Did you know that Austronesian languages (think Tagalog, Samoan, Fijian, Malay, etc.), originated in Taiwan?
Languages
- Hanzi 汉字: A Documentary of Chinese Typography [Streaming Resource] How does language shape identity? What role does handwriting play in the digital age? HANZI encourages audiences around the world to revisit and rethink their own culture, language and identity. HANZI explores international design, visual culture, and identity through the lens of modern Chinese typography. Winner of Best Film at the Urban Nomad Film Festival. Official Selection at the Bali International Film Festival and the Providence Art & Design Film Festival.
- Languages of the South Seas II [Streaming Resource] The languages of Polynesia are estimated to be some of the newest languages in the world, emerging only in the last millennium. Look back to the earliest cultures of the Polynesian islands...
Pacific Languages [eBook] by
Almost one-quarter of the world's languages are (or were) spoken in the Pacific, making it linguistically the most complex region in the world. Although numerous technical books on groups of Pacific or Australian languages have been published, and descriptions of individual languages are available, until now there has been no single book that attempts a wide regional coverage for a general audience. Pacific Languages introduces readers to the grammatical features of Oceanic, Papuan, and Australian languages as well as to the semantic structures of these languages. For readers without a formal linguistic background, a brief introduction to descriptive linguistics is provided. In addition to describing the structure of Pacific languages, this volume places them in their historical and geographical context, discusses the linguistic evidence for the settlement of the Pacific, and speculates on the reason for the region's many languages. It devotes considerable attention to the effects of contact between speakers of different languages and to the development of pidgin and creole languages in the Pacific. Throughout, technical language is kept to a minimum without oversimplifying the concepts or the issues involved. A glossary of technical terms, maps, and diagrams help identify a language geographically or genetically; reading lists and a language index guide the researcher interested in a particular language or group to other sources of information. Here at last is a clear and straightforward overview of Pacific languages for linguists and anyone interested in the history of sociology of the Pacific.
ISBN: 9780824818982Publication Date: 1998-03-01
- Da Kine Talk: From Pidgin to Standard English in Hawaii [eBook] Hawaii is without parallel as a crossroads where languages of East and West have met and interacted. The varieties of English (including neo-pidgin) heard in the Islands today attest to this linguistic and cultural encounter.'Da kine talk'is the Island term for the most popular of the colorful dialectal forms--speech that captures the flavor of Hawaii's multiracial community and reflects the successes (and failures) of immigrants from both East and West in learning to communicate in English.
A Grammar of yélî Dnye [eBook] by
This is a comprehensive description of a language spoken some 450 km offshore from the mainland of Papua New Guinea. The language is remarkable for its phonological, morphological and syntactic complexity. As the sole surviving member of its language family, and with little historical contact with surrounding languages, the language provides evidence of the kind of languages spoken in this part of the world before the Austronesian expansion. The grammar provides detailed information on the phoneme inventory, morphology, syntax and select semantic fields. Remarkable features include a 90 phoneme inventory including unique sounds, a morphology with thousands of non-compositional portmanteau elements, complex rules for negation, and extensive ergative syntax. Unusual patterns are also found in the organization of semantic fields, for example in partonymies of the body, taxonomies of the natural world, verbal semantics and kinship terms. The combination of linguistic 'rara' suggest that linguistic evolution under low contact can yield baroque and unusual patterns. The volume should be of special interest to linguists, typologists, sociolinguists, anthropologists and researchers in Oceania and Melanesia. Endorsement: "This long-awaited grammar is a major contribution to Papuan and general linguistics, providing as it does by far the most comprehensive and accurate grammatical description of a language that has already assumed a position as one of the world's most complicated. Hitherto, the most extensive grammatical description of the language has been the survey-like Henderson (1995), and while Levinson explicitly acknowledges his debt to this earlier grammar and to unpublished work by Henderson, his own detailed grammar clearly takes the level of description and analysis of the language to a completely new level. In particular, Levinson's grammar makes clear precisely to what extent and in what ways the language's morphology is complex beyond even what most studies on morphologically complex languages envisage. In addition, it provides a much more detailed account of the language's syntax, based on a judicious combination of corpus attestation and careful elicitation (incl. using the kits developed by Levinson's group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics). The grammar thus not only fills a major lacuna in our knowledge of the non-Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area, but also provides grist for future studies on the implications of the language's complexities." Bernard Comrie, University of California, Santa Barbara
ISBN: 9783110738476Publication Date: 2022-06-06
Cultural Gems
Asian American Culture: from Anime to Tiger Moms [2 Volumes] [eBook] by
An invaluable reference for school and public libraries as well as academic libraries at colleges and universities, this two-volume encyclopedia provides comprehensive coverage of a variety of Asian American cultural forms that enables readers to understand the history, complexity, and contemporary practices in Asian American culture. The contributed entries address the diversity of a group comprising people with geographically discrete origins in the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, identifying the rich variations across the category of Asian American culture that are key to understanding specific cultural expressions while also pointing out some commonalities. Entries are organized alphabetically and cover topics in the arts; education and politics; family and community; gender and sexuality; history and immigration; holidays, festivals, and folk tradition; literature and culture; media, sports, and popular culture; and religion, belief, and spirituality. Entries also broadly cover Asian American origins and history, regional practices and traditions, contemporary culture, and art and other forms of shared expression. Accompanying sidebars throughout serve to highlight key individuals, major events, and significant artifacts and allow readers to better appreciate the Asian American experience.
ISBN: 9781440829215Publication Date: 2016-03-14
Weavers of Song by
Weavers of Song is divided into two books. Book one covers regional music and dance, exploring the musical traditions of 20 specific areas, including the Society Islands and Tonga. In book two, McLean describes the musical instruments and the performance and teaching of music across the region.
Call Number: ML360 .M28 1999ISBN: 0824822714Publication Date: 2000-01-01
Handbook of Polynesian Mythology by
An accessible, concise reference source on Polynesia's complex mythology, product of a culture little known outside its home. Encounters with the West introduced Polynesian mythology to the world--and sealed its fate as a casualty of colonialism. But for centuries before the Europeans came, that mythology was as vast as the triangle of ocean in which it flourished, as diverse as the people it served, and as complex as the mythologies of Greece and Rome. Students, researchers, and enthusiasts can follow vivid retellings of stories of creation, death, and great voyages, tracking variations from island to island. They can use the book's reference section for information on major deities, heroes, elves, fairies, and recurring themes, as well as the mythic implications of everything from dogs and volcanoes to the hula, Easter Island, and tattooing (invented in the South Pacific and popularized by returning sailors). An annotated bibliography of the major introductory commentaries on Polynesian mythology and culture as well as an annotated listing of websites on a broad range of topics related to Polynesian mythology An extensive glossary focusing on English translations, equivalents, and interpretations of Polynesian words and phrases
Call Number: BL2620.P6 C72 2004ISBN: 1576078949Publication Date: 2004-10-25
Oriental Mythology (the Masks of God, Volume 2) by
The second volume in Joseph Campbell's monumental four-volume Masks of God series explores Asian mythology and its evolution into the distinctive religions of Egypt, India, China, and Japan. This Collected Works of Joseph Campbell edition has been revised with up-to-date science and new illustrations. In this legendary exploration of Asian mythology, Joseph Campbell delves into the underlying myths and folkloric traditions that evolved into the great philosophies of the Egyptians and Sumerians, as well as the distinctive religions of India, China, and Japan, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shintoism. Oriental Mythology was originally published in 1962 as the second volume of Campbell's monumental four-volume series The Masks of God. On completing the series, Campbell wrote, "Its main result for me has been the confirmation of a thought I have long and faithfully entertained: of the unity of man, not only in its biology, but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony . . . irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge." Oriental Mythology remains mesmerizing in its eloquence, its scope, and its tantalizing vision of what may next emerge. This new hardcover edition, which joins The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, features up-to-date archaeological, anthropological, and psychological information, as well as forty new or improved illustrations.
Call Number: BL311 .C276 2021 v.2ISBN: 9781608687282Publication Date: 2021-06-29
Creative Language Use
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Polynesian Poetry [Online Resource] by
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology. Prepared by recognized authorities, its articles treat their topics in sufficient depth and with enough lucidity to satisfy the scholar and the general reader alike. Entries vary in length from relatively brief notices to substantial articles of about 20,000 words. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965, established itself as a standard work in the field. Among the 215 contributors were Northrop Frye writing on allegory, Murray Krieger on belief in poetry, Philip Wheelwright on myth, John Hollander on music, and William Carlos Williams on free verse. In 1974, the Enlarged Edition increased the entries with dozens of new subjects, including rock lyric, computer poetry, and black poetry, to name just a few. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics accounts for the extraordinary change and explosion of knowledge within literary and cultural studies since the 1970s. This edition, completely revised, preserves what was most valuable from previous editions, while subjecting each existing entry to revision. Over 90 percent of the entries have been extensively revised and most major ones entirely rewritten. Completely new entries number 162, including those by new contributors Camille Paglia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Elaine Showalter, Houston Baker, Andrew Ross, and many more. New entries include those on cultural criticism, discourse, feminist poetics, and Chicano poetry. Improvements cover several areas: All the recent developments in theory that bear on poetry are included; bibliographies of secondary sources are extended; cross-references among entries and through blind entries have been expanded for greater ease of use; and coverage of emergent and non-Western poetries is dramatically increased. Indeed, a hallmark of the encyclopedia is its world-wide orientation on the poetry of national and cultural groups.
ISBN: 9780691021232Publication Date: 1993-05-09
Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater [eBook] by
Asian American literature is one of the most recent forms of ethnic literature and is already becoming one of the most prominent, given the large number of writers, the growing ethnic population from the region, the general receptivity of this body of work, and the quality of the authors. In recent decades, there has been an exponential growth in their output and much Asian American literature has now achieved new levels of popular success and critical acclaim. Nurtured by rich and long literary traditions from the vast continent of Asia, this literature is poised between the ancient and the modern, between the East and West, and between the oral and the written. The Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater covers the activities in this burgeoning field. First, its history is traced year by year from 1887 to the present, in a chronology, and the introduction provides a good overview. The most important section is the dictionary, with over 600 substantial and cross-referenced entries on authors, books, and genres as well as more general ones describing the historical background, cultural features, techniques and major theatres and clubs. More reading can be found through an extensive bibliography with general works and those on specific authors. The book is thus a good place to get started, or to expanded one's horizons, about a branch of American literature that can only grow in importance.
ISBN: 9780810855779Publication Date: 2012-04-12
Unbroken Thread [eBook] by ISBN: 9780870238550Publication Date: 1993-09-01Presents six outstanding works by Asian-American women playwrights, written in the past 20 years. Each play addresses the experiences of Asian-Americans in the United States, repudiating cultural and sexual stereotypes.
