The Chadic Languages of Yobe State, Nigeria

尼日利亚约贝州的乍得语

• 批准号: 0111289
• 负责人: Russell Schuh
• 金额: $ 17.02万
• 依托单位: University of California-Los Angeles
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-12-01 至 2005-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0111289&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Chadic; Languages; Yobe; State; Nigeria

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Russell G. Schuh and his colleague Dr. Alhaji Maina Gimba of the University of Maiduguri, Nigeria, will spend three years documenting five languages of Yobe State, Nigeria. These are Bole, Karekare, Ngamo, Bade, and Ngizim, all major languages of the Chadic family. None of these languages has yet been described comprehensively in full grammars or dictionaries; nor is any used in written form by its speakers. Drs. Schuh and Gimba will train teams of native speakers to collect and transcribe data in their own languages. The teams will begin by building on existing lexical databases and collections of texts. Databases currently range from 700-800 words for Ngamo to over 3000 words for Bole. Researchers will work toward relatively large dictionaries of several thousand items per language. Texts currently emphasize folktales. Researchers will collect new texts, including oral history, descriptions of customs and traditions, poetry and song, and personal narrative. One source of new texts will be transcription of audio and video recordings of people recognized as being particularly knowledgable or skilled in various domains. One goal of the project will be to stimulate speakers to write in their native languages. To this end, the project will solicit texts in written form from people already literate in Hausa (the lingua franca of Northern Nigeria), particularly secondary school students. As collections of texts increase, they will be published locally so that people can see themselves in print. Ultimately the project will produce sizable dictionaries for each language in both paper and electronic form (CD and searchable web databases) and collections of texts both for local distribution and, with translations, in both paper and electronic form for an audience outside Nigeria. Not least, a long-term outcome, extending beyond the duration of the project, should be continued self-documentation of the languages in written form.This language documentation project is significant in four ways. First, it emphasizes linguistic structure that is encoded in the lexicon. This includes derivational processes that make nouns from verbs, make verbs passive, or create nouns indicating agent or instrument; inflectional processes that indicate gender, number, tense, or (in)definiteness; compounding creating word combinations whose overall meaning is not predictable from the parts. Second, the project's documenting of a group of related languages reveals language history. The lexicons of these languages tell us, for example, which words can be reconstructed as having been shared by the original ancestor language, how words may have shifted in meaning in individual languages, and which words have been adopted from other languages. Third, the lexicon is also a repository of ethnoecology. It includes names for flora, fauna, and natural objects, and means of constructing names for things in the environment (compounding, word derivation, etc.). Finally, the lexicon represents all aspects of culture, including words from the entire range of crafts, occupations, traditions, and social organization. The text collections are especially critical to the study of historical and cultural changes. All these issues require detailed documentation and input from natives of the culture, which this project will provide.

在国家科学基金会的支持下，尼日利亚迈杜古里大学的Russell G. Schuh博士和他的同事Alhaji Maina Gimba博士将花三年时间记录尼日利亚约贝州的五种语言。它们是伯乐语、卡雷卡语、恩加莫语、巴德语和恩吉津语，都是乍得语系的主要语言。这些语言都还没有在完整的语法或字典中得到全面的描述；它的使用者也不使用任何书面形式。Drs。Schuh和Gimba将培训以母语为母语的团队，用他们自己的语言收集和转录数据。这些小组将从建立现有的词汇数据库和文本集合开始。目前的数据库从Ngamo的700-800字到Bole的3000多字不等。研究人员将致力于开发每门语言包含数千个词条的相对较大的词典。目前的教材强调民间故事。研究人员将收集新的文本，包括口述历史、对习俗和传统的描述、诗歌和歌曲以及个人叙述。新文本的一个来源将是在各个领域被认为特别有知识或技术的人的录音和录像的转录。这个项目的一个目标是鼓励说母语的人用他们的母语写作。为此目的，该项目将向已经掌握豪萨语（尼日利亚北部的通用语）的人，特别是中学生征集书面文本。随着文本收藏的增加，它们将在当地出版，这样人们就可以在印刷品上看到自己。最终，该项目将为每种语言制作大量纸质和电子形式的词典（CD和可搜索的网络数据库）和文本集，既可在当地分发，也可为尼日利亚以外的读者提供纸质和电子形式的翻译。最重要的是，一个长期的结果，超出项目的持续时间，应该继续以书面形式对语言进行自我记录。这个语言文档项目在四个方面具有重要意义。首先，它强调在词汇中编码的语言结构。这包括衍生过程，使动词变为名词，使动词变为被动，或创造表示代理人或工具的名词；词形：表示性别、数字、时态或（在）确定性的屈折过程；复合词创造的单词组合，其整体意义无法从部分中预测。其次，该项目对一组相关语言的记录揭示了语言的历史。例如，这些语言的词汇告诉我们，哪些词可以重构为原始祖先语言共有的词，哪些词在个别语言中的意义可能发生了怎样的变化，哪些词是从其他语言中吸收来的。第三，词典也是民族生态学的宝库。它包括植物、动物和自然物体的名称，以及为环境中的事物构造名称的方法（复合、词源等）。最后，词典代表了文化的各个方面，包括来自整个工艺、职业、传统和社会组织的词汇。这些文本集对于研究历史和文化变迁尤为重要。所有这些问题都需要来自当地文化的详细文件和输入，而本项目将提供这些。