Readings
Place
- African Diasopora
- Sociolinguistic variation and language change in El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia)
This study is a sociolinguistic investigation into the Spanish spoken in El Palenque de San Basilio, a maroon village established in the 17th century on Colombia's Atlantic coast near Cartagena de Indias. Palenque presents a unique opportunity to observe the dynamics of an "insular" variety of regional Spanish that has been in contact for more than 250 years with a Spanish-based creole language (Lengua).
- El Palenque de San Basilio
1992 documentary on the Caribbean Colombian Maroon Community of San Basilio Palenque located near Cartagena in the department of Bolivar. The focus is on present day descendants of African maroons who resisted against the Spaniards and claimed their liberty early during the colonial era with the escape of slavery and establishment of free communities termed palenques also known as maroon communities in English. This particular community was founded by the maroon leader Benkos Bioho, which is a hero to many Colombians of African heritage.
Exercises
Linguistic Concepts
In linguistics, a calque (pronounced /kælk/) or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word (Latin: "verbum pro verbo") or root-for-root translation.
For example, the common English phrase "flea market" is a phrase calque that literally translates the French "marché aux puces".
Going in the other direction, from English to French, provides an example of how a compound word may be calqued by first breaking it down into its component roots. The French "gratte-ciel" is a word-coinage inspired by the model of the English "skyscraper" — "gratter" literally translates as "to scrape", and "ciel" translates as "sky".
Used as a verb, "to calque" means to loan-translate from another language so as to create a new lexeme in the target language.
"Calque" itself is a loanword from a French noun, and derives from the verb "calquer" (to copy). Loan translation is itself a calque of the German "Lehnübersetzung".
In linguistics, a register is a subset of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, an English speaker may adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal (e.g. "walking", not "walkin'") and refrain from using the word "ain't" when speaking in a formal setting, but the same person could violate all of these prescriptions in an informal setting.
The term was first used by the linguist Thomas Bertram Reid in 1956, and brought into general currency in the 1960s by a group of linguists who wanted to distinguish between variations in language according to the user (defined by variables such as social background, geography, sex and age), and variations according to use, "in the sense that each speaker has a range of varieties and choices between them at different times" (Halliday et al, 1964). The focus is on the way language is used in particular situations, such as legalese or motherese, the language of a biology research lab, of a news report or of the bedroom.
People
- Bill Stewart
William Alexander Stewart, a Hawaiian-born Scot who grew up multilingual in California and became an authority on creole languages, in particular Gullah, the West African-flavored speech of of the Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia, died on March 25 at Columbia-Presbyterian Center in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was congestive heart failure, according to the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he had been on the faculty since 1973.
A professor of linguistics, he was an early scholar of what has come to be known as ebonics, the nonstandard English many African-American children hear and learn at home. He explored its grammatical differences and how these can lead to misunderstandings in the classroom.
Professor Stewart examined and wrote widely about how this creates testing problems for such children. He argued that certain grammatical peculiarities of the dialect, like ''he busy,'' meaning he's busy right now, and ''he be busy,'' meaning he's always busy, make nonstandard English into a separate language.
Asking its young speakers to express these ideas in standard English simply could not reflect what the pupils intended to say, Professor Stewart argued. He demonstrated that speakers of nonstandard English were, in fact, speaking the remnants of a creole, melding languages of African slaves and the English of American settlers.
