Etyma for 'chicken', 'duck', and 'goose' among language phyla in China and Southeast Asia

This paper considers the history of words for domesticated poultry, including ‘chicken’, ‘goose’, and ‘duck’, in China and mainland Southeast Asia to try to relate associated domestication events with specific language groups. Linguistic, archaeological and historical evidence supports Sinitic as one linguistic source, but in other cases, Tai and Austroasiatic form additional centers of lexical forms which were borrowed by neighboring phyla. It is hypothesized that these geographic regions of etyma for domesticated birds may represent instances of bird domestication, or possibly advances in bird husbandry, by speech communities in the region in the Neolithic Era, followed by spread of both words and cultural practices

Notes on grammatical vocabulary in Central Vietnamese

This study focuses on grammatical vocabulary in Central Vietnamese2 (CV, hereafter) with the goal of exploring historical-linguistic developments in Vietnamese in general.One purpose of focusing on grammatical vocabulary is to provide a sample of how this type of vocabulary can innovate over time in different dialectal regions. For research on Central Vietnamese in particular, this focus also allows some identification of historical patterns of lexical preservations (e.g., forms shared with other Vietic languages), innovations or general variation, and the effects of language contact. While CV is quite obviously Vietnamese, there are a number of distinctive traits in its grammatical vocabulary which highlight some of the differentiation over time between CV and standard Vietnamese3 (StV, hereafter). In a number of instances, data suggests reconstructability at the level of Proto-Việt-Mường or even Proto-Vietic forms. These historical points are dealt with throughout this paper and summarized in the conclusion.Australian National Universit

Sino-Vietnamese grammatical vocabulary and sociolinguistic conditions for borrowing

Vietnamese has been demonstrated to be a Mon-Khmer Austroasiatic language (Haudricourt 1954, Shorto 2006), albeit one which differs substantially from the typical Austroasiatic phonological template (Alves 2001). Some of that linguistic transformation was most likely due in part to language contact with Chinese, primarily through the massive lexical borrowing that took place over the past two millennia. However, the question of the sociolinguistic conditions under which this borrowing occurred over this large period of time has nevertheless been little described. The main purpose of this paper is to consider the borrowing of grammatical vocabulary in particular from Chinese into Vietnamese to exemplify the long-term Sino-Vietnamese language contact. This requires an exploration of the socio-historical context in which the elements of Chinese came into Vietnamese and a sorting out of the spoken versus literary means of transmission of linguistic borrowing. This case study in the borrowing of grammatical vocabulary sheds light on the issues of language contact and linguistic borrowing when a prestigious written language is accessible to a linguistic community

Review of Dictionary of Kammu of Yùan Language and Culture, by Jan-Olof Svantesson, Kàm (Damrong Tayanin) Ràw, Kristina Lindell, and Håkan Lundström

The Dictionary of Kammu of Yùan Language and Culture (Kopenhagen: NIAS Press 2014. XXXVI, 462 S. m. Abb. 4°. Hartbd. ISBN 978-87-7694-116-1) is a pleasingly decorated, large (roughly size A paper), tan, hard-cover reference with clear black print inside but also with numerous vivid drawings referring to lexical entries exemplifying aspects of Kammu culture. A majority of the 700,000 speakers of the Austroasiatic Kammu (also spelled ‘Khmu’) language live in Laos but also nearby areas of China, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam. However, as the authors state, 'This dictionary records the Yùan dialect of Kammu, spoken in the southern part of Luang Namtha Province in northern Laos.

Three Applications of Automated Test Assembly within a User-Friendly Modeling Environment

While linear programming is a common tool in business and industry, there have not been many applications in educational assessment and only a handful of individuals have been actively involved in conducting psychometric research in this area. Perhaps this is due, at least in part, to the complexity of existing software packages. This article presents three applications of linear programming to automate test assembly using an add-in to Microsoft Excel 2007. These increasingly complex examples permit the reader to readily see and manipulate the programming objectives and constraints within a familiar modeling environment. A spreadsheet used in this demonstration is available for downloading. Accessed 12,243 times on https://pareonline.net from June 21, 2009 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right

Informal learning recognition through a cloud ecosystem

Learning and teaching processes, like all human activities, can be mediated through the use of tools. Information and communication technologies are now widespread within education. Their use in the daily life of teachers and learners affords engagement with educational activities at any place and time and not necessarily linked to an institution or a certificate. In the absence of formal certification, learning under these circumstances is known as informal learning. Despite the lack of certification, learning with technology in this way presents opportunities to gather information about and present new ways of exploiting an individual’s learning. Cloud technologies provide ways to achieve this through new architectures, methodologies, and workflows that facilitate semantic tagging, recognition, and acknowledgment of informal learning activities. The transparency and accessibility of cloud services mean that institutions and learners can exploit existing knowledge to their mutual benefit. The TRAILER project facilitates this aim by providing a technological framework using cloud services, a workflow, and a methodology. The services facilitate the exchange of information and knowledge associated with informal learning activities ranging from the use of social software through widgets, computer gaming, and remote laboratory experiments. Data from these activities are shared among institutions, learners, and workers. The project demonstrates the possibility of gathering information related to informal learning activities independently of the context or tools used to carry them out

The Shape and Scale of Galactic Rotation from Cepheid Kinematics

A catalog of Cepheid variables is used to probe the kinematics of the Galactic disk. Radial velocities are measured for eight distant Cepheids toward l = 300; these new Cepheids provide a particularly good constraint on the distance to the Galactic center, R_0. We model the disk with both an axisymmetric rotation curve and one with a weak elliptical component, and find evidence for an ellipticity of 0.043 +/- 0.016 near the Sun. Using these models, we derive R_0 = 7.66 +/- 0.32 kpc and v_circ = 237 +/- 12 km/s. The distance to the Galactic center agrees well with recent determinations from the distribution of RR Lyrae variables, and disfavors most models with large ellipticities at the solar orbit.Comment: 36 pages, LaTeX, 10 figure

Production Systems to Integrate Livestock Grazing and Grain Production in Southern Brazil and Midwestern USA

Agriculture in the USA and Brazil has undergone similar and dramatic changes in the past 20 years. In both countries, production systems have become increasingly specialized. Large farms are characterized by single enterprises, simple crop rotations, and livestock production is segregated from grain production. The lack of diversification and high production costs expose producers to risk from economic swings of single enterprises and greater reliance on pesticides and synthetic fertilizers to maintain profitability, along with greater risk of soil erosion from continuous row crop production. Scientists in southern Brazil and Ohio are collaborating to develop no-tillage systems that integrate livestock grazing with cash grain production. The goal is diversified production systems that are profitable as well as biologically and environmentally sound