Linguistics – Global Engagement Fellows

Ancient Scripts in the Arab World

May 28, 2018Finding A Voice

During my visit to Paris after finishing up at Bordeaux, I followed up on a recommendation from a friend and visited the Institute of the Arab World, which was absolutely fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the part of the collection that explained the early history of the Arabian peninsula and the Levant, as it introduced me to scripts and languages that I was previously unaware of, such as Sabean, Thamudic, and the Ancient South Arabian script.

Recently, I came across an article in the New Yorker (via languagehat) and a podcast from UT about Ahmed Al-Jallad, who researches and deciphers inscriptions in the Safaitic script, which are written in an older, pre-Islamic form of Arabic. The Safaitic alphabet is primarily found in Syria and Jordan, and Al-Jallad theorizes that forms of Arabic were present in this region before the rise of Classical Arabic on the Arabian peninsula. In the podcast, Al-Jallad discusses pre-Islamic inscriptions written in the Arabic alphabet. Those found to this point are generally associated with a Christian identity, rather than a pagan one. I would highly recommend reading the article and podcast (with transcript) if you are interested in Arabic history, linguistics, or just generally get excited about deciphering ancient scripts and languages. Al-Jallad also has an interesting discussion of Safaitic with photos and translations on his Twitter account.

The 31st Annual Symposium for Arabic Linguistics

May 8, 2017Finding A Voice

The University of Oklahoma hosted this year’s Annual Symposium for Arabic Linguistics, and I had the very good fortune to volunteer while listening to some of the talks. Since I am majoring in both linguistics and Arabic, this was a perfect opportunity to learn more about both.

First of all, I realized how much linguistic variety is found in the array of Arabic dialects. In addition to the standard national dialects, there were talks on dialects I had never heard of, such as Jazani and Najdi from Saudi Arabia and Coastal Dhofari from Libya. These dialects contained diminutive and even augmentative forms. I also learned that Moroccan Arabic’s syllabic structure differs significantly from that of English, being simplex instead of complex. Other interesting dialectal talks concerned the generic in Tunisian Arabic and the use of dialectal or formal causal discourse markers by speakers of Algerian, Moroccan, and Egyptian Arabic.

Some of the talks expanded on topics I had covered in my linguistics classes. The notation we studied for the prosodic skeleton was especially useful, as many of the more morphological topics, such as the augmentative and diminutive, referred to it. There was also a discussion of emphasis in Cairene Arabic. Last semester, for my phonology class, I had the chance to look at emphasis in a few different dialects. Since there is no single explanation, it was interesting to hear another argument.

I also got a glimpse into areas of linguistics that I have not yet studied, such as language acquisition and pragmatics. One of the language acquisition presentations considered the retention of feminine, broken, and masculine human plurals by heritage speakers. A pragmatics talk covered attitude datives, where a dative pronoun is added even if the action is not done to the speaker, as an expression of authority. I particularly enjoyed the final comparison to the attitude or personal dative in Southern American English, which has evaluative connotations of satisfaction, as in I love me some ice cream.

The conference was inspiring, both in the information I learned and in the glimpse it gave me of how I might use my growing love for and increasing skills in linguistics and Arabic. I even learned about a group of minority languages in the Arab World that I was heretofore unfamiliar with, the Nubian languages. I look forward to stretching my knowledge of linguistics and Arabic more in the future.

Linguistic Fieldwork

May 11, 2016Finding A Voice

A couple of weeks ago, the Linguistics Club hosted a talk by Dr. Shobhana Chelliah, a professor at the University of North Texas. She has worked with two languages spoken in Manipur, a state in north-east India. Her primary focus was on the process of fieldwork, but first she gave some background about the languages spoken in this region.

States and Cities in North-East India

By User:Planemad – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:India_states_and_union_territories_map.svg, CC BY-SA 1.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37702877

In the North-East Indian states, around 200 languages from the Tibeto-Burman language family are spoken. In Manipur, the main language spoken in the valley, Meitei, is very different from the Naga and Kuki-Chin language groups spoken in the hill regions. Meitei was the first language Dr. Chelliah worked with, and is also the first language of many of the linguistics students in Manipur. Both she and the students are interested in documenting the other languages, such as Lamkang, but there are difficulties.

Compared to Meitei, Lamkang is much more grammatically complex. It has case endings and a complicated verbal system. Like many Tibeto-Burman languages, it is neither purely nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive. I think a simplified way of explaining that is whether the agent of the action or the patient being acted upon is marked. To figure out what was going on, linguists worked together to compare languages across the family and to compile corpora. Analyzing discourse proved better for explaining the marking system than simple elicitation. It turns out that the agent was generally marked if there was something unexpected about the action, but not if it was run of the mill. You can see how that would be difficult to figure out by simply asking for translations or descriptions.

However, while Dr. Chelliah prefers this more natural method of analyzing discourse, she realized that to catalog the verb forms she needed to do more focused elicitation. Lamkang has two different verb stems per verb and a variety of prefixes and suffixes. Dr. Chelliah had actually brought one of her consultants with her, who was nice enough to pronounce the verbs for us. Because this type of elicitation is quite tiring for the consultant, Dr. Chelliah and her coworkers brought together several speakers at a weeklong language workshop. This allowed the native speakers to discuss the verb forms and break up the sessions with other activities, such as orthography.

Dr. Chelliah’s lecture was especially intriguing to me because I am interested in doing this type of fieldwork. While I realize that it can be quite a lot of work, it also sounds very exciting to puzzle out exactly what is going on in a language for the first time. The vast variety in the world’s languages, both in their sounds and their structures, is simply extraordinary.