Yoruba1 Proverbs is the most comprehensive collection to
date of more than five thousand Yoruban proverbs that showcase Yoruba
oral tradition. Following Oyekan Owomoyela’s introduction, which
provides a framework and description of Yoruba cultural beliefs, the
proverbs are arranged by theme into five sections: the good person; the
fortunate person (or the good life); relationships; human nature;
rights and responsibilities; and truisms. Each proverb is presented in
Yoruba with a literal English translation, followed by a brief
commentary explaining the meaning of the proverb within the oral
tradition.
This definitive source book on Yoruba
proverbs is the first to give such detailed, systematic classification
and analysis alongside a careful assessment of the risks and pitfalls
of submitting this genre to the canons of literary analysis.
1 The Yoruba (Yorùbá in Yoruba orthography) are a large ethno-linguistic group or ethnic nation in Africa; the majority of them speak the Yoruba language (èdèe Yorùbá; èdè = language). The Yoruba constitute approximately 21 percent of Nigeria's total population, and around 30 million individuals throughout the region of West Africa.
Working with Spoken Discourse provides a comprehensive account of the expanding multidisciplinary field of discourse analysis. Combining theory and practice it covers a wide range of material in a lively and accessible style. It discusses current approaches, concepts and debates in the field of spoken discourse and provides a grounding in the practical techniques of discourse analysis and how to apply them to real data. Working with Spoken Discourse is divided into three sections.
The overall aim of the book is to provide an integrated view of the separate stages of the speech chain, covering the production process, speech data analysis, and speech perception. Analyses of information bearing elements of the speech signal have found applications in linguistic theory and in the knowledge base of speech technology with special reference to speech synthesis.
The book contains 19 selected articles organized in 6 chapters: Speech research overview with a historical outline, Speech production and synthesis, The voice source, Speech analysis and features, Speech perception, Prosody. Each chapter is preceded by an introduction including suggestions for additional reading. A list of all the authors publications since 1945 is included. It is supplemented by an ordering in categories. The articles have been selected to ensure representative coverage of the field. Some of them, primarily those on speech acoustics and the human voice source, have been previously published. During the last 15 years, a major emphasis has been on speech prosody with several novel approaches. A recent major article provides a broad frame starting with aerodynamics and voice source properties, leading up to intonation analysis, prosodic grouping, and rules for text-to-speech synthesis. These are illustrated in an audio file. A novel feature introduced in analysis as well as synthesis is a parameter of perceived syllable and word prominence with acoustical correlates and ties to lexical categories. The author was involved in early developments of distinctive feature theory together with Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. Applications to Swedish are contained in the book. A major issue in current phonology and phonetics has been the search for absolute invariance of speech features. However, with the growing insight into contextual variability, this remains a pseudo problem. In order to approach the essence of the speech code, we need to structure variability with respect to all possible contextual factors. As claimed by the author, this is not only a requirement for a sound development of general phonetics and phonology. It is also a prerequisite for realizing advanced aims of speech technology. Computer power cannot substitute fundamental knowledge of the human speech communication process. The book should accordingly be of interest for several disciplines, not only speech technology, linguistics, phonetics, and acoustics, but also for psychology and physiology of speech and hearing with applications in medical science.
