LACITO
LACITO (''Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale'') is a multidisciplinary research organisation, principally devoted to the study of cultures and languages of oral tradition. LACITO is a branch of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the principal network of researchers in France. It is thus occasionally referred to as ''LACITO–CNRS'' or ''CNRS–LACITO''. Scientific activities Created in 1976 by André-Georges Haudricourt, LACITO is specialized in the description, documentation and analysis of under-documented languages of the world. The members of LACITO are linguists and linguistic anthropologists. The main perspective adopted by LACITO’s researchers is that of language typology, as linguistic structures are compared in search of universals, yet with special attention to their diversity. Besides language documentation and grammatical description, research at LACITO also includes historical linguistics, lexicography, psycholinguistics, socioli ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pangloss Collection
The Pangloss Collection is a digital library whose objective is to store and facilitate access to audio recordings in endangered languages of the world. Developed by the LACITO centre of CNRS in Paris, the collection provides free online access to documents of connected, spontaneous speech, in otherwise little-documented languages of all continents.Michailovsky, Boyd, Martine Mazaudon, Alexis Michaud, Séverine Guillaume, Alexandre François & Evangelia Adamou. 2014Documenting and researching endangered languages: the Pangloss Collection '' Language Documentation & Conservation'' 8, pp. 119-135. Principles A sound archive with synchronized transcriptions For the science of linguistics, language is first and foremost spoken language. The medium of spoken language is sound. The Pangloss Collection gives access to original recordings simultaneously with transcriptions and translations, as a resource for further research. After being recorded in its cultural context, texts have be ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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André-Georges Haudricourt
André-Georges Haudricourt (; 17 January 1911 – 20 August 1996) was a French botanist, anthropologist and linguist. Biography He grew up on his parents' farm, in a remote area of Picardy. From his early childhood, he was curious about technology, plants and languages. After he obtained his baccalauréat in 1928, his father advised him to enter the National Institute of Agriculture ''(Institut national agronomique)'', in the hope that he would obtain a prestigious position in the administration. However, at graduation (1931), Haudricourt got the worst mark of the entire year group. Unlike his peers, he was interested not in promoting modern tools and technology but in understanding traditional technology, societies and languages. He attended lectures in geography, phonetics, ethnology and genetics in Paris. Marcel Mauss obtained funding for him to go to Leningrad for one year to pursue studies in genetics with Nikolai Vavilov, whose lectures he had attended with great interest ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Alexis Michaud
Alexis Michaud is a French linguist specialising in the study of Southeast Asian languages, especially Naic languages and Vietnamese. He is also known for his work on the typology of tonal languages and as a foremost proponent of Panchronic phonology. He is one of the main editors of the Pangloss Collection. He works at the LACITO research centre within Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is member of the editorial board of journals such as ''Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area'' and associate editor of the ''Journal of the International Phonetic Association''. A documentary film entitled ''Sound Hunter'' was made about his fieldwork in Yunnan Yunnan , () is a landlocked province in the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the ..., China. Representative publications * * * * Michaud, Alexis. 2006. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Language Documentation
Language documentation (also: documentary linguistics) is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community. Language documentation seeks to create as thorough a record as possible of the speech community for both posterity and language revitalization. This record can be public or private depending on the needs of the community and the purpose of the documentation. In practice, language documentation can range from solo linguistic anthropological fieldwork to the creation of vast online archives that contain dozens of different languages, such as FirstVoices or OLAC. Language documentation provides a firmer foundation for linguistic analysis in that it creates a corpus of materials in the language. The materials in question can range from vocabulary lists and grammar rules to children's books and translated works. These materi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Public University
A public university or public college is a university or college that is in state ownership, owned by the state or receives significant government spending, public funds through a national or subnational government, as opposed to a private university. Whether a national university is considered public varies from one country (or region) to another, largely depending on the specific education landscape. Africa Egypt In Egypt, Al-Azhar University was founded in 970 AD as a madrasa; it formally became a public university in 1961 and is one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the world. In the 20th century, Egypt opened many other public universities with government-subsidized tuition fees, including Cairo University in 1908, Alexandria University in 1912, Assiut University in 1928, Ain Shams University in 1957, Helwan University in 1959, Beni-Suef University in 1963, Zagazig University in 1974, Benha University in 1976, and Suez Canal University in 1989. Kenya ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics) # to develop general theories about how and why language changes # to describe the history of speech communities # to study the history of words, i.e. etymology Historical linguistics is founded on the Uniformitarian Principle, which is defined by linguist Donald Ringe as: History and development Western modern historical linguistics dates from the late-18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity. At first, historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, primarily as a tool ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lexicography
Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries. * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. * Theoretical lexicography is the scholarly study of semantic, orthographic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic features of lexemes of the lexicon ( vocabulary) of a language, developing theories of dictionary components and structures linking the data in dictionaries, the needs for information by users in specific types of situations, and how users may best access the data incorporated in printed and electronic dictionaries. This is sometimes referred to as 'metalexicography'. There is some disagreement on the definition of lexicology, as distinct from lexicography. Some use "lexicology" as a synonym for theoretical lexicography; others use it to mean a branch of linguistics pertaining to the inventory of words in a particular language. A person ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language. Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language. It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a listener. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields, due mainly to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the mind-brain processes language, and less so ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.) and/or geographical barriers (a mountain range, a desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in usage and differences in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Oral Literature
Oral literature, orature or folk literature is a genre of literature that is spoken or sung as opposed to that which is written, though much oral literature has been transcribed. There is no standard definition, as anthropologists have used varying descriptions for oral literature or folk literature. A broad conceptualization refers to it as literature characterized by oral transmission and the absence of any fixed form. It includes the stories, legends, and history passed through generations in a spoken form. Background Pre-literate societies, by definition, have no written literature, but may possess rich and varied oral traditions—such as folk epics, folk narratives (including fairy tales and fables), folk drama, proverbs and folksongs—that effectively constitute an oral literature. Even when these are collected and published by scholars such as folklorists and paremiographers, the result is still often referred to as "oral literature". The different genr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), 2004''Companion to Linguistic Anthropology'' Malden, MA: Blackwell. Linguistic anthropology explores how language shapes communication, forms social identity and group membership, organizes large-scale cultural beliefs and ideologies, and develops a common cultural representation of natural and social worlds.Society for Linguistic Anthropology. n.dAbout the Society for Linguistic Anthropology(accessed 7 July 2010). Historical Development Linguistic anthropology emerged from the development of three distinct paradigms that have set the standard for approaching linguistic anthropology. The first, now known as " anthropological linguistics," focuses on the documentation of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Language Universals
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, ''All languages have nouns and verbs'', or ''If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels.'' Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a Universal Grammar, but was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who derived a set of forty-five basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax, from a study of some thirty languages. Though there has been significant research into linguistic universals, in more recent time some linguists, including Nicolas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson, have argued against the existence of absolute linguistic universals that are shared across all languages. T ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |