sky is “a…
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.
Funeral dirges (sìnɔ in Siwu) are sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges, the performances, and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far. Dirges are rarely heard in Kawu nowadays, but there are signs of a renewed interest in the genre.