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A Minority South Ryukyuan Language of the Miyako Islands
Spoken on Kurima, a miniscule island in the Miyakojima municipality in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, Kurima-Miyako is a South Ryukyuan topolect, a regional variant of the Miyako language. With most fluent speakers aged 80 or older and the island’s depopulation progressing, the topolect of Kurima faces imminent extinction, a reflection of a common pattern in the Ryukyus, whereupon the vernaculars of small islands and isolated remote areas have been facing multifold minorization for decades on the part of the dominant variety/varieties of the area (Shimoji and Hirara in the case of Kurima), Okinawan, and standard Japanese. Responding to the urgent task of producing a comprehensive description while it still has native speakers, the present volume is the first ever attempt at a systemic presentation of the Kurima topolect in any language. It also uses comparative evidence from Ryukyuan and Mainland Japonic languages to provide new proto-language reconstructions and offer insights into the history of Japonic languages.
The development of the prosodic system from Indo-European to Balto-Slavic is dominated by two major innovations: the rise of mobility and the rise of acuteness. This book provides a new account of the latter. It stands out from previous works for being informed by recent advances in phonological typology and tonogenesis and, especially, for its comprehensiveness. All matters related to the rise of acuteness are treated in detail. As a result, the book includes new insights on several issues of Balto-Slavic historical phonology and morphology as well.
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At the intersection of Jewish studies and linguistic research, the essays assembled in this book approach the topic of the languages of Sephardic Jews from different perspectives, spanning chronologically from the Middle Ages to the present day. Drawing on diverse sources – from medical glossaries to inquisition archives, from rabbinic responsa to recordings of today's speakers – the scholars collaborating on this project have endeavoured to reconstruct fragments of a complex and elusive linguistic reality, which over the centuries has been shaped by the historical experience of its speakers. An innovative collection of rigorously conducted synchronic and diachronic studies that contributes to expanding our knowledge and opening new perspectives on crucial issues, such as the effects of contact on the linguistic structures, the possibility of a norm for polycentric languages, the relationship between the lexicon of a language and the vitality of its speech community.
This book is an account of the variation between two possessive constructions in Danish and Swedish: the s-genitive (husets tak ‘the house’s roof’), and the prepositional construction (taket på huset ‘the roof of the house’). Present-day corpus data, as well as historical data (texts from 1250–1550) are explored. Through statistical and qualitative analysis, various factors that influence the choice between the two constructions are identified. The book offers new data on the genitive variation in Danish and Swedish. The approach is also novel as two closely related Scandinavian languages are compared from both a historical and a contemporary perspective.