Twenty texts in the Chinese dialect of Shanghai city are presented as a tool for those familiar with some dialect of Chinese who are learning this variety. The texts, recorded as spontaneous speech, were originally collected for grammatical analysis and have been revised somewhat for print form. They are arranged in approximate order of…

Provides a technique by which a teacher can identify the environmental conditions under which phonetic shapes of tones can vary. Two separate methods of charting are illustrated. One shows individual tone variation, and the other shows the effect of a specified tonal environment on all five tones. (DS)

Using Yoruba as a case study, this article demonstrates the fact that the languages of Africa and the cultures of its peoples are inseparable. Therefore, the study advocates that appropriate aspects of these cultures should form an integral part of African language teaching. This article discusses specifically how language teachers can transmit…

An autosegmental analysis of Kagate tone is presented. The focus is on tonal instability, which occurs as the result of a compensatory lengthening process. To account for facts of tonal stability, previously hypothesized, and tonal instability, it is proposed that the location of tone within the overall geometry is subject to parametric variation,…

A glossary was developed by the City of Chicago's Board of Education to assist teachers of English as a second language (ESL) dealing with Vietnamese immigrant children. It contains a list of commonly used English words and lists of key words used in 13 subject areas: art, foreign languages, language arts, library science, mathematics, music,…

This paper reviews the evidence that Proto-Niger-Congo was a tone language with only two level tones and seeks to find the evidence that will explain how some of the descendant languages have more than two tones. In particular it shows how synchronic tone rules in Cama and consonant correspondences between Cama and Yoruba suggest a new factor in…

The material in this report represents some of the earliest results of field research in the languages of Nepal by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc. Some of the results presented here are tentative hypotheses, subject to revision in the light of continuing research. Part I, the present volume, presents phonological data in terms of…

This volume, a collection of selected papers from the Conference on African Languages and Linguistics organized by the Department of Linguistics of the University of Illinois and held at Urbana-Champaign on April 24-25, 1970, contains: W. E. Welmers, "The Typology of the Proto-Niger-Kordofanian Noun Class System"; D. Dalby, "A…

This beginning text in Navaho, based on techniques developed by Frank C. Laubach, introduces the symbols for each of the sounds separately and then in words and simple sentences. The illustrations which accompany the symbols serve to reinforce the sound/letter association. See AL 002 251 for the supplementary volume, "Charts and Teaching…

The present volume is a 176-unit course in spoken Sesotho, designed to prepare Peace Corps volunteers to communicate using basic sentence patterns in the most commonly encountered cultural contexts. The units, or "microwave cycles" are presented in two phases, "manipulative" and "communicative" oral practices. The…

Discusses the transitional unilateral code-switching observed in speakers of Hakka when speaking Cantonese. (CLK)

American English speakers, divided into musically untrained and trained groups, show no ear advantage for pitch contrasts which are recognized by speakers of Thai, when presented in a linguistic context. The only effect of musical training is an enhancement of left ear accuracy for pitch contrast recognition. (Author/SW)

Discusses main ideas of papers presented that reflect the new directions explored in the field of Chinese linguistics. Current areas of study include tonal distinctions in dialect studies, contrastive analysis of Taiwanese and standard Chinese verb phrase structures, and the application of old Chinese morphological grammar to characteristics of…

Tonal "flip-flop" (reversal of pitch value in which a direct exchange of value between two items is necessarily involved) can be found in a significant number of modern Chinese dialects, where an opposite pitch pattern is observed for the traditional Yin/Yang dichotomy of tones. (Author/CB)

Discusses Tone sandhi, the tone changes undergone by tone-bearing syllables in juxtaposition, in several Chinese dialects. The tone group is examined as a syntatico-semantic unit in Fuzhou and Mandarin and as a syntactic boundary-marker in Shanghai and Xiamen. The theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed. (20 references) (JL)