Ethnographie et Vocabulaire Religieux des Cultes Vodoun

Roger Brand
Université de Tour

Ce travail ethno-linguistique est une approche de la mentalité religieuse des populations du sud et moyen Bénin au niveau des Cultes Vodoun. Ce travail porte sur la langue Wéménugbé qui est parlée par une population de Réfugiés groupés dans des villages bordant le fleuve Ouémé, Wo, depuis son embouchure dans le lac Nokoué et sur une profondeur de 85 kilomètres et le long de la rivière So. Les caractéristiques de la langue Wéménugbé sont celles de la langue Fungbe, fongbé, d'Abomey dont les particularités dominantes sont une très forte nasalisation et des emprunts de termes aux langues des populations Gun , Goun, de Porto-Novo, des populations Aïzo des villages sur la rivière So et des population Yoruba. Elle est appelée aussi Gungbe, goungbé, de l'Ouémé. Elle appartient au groupe des langues Kwa.

Il est présenté sous la forme d’un lexique de plus de 1350 termes qui replace la vie religieuse liée aux Cultes Vodoun des Wéménu dans son cadre existentiel et réaliste des sociétés de l’Afrique de l’ouest. Ce lexique ethnographique est mis sous une forme limitée et comporte uniquement les termes en langue Wéménugbé et une définition française. L’intéressant est qu’il aborde la réalité religieuse des Cultes Vodoun.

ISBN 9783895866845. Languages of the World/Dictionaries 26. 160pp. 2000.

Lexique Yaka – Français; Français – Yaka

Ruttenberg S.J. Piet

Le yaka, langue H31 dans la classification de M. Guthrie est parlé au Zaïre, dans la sous-région du Kwango.

ISBN9783895869464. Languages of the World/ Dictionaries 27. 280pp. 2000.

Tuvan dictionary

K. David Harrison & Gregory David Anderson
Yale University, University of Manchester

This dictionary consists of approximately 5-6,000 basic vocabulary items of Tuvan, a Turkic language of south central Siberia.
The lexicon of Tuvan is charcterized by a larger number of Mongolian loans than in other Turkic languages of southern Siberia. Modern Tuvan has also borrowed extensively from Russian, though less than neighboring Altai-Sa yan Turkic languages. There are also a number of loans in Tuvan from Chinese, Tibetan, and even Sanskrit, though usually through a Mongolian intermediary; these words are predominantly in the religious or political spheres, or refer to cultural items diffused from those areas. Finally there are a small number of words in Tuvan from other, now extinct (and in part assimilated to Tuvan linguistically), languages belonging to the Yeniseian and Samoyed families.

Thus, the lexicon of Tuvan reflects the diverse and complex history of socio-cultural contacts of the Tuvan people.

Tuvan (aka Tuvan/Tuvinian) is spoken by 150-200,000 people in the Republic of Tuva in south central Siberia. Tuvan (along with the closely related Tofalar) stand out among the Turkic languages in several ways. Tuvan has three sets of phonemic vowels: plain, long, and creaky voice. Word-initially obstruents exhibit a contrast between unaspirated/aspirated or voiced/voiceless, depending on the speaker. There is also a phonemically marginal series of long nasalized vowels. Tuvan has only one inflectional series for verbs, prefering enclitic pronominals in most forms (in main clauses). Large numbers of Mongolisms and Mongolian derivational affixes are found, the latter often appearing with Turkic roots. Russian loans are also numerous, and in the speech of certain younger residents of Kyzyl, contact-induced restructuring can be observed.

ISBN 3895865282. Languages of the World/Dictionary 28. 176pp. 2003.

A Lexicon of Modern Mohegan

Julian Granberry
Native American Language Services

Mohegan, a dialect of the Mohegan-Pequot language of Southern New England, was one of the major Algonquian languages of Connecticut, spoken from the Connecticut River in the west to the Thames River in the east and from central Connecticut south to Long Island Sound from at least the 13th century through the 1800s. Its last speaker, Mrs. Fidelia A.H. Fielding, died in 1908. From detailed professional phonetic recordings of lengthy texts from Mrs. Fielding’s speech it is possible to recover a significant vocabulary in Modern Mohegan as it was spoken in the early years of the last century. The application of known phonological correspondences between the Mohegan dialect and the mutually intelligible neighboring Pequot dialect make it possible to reconstruct a large number of probably occurring lexical items which may be added to the total vocabulary of Modern Mohegan. This vocabulary, in both Mohegan-English and English-Mohegan alphabetical listings, is presented in the Lexicon along with a detailed description of the methods by which the data were recovered, phonemicized, and normalized.

ISBN 9783895867644. Languages of the World/Dictionaries 29. 98pp. 2005.

Bokobaru dictionary

Ross Jones

The Bokobaru-English, English-Bokobaru dictionary was compiled by the author in Nigeria over a 12 year period while translating the Bible into Bokobaru. It forms a trilogy together with the simultaneously published Boko and Busa dictionaries. This cluster of languages, of which the grammar was published in 1998 by Lincom Europa, belongs to the Eastern subdivision of the Mande language family.

The database is root based, so that any word that begins with a lexeme root will appear as a subentry under that lexeme. The head and subwords are written in Bokobaru orthography, followed by phonetic representations, including tones and variants, a part of speech label and glosses in English. Sentences in the vernacular illustrate the use of the words, followed by a translation into English.

Etymology, synonyms and variants are given as appropriate, with the etymology showing significant historical borrowing from Dendi. Comparison of Bokobaru words with the equivalent words in the Boko and Busa dictionaries illustrates consonant weakening, elision and significant changes in the tone systems.

ISBN 9783895868368. Languages of the World/Dictionaries 30. 349pp. 2004.

Busa dictionary

Ross Jones

The Busa-English, English-Busa dictionary was compiled by the author in Nigeria over a 12 year period while translating the Bible into Busa. It forms a trilogy together with the simultaneously published Boko and Bokobaru dictionaries. This cluster of languages, of which the grammar was published by Lincom Europa in 1998, belongs to the Eastern subdivision of the Mande language family.

The database is root based, so that any word that begins with a lexeme root will appear as a subentry under that lexeme. The 6600 head and subwords are written in bold Busa orthography, followed by phonetic representations, including tones and variants, a part of speech label and glosses in English.

Etymology, synonyms and variants are given as appropriate, with the etymology showing significant historical borrowing from Dendi. Comparison of Busa words with the equivalent words in the Boko and Bokobaru dictionaries illustrates consonant weakening, elision, and significant changes in the tone systems.

ISBN 9783895868375. Languages of the World/Dictionaries 31. 212pp. 2004.

A Tri-Lingual Dictionary of Emberá-Spanish-English

Solomon Sara
Georgetown University

Emberá is a Central American Indian Language belonging to the Choco grouping. It is Spoken in Panama, Colombia and Ecuador in unequal proportions. This study is based on the Emberá dialect spoken in Panama. Though the statistics vary, the number of native speakers is no more than sixty thousand. In Panama, the number of speakers is no more than twenty thousand.

There are no studies in English on Emberá, and a very few in Spanish. This dictionary is based on information and elicitations from the native speaker Mr. Daniel Castañeda. This is the first attempt at a collection of the basic lexical items of the language, and it is first in English and Spanish. Mr. Castañeda is a bilingual speaker of Spanish and Emberá, with limited fluency in English. All elicitations were done through the medium of Spanish at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. while he was residing in the area. For ease of use the dictionary is multi-directional, i.e. Emberá-Spanish-English and Spanish-Emberá-English.

Even though this dialect differs from Chamí dialect, this dictionary can serve as a companion to the grammar of Emberá by D.A. Licht, also published by LINCOM EUROPA.

ISBN 9783895866722. Languages of the World/Dictionaries 38. 400 pp. 2001.