Cultural contact and change in naming practices among the Aari of southwest Ethiopia
When people of different cultures interact, a degree of linguistic and/or cultural adaptation is expected. This paper examines the implication of the relationship between the Aari and the Gama for the naming practices of the former. The Aari people, who speak Araf, came into contact with Amharic-speaking migrants from central and northern Ethiopia (collectively called the Gama) during the southward expansion of Emperor Menelik in the late nineteenth century. Traditionally, the Aari people used names to express their collective history, shared life experiences, major events, and their environment. The incorporation of Aariland into the Ethiopian empire led to economic, political, and cultural domination as well as resistance on the part of the Aari. Personal names that characterize the period of struggle against the dominant migrants became common until the 1974 revolution that ended the Gama hegemony. Afterwards, however, the naming tradition suffered a setback as evidenced in the decline of Aari personal names in favour of Amhara names and the alteration of the spelling and pronunciation of Aari names. The new changes in naming practices compromised the role of the Aari language as an expression of culture and a marker of identity.
The structure of Ibibio death prevention names
This paper examines death prevention names among the Ibibio in South-eastern Nigeria, from their structural perspectives. Ibibio death prevention names can generate and maintain some level of assurance and security that is vital for a child’s survival, given the implicit assumption that spiritual forces of some kind are at work. These names are believed to link their bearers to their past, ancestors and spirituality. This paper argues that these names represent enriching morphosyntactic properties that provide a window to the grammatical description of the Ibibio language. Their syntax is not constrained to a limited set of structures, thus they are structurally versatile and open ended, representing the various types and functions of sentences in the Ibibio language. The paper concludes with the claim that, in addition to the referential contents and metaphysical presuppositions of these names, they have other formal structural properties that distinguish them from ordinary Ibibio names.
The first ground cricket (Orthoptera: Trigonidiidae: Nemobiinae) from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber
Abstract A new genus and species, Birmaninemobius hirsutus gen. et sp. nov., is described on the basis of a well-preserved orthopteran specimen in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber and attributed to the subfamily Nemobiinae (ground crickets) of the family Trigonidiidae (Grylloidea). As the first record of Nemobiinae from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber, this new taxon not only provides novel morphological diversity in ground crickets but also indicates that the ground crickets lived in Burma (Tethyan islands) as early as the mid-Cretaceous.