and others, the primary goal in the study of partial reduplication has been to construct a theory that insightfully captures the full range of considerations that speakers may invoke in determining how a reduplicant will relate to its base. Given that both phonology and morphology are potentially involved, this has meant two things. First, there has been an attempt to characterize the reduplica...

Abstract In this paper we present a new, lexicon-based phylogeny of 34 Southern Bantu languages, and combine it with previous insights from linguistics, archaeology, genetics to study the history languages their speakers. Our shows all derive single, direct ancestor, which contrasts archaeological evidence indicating separate migrations speakers into southern Africa. This suggests that spoken b...

DOI: 10.5581/1516-8484.20130019 Sickle cell anemia (SCA) is defined as a monogenic disease that characterizes the homozygous state of hemoglobin S (Hb S). Hemoglobin S polymerizes under adverse conditions such as deoxygenation, acidosis or dehydration. Its polymers deform erythrocytes and lead to a diverse and complex pathophysiology(1,2). Beta-S globin haplotypes (βS haplotypes) are important ...

This paper submits the results of an acoustic study of segmental duration in verbs in Lusaamia, a Bantu language spoken in Western Kenya and Eastern Uganda that is characterized by phonemic vowel length distinctions and compensatory lengthening before prenasalized stops (NC). The present study establishes and compares mean durations of lexically short vowels, lexically long vowels and pre-NC vo...

The language isiZulu belongs to the Nguni group of languages, which also include isiXhosa, isiNdebele and siSwati. Of the four Nguni languages, isiZulu is the most dominant language in South Africa, which is spoken by 22.7% of the country’s 51.8 million population. However, isiZulu (and even more so the other Nguni languages) still remains an under-resourced language for software applications. ...

Languages, like genes, evolve by a process of descent with modification. This striking similarity between biological and linguistic evolution allows us to apply phylogenetic methods to explore how languages, as well as the people who speak them, are related to one another through evolutionary history. Language phylogenies constructed with lexical data have so far revealed population expansions ...

There is cross-linguistic variation in the choice of the verbal copula used to express the HAVE relation. Many languages use be instead of have. For example, Turkish and Latin use be systematically and most other languages (including English) do so at least in certain constructions. There are also languages where a copula is not required (some Bantu languages, Malagasy for certain constructions...

In this paper, we present an analysis of the tone system of Tiriki, a Bantu language spoken in Kenya and previously undescribed in the linguistic literature. We focus on downstep, a complex phenomenon that arises in a number of different and interesting ways in this language. We claim that tone in Tiriki is best analyzed in a model where downstep is represented phonologically by a floating low ...