Essay: languages as historical archives: implications for agriculture and development.

From: UN Chronicle | Date: December 1, 2003| Author: | Copyright information

In the eighteenth century, the British New World colony of South Carolina prospered from the raising and exporting of rice. What does this have to do with linguistics, agriculture and development in the modern day? The answer is a salutary warning against unexamined assumptions: African agricultural technology created the prosperity of colonial Carolina.

Many centuries before, peoples of the Guinea Coast of Africa evolved a sophisticated and highly efficient technology for growing abundant crops of African rice, Oryza glaberima. Taking advantage of the tidal estuaries of ...

Read all of this article with a FREE trial to HighBeam Research

Related newspaper, magazine, and trade journal articles from HighBeam Research

(Including press releases, facts, information, and biographies)

The language of exclusion and the people of God: a socio-theological look at the question of inclusive language.
; Language is more than a means of communication--a neutral medium...exchange of ideas. It is an integral part of our humanity. Language not only mirrors the ideals, values, and structures of...shaping and preserving these ideals, values, and structures. Language, by its very nature, is a more complex ...
Defining whole language in a postmodern age.
; Can whole language be 'defined' in the true sense of the...Lorraine Wilson believes that while whole language can never be 'defined' in the sense suggested...article she describes how a group of whole language advocates set about defining what whole...
Reflections on Language.(Review)
; Reflections on Language. Ed. by STUART HIRSCHBERG and TERRY...All undergraduate students of Modern Languages or English should follow a course that...them to the nature and functions of language, but it is not an easy task to find...
The language of invitation.(Essay)
; Language empowers and kills. Verbal language, with its attendant body language, can affirm, offer love, do ministry, and seek justice. Verbal and body language can likewise assault, maim, harm, and kill. Language is essential in everything that we...
Words that express our realities deserve to be praised, preserved. (variants in language)(Column)
; Language. Mother tongue. Without an event that jars our sense of...lifetime honing. As a poet, I am particularly concerned with language. I listen carefully, sift intentionally, working always...children in Spanish and written several books in that language, I've been surprised that my poetry has always ...
Will S. African Language Go Way of Apartheid?
; The Afrikaans language survived British colonization. It seems...Afrikaners are these days about their language - an Africanized derivative from Dutch...Dutch - white settlers arrived. The language of their 20th century descendants, as...
Living language:At this conference
; Living language: At this conference, Yiddish is anything...Yiddish, many as their first or only language. Today, linguists believe the number...conference in Milwaukee that theirs is a dying language. "I don't feel I can live a full Jewish...
Spirals to unravel a mystery (part two).(origin of language)
; LANGUAGE AND THE WHEEL ON THE ORIGIN of language there will always remain a range of unanswerable questions. Was language invented extempore, or gradually developed from grunts and screeches, was it born out of pure sound and gradually meaning attached...
Re-visioning gender and language research.
; The area of language and gender has attracted attention from a wide range of...identified as having two broad types of concern - sex bias in language and sex difference in language use (Henley, 1995).(2) Early work on sexism in language...
HUMAN BEHAVIOR AS LANGUAGE: SOME THOUGHTS ON WITTGENSTEIN
; ABSTRACT: Language has been traditionally considered as a special psychological...learning, memory, and thinking. Based on Wittgenstein's notion of language game, I argue that language is not limited to a psychological phenomenon, but rather it...