French

Book review: Before the Linguistics Wars, was there peace? An edition of the correspondence between Hugo Schuchardt (linguist) and Gaston Paris (philologist)

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Maanen i min kuffert

Perhaps, dear reader, you are at a linguistics department, while your friend – studying very similar courses at a different university – is in a philology department. Some departments used to call themselves one way but later renamed themselves, such as Harvard’s Department of Linguistics, originally Comparative Philology. What differences are there and why does the name seem to matter? A highly readable and enjoyable article containing both qualitative and quantitative data tackled this issue over three decades ago – Margaret Winters & Geoffrey Nathan’s 1992 “First he called her a philologist and then she insulted him” (a worthwhile longer account can be found in Momma 2012).

And a likewise highly readable and enjoyable book has existed since … ↪

Lingua Franca: Elusive contact language of Christian slave colony based in Algiers finally pinned down

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Not long ago, I wrote a review on Lingoblog.dk, discussing Nolan’s (2020) book The Elusive case of Lingua Franca. That book was an open-ended study akin to an enchanting yet frustrating detective novel, in search of the famous contact language of the Mediterranean. It discusses the difficulties in tracing that famous ‘mixture of all languages, by means of which we can all understand one another’, ‘that all over Barbary and even in Constantinople is the medium between captives and Moors, and is neither Morisco nor Castilian, nor of any other nation’, as Miguel de Cervantes describes in Chapter XLI of the Don Quixote, most probably, the “Lingua Franca”.

Cervantes wrote the masterpiece of Don Quixote … ↪

A French-Canadian Métis historian in a bilingual country

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Olive Dickason Cover Final 1mb rgb

Many months ago, colleague Peter Bakker asked me to review a new book called “Changing Canadian History: The Life and Works of Olive Patricia Dickason”. Peter and I were originally under the impression that Dr. Dickason had done some scholarship on indigenous languages of Canada, but it turns out that her focus was purely on history. Although initially disappointed to have agreed to review a book with little relation to languages and linguistics, I feel differently now after having read the biography. Olive Dickason’s contributions to reconceptualising Canadian history and recognition of indigenous people in Canada is important and worthy of sharing with Lingoblog readers.

Olive Dickason (1924-1989) was a celebrated Canadian historian best known for her groundbreaking work on
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Mbessa: The Cameroonian language that refused to be swallowed by Kom

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Africa Map Cameroon
Mbessa (Mbesa) is a kingdom of over 25,000 people in the Anglophone Northwest Region of Cameroon. Mbessa, like the hundreds of other kingdoms in the grassfields of the Northwest Region, is actually called a Fondom and it is headed by a powerful traditional authority called the Fon, and specifically called Foyn in the Mbessa language. It should therefore be understood that Fondom equals kingdom while Fon or Foyn equals king.

The kingdom of Mbessa was founded in the 18th century (circa 1772) by an exiled Nkar man called Tfukenu and a self-exiled Oku prince called Nsuung Nyiete (Mala 2013). Geographically, Mbessa is located between Akeh, Din, Kom and Oku, all of which are neighbouring Fondoms.

Mbessa is found in a

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