Epilogue: A Hypothesis on the East Asian Beginnings of the Yersinia pestis Polytomy

The work of Cui et al. (2013)—in both dating the polytomy that produced most existing strains of Yersinia pestis and locating its original home to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau—offers a genetically derived specific historical proposition for historians of East and Central Asia to investigate from their own sources. The present article offers the hypothesis that the polytomy manifests itself in the Mongol invasion of the Xia state in the Gansu corridor in the early thirteenth century and continues in the Mongols’ expansion into China and other parts of Eurasia. The hypothesis relies to a considerable extent on work of Cao Shuji (1995), but argues for a different means and direction for the spread of plague than either Cao or William McNeill have previously posited

Genome Sequence of the Human Abscess Isolate Streptococcus intermedius BA1

Streptococcus intermedius is a human pathogen with a propensity for abscess formation. We report a high-quality draft genome sequence of S. intermedius strain BA1, an isolate from a human epidural abscess. This sequence provides insight into the biology of S. intermedius and will aid investigations of pathogenicity

Overshooting Americanisation. Accent stylisation in pop singing – acoustic properties of the bath and trap vowels in focus

The paper addresses the problem of overshoot involved in singing accent stylisation. Selected phonetic features indexed as “American” and “Cockney” are analysed in the singing and speaking styles of a British vocalist, Adele. Overshoot, understood as a greater frequency or an exaggerated quality of a given feature, is characteristic of staged performance (Bell and Gibson 2011; Coupland 2007). PRAAT is used to establish the acoustic properties (F1 and F2) of the BATH and TRAP vowels, as well as the presence or absence of the BATH-TRAP split. The results show that Americanisation regarding the BATH-TRAP split in singing is present and the Americanised vowel tokens are “overshot”, having higher F2 frequency compared with the regular British TRAP vowel

TMG 1 (2014): Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica Green

The plague organism (Yersinia pestis) killed an estimated 40% to 60% of all people when it spread rapidly through the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe in the fourteenth century: an event known as the Black Death. Previous research has shown, especially for Western Europe, how population losses then led to structural economic, political, and social changes. But why and how did the pandemic happen in the first place? When and where did it begin? How was it sustained? What was its full geographic extent? And when did it really end? Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World is the first book to synthesize the new evidence and research methods that are providing fresh answers to these crucial questions. It was only in 2011, thanks to ancient DNA recovered from remains unearthed in London’s East Smithfield cemetery, that the full genome of the plague pathogen was identified. This single-celled organism probably originated 3000-4000 years ago and has caused three pandemics in recorded history: the Justinianic (or First) Plague Pandemic, around 541-750; the Black Death (Second Plague Pandemic), conventionally dated to the 1340s; and the Third Plague Pandemic, usually dated from around 1894 to the 1930s. This ground-breaking book brings together scholars from the humanities and social and physical sci­ences to address the question of how recent work in genetics, zoology, and epi­de­miology can enable a rethinking of the Black Death\u27s global reach and its larger historical significance. It forms the inaugural double issue of The Medieval Globe, a new journal sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This issue of The Medieval Globe is published with the support of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1000/thumbnail.jp

New speakers: Challenges and opportunities for variationist sociolinguistics

While the field of variationist sociolinguistics has advanced rapidly since Labov (1966), it remains the case that a socially informed theory of language change continues to be influenced by only very few languages, typically English and a handful other dominant European languages. This article considers recent work on the emergence of new speakers in (severely) endangered or minority language communities, and what they might have to offer variationist theory. Although definitions can vary, it has become convention to describe new speakers as individuals ‘with little or no home or community exposure to a minority language but who instead acquire it through immersion or bilingual education programs, revitalization projects or as adult language learners’ (O'Rourke, Pujolar, & Ramallo, 2015: 1). There is now a wealth of literature available on new speakers in typologically dissimilar language contexts, though, so far, very little work has adopted the variationist paradigm. This article will argue that new speakers can figure prominently in variationist models of diffusion and change, taking the classic sociolinguistic factor of social networks as an example. The article ends by proposing a manifesto of potential research trajectories, based on current gaps in the literature

‘I enjoyed it because … you could do whatever you wanted and be creative’: three principles for participatory research and pedagogy

The complexity of many children’s lives can result in their ideas being neither understood nor included in mainstream opportunities for learning, particularly children who are living with disadvantage. With a focus on developing ethical and inclusive principles for participatory research and pedagogy, this paper reports on a pilot project where we worked with young, hard-to-reach individuals across four sites in England to enable them to design and carry out research about their experiences and views of disadvantage. Here, we present snapshots of the young participants’ choices of research topics and methods, which reflected their own lives and interests, and led to powerful visualizations of the complexity of child and youth disadvantage. Reflecting back on the project, we discuss effective ways to initiate and sustain participatory research that can enable young researchers to be involved as active and empowered agents at every stage of the research process. We also consider the implications for developing participatory pedagogy, with researchers working alongside educators to create school cultures that foster belonging and genuinely support all students’ expertise and ways of knowing by looking beyond the school buildings and into their lives in the wider community

Laughing when you shouldn't Being "good" among the Batek of Peninsular Malaysia

Batek people describe their many laughter taboos with utmost seriousness, and in ethical terms of good and bad. Despite this, people often get it wrong—sometimes laughing all the more when the taboos forbid it. Because laughter can be ambiguous and impossible to control, being wrong can be accepted without the need for discussion or reflection. People thus act autonomously while holding deeply shared ethical orientations. Here, ethics can be both culturally predefined and shaped by individuals, as when it comes to laughter people draw on individual and shared concerns in an ad hoc, flexible manner. Laughter's tangled contradictions thus demonstrate that people's understandings of being “good” are mutually implicated with their understandings of what it means to be a person in relation to others

Language endangerment and language documentation in Africa

Non peer reviewe