The Winners and Finalists of the 2008 AAA Photo Contest are now available in a Flickr gallery. The photos are…
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.
Colleen’s post about the Hand Drawn Map Contest reminded me of a neat map of Kawu I was given some…
Phonology Assistant (PA) is a free phonology tool by SIL that (as of version 3.0) works interactively with the data…
Semantic cookies are sold in Akpafu-Mempeasem, central Volta Region, Ghana (among other places) Fieldwork sessions on lexical semantics have become…
There are several ideophones in Siwu that have to do with silence. Here are a few examples: mì-lo kanananana! 2PL-be.silent…
Mt. Iso in PNG, 12 miles southwest of Sumo, east of the Catalina River. Diuwe is spoken between sea level…
A while ago I spent some time with a language assistant to work through a list of the Siwu ideophones I collected so far. There were some interesting metalinguistic comments on the function of ideophones. Here are three representative exchanges.
Hello from the field! I’m currently on a five-week trip to Kawu in the beautiful Volta Region, eastern Ghana (see…
Having been a small and quite isolated language for centuries, Siwu was relatively late to attract attention from outsiders. Europeans…