Mapping from Statistical to Biological Proximity

We verify whether the proximity claimed by state-of-the-art statistical similarity measures are indeed biologically appropriate or not. We present some analytical results on it

Some Introductory Notes on the Development and Characteristics of Sabah Malay

This is a preliminary description of the Malay variety used as a lingua franca in the Malaysian state of Sabah at the northernmost top of Borneo. The paper discusses a number of common linguistic features that distinguish Sabah Malay from other Malay varieties and analyses these features from a historical linguistic perspective. While it is argued that Sabah Malay has a close historical relation with other Malay dialects spoken in Borneo, especially Brunei Malay, the vernacular is also influenced phonologically and lexically by Sabah's indigenous and immigrant speech communities. Words and sentences recorded or elicited during fieldwork in various parts of Sabah illustrate these points

Some Introductory Notes on the Development and Characteristics of Sabah Malay

This is a preliminary description of the Malay variety used as a lingua franca in the Malaysian state of Sabah at the northernmost top of Borneo. The paper discusses a number of common linguistic features that distinguish Sabah Malay from other Malay varieties and analyses these features from a historical linguistic perspective. While it is argued that Sabah Malay has a close historical relation with other Malay dialects spoken in Borneo, especially Brunei Malay, the vernacular is also influenced phonologically and lexically by Sabah\u27s indigenous and immigrant speech communities. Words and sentences recorded or elicited during fieldwork in various parts of Sabah illustrate these points

A Grammar of Papuan Malay

This book presents an in-depth linguistic description of one Papuan Malay variety, based on fifteen hours of recordings of spontaneous narratives and conversations between Papuan Malay speakers.‘Papuan Malay’ refers to the easternmost varieties of Malay (Austronesian). They are spoken in the coastal areas of West Papua, the western part of the island of New Guinea. The variety described here is spoken along West Papua’s northeast coast.After a general introduction to the language, its setting and its history, this grammar discusses the following topics, building up from smaller grammatical constituents to larger ones: phonology, word formation, noun and prepositional phrases, verbal and nonverbal clauses, non-declarative clauses, and conjunctions and constituent combining. Of special interest to linguists, typologists and Malay specialists are the following in-depth analyses and descriptions: affixation and its productivity across domains of language choice, reduplication and its gesamtbedeutung, personal pronouns and their adnominal uses, demonstratives and locatives and their extended uses, and adnominal possessive relations and their non-canonical uses.This study provides a point of comparison for further studies in other (Papuan) Malay varieties and a starting point for Papuan Malay language development efforts.Language Use in Past and Presen

Constructing Families: Associative Networks in the Seventeenth-century Cases of Mary and Katherine Hampson

Wills and other evidence related to the married Mary Hampson and her sister-in-law the never married Katherine Hampson place each within associative networks and detail their financial and emotional situations throughout their lives. Mary Hampson’s printed autobiography and legal documents detailing years of marital abuse reveal the loss of her small fortune and her financial destitution that contributed to her inability to maintain her familial and class associations. In contrast, her sister-in-law the never married Katherine Hampson died possessed of wealth that increased dramatically under her financial management. Katherine Hampson’s detailed will illustrates a complex associative network that reveals her familial connectedness and emotional well-being throughout her life. The cases of these two women challenge normative conceptions of the relationship between marital status and financial, social, and emotional stability in early modern England

A Description of Ternate Malay

Ternate Malay is a local variety of Malay in Ternate, a small island in the Maluku Utara province in eastern Indonesia. The majority of speakers live in Ternate town, where it serves as mother tongue as well as a means of communication between people of various ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. In the last few decades there is a growing scholarly interest in local Malay varieties, particularly in the eastern part of Indonesia. This article is a short description of Ternate Malay based on the idea that words in Ternate Malay receive their meaning in the combination with other words and that the linguistic context as well as the non-linguistic situation in which they occur, determine the most suitable interpretation of utterances. It is shown how certain words facilitate the determination of the interpretation

Searching for seeds to rest in libraries : European collecting habits towards Malay books and manuscripts in the nineteenth century

European scholars, colonial administrators, missionaries, bibliophiles and others were the main collectors of Malay books in the nineteenth century, both in manuscript or printed form. Among these persons were many well-known names in the field of Malay literature and culture like Raffles, Marsden, Crawfurd, Klinkert, van der Tuuk, von Dewall, Roorda, Favre, Maxwell, Overbeck, Wilkinson and Skeat, to name only a few. Their collections were often handed over to public libraries where they form an important part of the relevant Oriental or Southeast Asian manuscript collections. Therefore the knowledge of the intellectual culture of the Malay Peninsula and the Malay World in general depended very much on these manuscripts and printed books collected often by chance or in a rather unsystematic way. The collections reflect in a strong sense the interests of its administrative or philologist collectors: court histories, genealogies of aristocratic lineages, law collections (adat-istiadat as well as undangundang) or prose belles-lettres build a vast bulk of these collections, while Islamic religious texts and poetry forms popular in the 19th century (especially syair) are fairly underrepresented. Malay manuscripts and books located in religious institutions like mosques or pondok/pesantren schools have not been searched for; until today there are more or less no systematic studies of these collections. As in some statistics religious texts build about 20% of all existing Malay manuscripts, their neglect by Europeans scholars leads to a distorted view of the literary culture in the Malay language