morphology Archives

The Hand that Feeds

Food plays a major part in shaping human–animal relations, from nurturing farm and zoo animals to bringing wild birds into suburban gardens. Food-mediated interactions create personal interspecies bonds, enrich and alter environments, change species distributions, enable new relationships and reconfigure social perspectives, but also lead to many concerns over health and disease, for example, as well as conflicts over spaces and resources. However, previous attention has almost exclusively focused on the purpose-driven, utilitarian and economic aspects of feeding, rather than the affective and emotional encounters that motivate many feeding practices.

Presenting new research and interdisciplinary case studies, The Hand that Feeds considers animal feeding from historic to modern times. The volume explores the nuances and complexity of non-utilitarian feeding relationships, across urban and rural divides, in the wild, on the farm, at the zoo and in the garden, and how our feeding relationships have altered animal distributions and behaviours. The authors scrutinise contrasts between which species are promoted and which are persecuted, and how the species we choose to feed reflects broader world views and cultural values. Ultimately, this volume engages in the discussion of how we feed, why we feed, which animals we deem worthy of feeding and the widespread impacts of feeding relations.

A Grammar of Khowar

This book is the first full-length English-language grammar of Khowar, one of the Far Northwestern Indo-Aryan languages. It reflects more than 30 years of field research by the author, and attempts to capture a snapshot of the language at the end of the twentieth century, a time when this and other small mountain languages in northern Pakistan were undergoing rapid change, the pace of which continues to accelerate.

An introductory chapter presents the language in its genetic, geographical, and typological contexts, and its multi-layered lexicon. There follow chapters on phonology, word formation and derivational morphology, nominal morphology, deictic elements, the verbal system, adjectival modification, adverbial modification, morphosyntax, and morphosemantics. This final chapter is a distillation of features of the language that are central to understanding how it conceives of and portrays the world.

In addition to grammatical analysis and discussion, A Grammar of Khowar features numerous original example sentences, mostly contributed by senior, highly competent speakers of the language. A significant number of examples are drawn from oral texts recorded by the author in several villages. They are presented in roman representation and are accompanied by a complete morphological analysis and English translation.

Additionally, an Appendix contains a 30-page sample text, presented first in Khowar’s Perso-Arabic script then by roman-based morphological analysis and an English translation by the author.

A Grammar of Akajeru

A Grammar of Akajeru describes aspects of the grammatical system and lexicon of Akajeru, a traditional dialect of the North Andamanese language, as it was reportedly used around the beginning of the twentieth century. It is based primarily on the fragments of this variety provided by the British anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown and scattered among the published results of his anthropological research carried out on the islands between 1906 and 1908. These are supplemented by published lists of 46 anatomical terms and 28 toponyms collected by Edward Horace Man, Officer in Charge of the Andamanese 1875–79.

The book provides a linguistic analysis of all the extant Akajeru material, plus items identified by Radcliffe-Brown as ‘North Andaman’ without further specification, his few records of Akabo and Akakhora and Man’s few records of Akakhora, which together constitute all the documentation of these other traditional North Andamanese dialects. It includes a grammatical sketch of Akajeru, a list of all the words that were recorded, together with an English-Akajeru finder list, and a comparison between Akajeru and Present-day Andamanese, an Akajeru-based variety with elements from all the other traditional dialects of North Andamanese that is today remembered by only three people.