User:Spark9/Language selection

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Pair Selection

I am planning to work with Zach Kelly on Navajo.

Languages of Interest

  1. Twi
  2. Navajo
  3. Tigre

Twi

Morphological Typology

Twi has analytical morphology as it is a tonal language. There is some level of distributed morphology with plural words within Twi, meaning that there are small changes to the word when the word is pluralized. Though Twi is analytical, it does have some inflectional morphology, especially with the use of affixes. There are two types of affixes used: derivational and inflectional. When a derivational affix is added to the root of a word, a new word is formed. Inflectional affixes do not change the word. Instead, they modify the word to change their grammatical components.

About the Language

Twi has about 17-18 million speakers that live in mainly in southern and central Ghana. It is spoken by the Akan people, which is the largest of the 17 ethnic groups in Ghana. Some other languages Twi speakers may know various other dialects, which include the Akan language, Fante, Bono, Asante, and Akuapem. There are many second-language speakers in Ghana, and 80% of the Ghanaian population speaks Twi as their primary or secondary language. They use the writing system called Adinkra Nkyea with consonants and vowels that are dictated tonally. The ISO codes used include: tw and twi .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twi


Availability of Resources

It is very likely that one will find at least a few pages worth of text in Twi. There are translations of the Bible, short excerpts, and other texts that are available online.

Navajo

Morphological Typology

Navajo is a language that consists of many morphological typologies. Navajo has a large inventory of phonemes, including several consonants that are not found in English. It has four basic vowels that can be distinguished for the following three characteristics: nasality, length, and tone. In addition to this, Navajo has both agglutinative and fusional elements. This is because it relies on affixes to modify verbs and the nouns are derived from multiple morphemes. In both cases, these morphemes are created irregularly, and the patterns are not easily recognizable. Navajo also has a high ratio between morphemes and words, and paired with the fact that the majority of words cannot stand alone, Navajo also has polysynthetic morphology.

About the Language

Navajo is spoken by nearly 330,000 native Navajos. It is most widely spoken by Native Americans in the Southwest United States, and is a Southern Athabaskan language of the Na-Dené family. Some other languages that Navajo speakers may be familiar with include Spanish and English, as these are the most common languages spoken in the region. As of now, the transmission to current and future generations is low and the language has struggled to maintain a healthy base of speakers. However, this issue has been solved to some degree through educational programs within Navajo Nation, a Native American territory. Their orthography utilizes Latin, which is used as the Navajo alphabet. In addition to this, Navajo Braille is another name for their orthography. The ISO codes used include: nv and nav.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language

Availability of Resources

It is very likely that one will find at least a few pages worth of text in Navajo. There are translations of the Bible, academic excerpts, and other texts that are available online.

Tigre

Morphological Typology

Tigre is classified as having polysynthetic morphology. This is because there are multiple phonemes of Tigre in addition to the fact that Tigre has a high morpheme-to-word ratio. Interestingly, Tigre has preserved the two pharyngeal consonants of Ge'ez. In addition to this, there are "strong" and "weak-final" verbs in the Tigre language. This actually demonstrates that there is inflection with these verbs, with the use of suffixes.

About the Language

There are about 1 million speakers of Tigre who live mainly in western and northern highlands of Eritrea, as well as the lands adjacent to Sudan. Some other languages that the Tigre people may know include Ge'ez and Tigrinya. as there is high lexical similarity between these languages. Information about the transmission of Tigre to current and future generations is not available, but the orthography of Tigre utilizes the Tigre alphabet as well as the Arabic script. However, since 1889, the Ge'ez script has been used to write the Tigre language. The ISO code used for Tigre is tig.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigre_language https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tigre-language


Availability of Resources

There are very few texts that are available in Tigre. While the Tigre alphabet is available for the public, full texts with complete sentences are not available. However, there are a few religious texts that have been prepared by missionaries, and these are the only documents in the language.