Narrator as Interpreter: Stability and Variation in Hausa Tales.

The aim of this thesis is to show how the narrator of Hausa tales is able to maintain and render the stable elements in any particular tale while at the same time making use of a number of dimensions of variability to interpret the tale in an original or different way. This combination of fixity and flexibility ensures that story-telling remains relevant to everyday Hausa life in spite of the disapproval of many Muslim scholars and the growth of alternative means of communication and entertainment. The introduction reviews previous work on the subject, outlines the approach adopted in this thesis and discusses the background of the five principal informants used for this study. Chapter Two examines the factors that militate against and those that promote the telling of tatsuniya. Dominant attitudes to the telling' of traditional tales are discussed representing the views of the malamai, the colonial administration and the proponents of Hausa cultural revivalism. Chapter Three identifies and groups the major recurrent themes from among a corpus of 150 tales. The thematic categories are moral categories relating to such notions as fair and unfair treatment of one person by another or the expression of certain general moral virtues highly esteemed in Hausa society. Chapter Four groups tatsuniya on the basis of plot structure. Three structural categories represent alternative patterns in the deployment of episodes which are seen as discrete transitions from statement of a problem to its resolution. Chapter Five illustrates variability and stability in the rendering of a number of versions of the same story. Four pairs of stories are examined in detail having been selected to represent the thematic and structural categories outlined in Chapters 3 and 4. The extent of the narrator's freedom and constraints upon it are highlighted. Chapter Six examines the narrative performance techniques of three representative narrators. Variations in manner of description, use of song and use of specialized vocabulary are discussed. Account is taken of the particular strengths of individual performances and their strategies for ensuring audience enjoyment of their rendering of a well-known story. Appendix I contains the full list of stories marked for thematic and structural categories. Appendix II contains the Hausa texts and English translations of the stories discussed in the body of the thesis

Online Bibliography of Chadic and Hausa Linguistics

The Online Bibliography of Chadic and Hausa Linguistics (OBCHL), henceforth the ‘biblio’, is an updated, expanded, and corrected edition of the bibliography published some fifteen years ago by Rüdiger Köppe Verlag (Newman 1996). That biblio was built on valuable earlier works including Hair (1967), Newman (1971), Baldi (1977), R. M. Newman (1979), Awde (1988), and Barreteau (1993). The ensuing years have witnessed an outpouring of new publications on Chadic and Hausa, written by scholars from around the globe, thereby creating the need for a new, up-to-date bibliography. Data gathered for this online edition, which was compiled using EndNote, an excellent and easy to use bibliographic database program, have come from my own library and internet searches as well as from a variety of published sources. Particularly valuable have been the reviews of the earlier bibliography, most notably the detailed review article by Baldi (1997), the Hausa and Chadic entries in the annual Bibliographie Linguistique, compiled over the past dozen years by Dr. Joe McIntyre, and the very useful list of publications found regularly in Méga-Tchad. A subsequent third edition of this work can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/2022/20576

Comprehensive Bibliography of Chadic and Hausa Linguistics, Third Edition

The Comprehensive Bibliography of Chadic and Hausa Linguistics is an updated, expanded, and corrected edition of the print book published some twenty years ago by Rüdiger Köppe Verlag (Newman 1996). The outpouring of new publications on Chadic and Hausa in the ensuing years created the need for an updated bibliography. The first edition of this online bibliography was published in 2012 at Bayreuth University, the second edition in 2013 at Indiana University (http://hdl.handle.net/2022/16600), and the current third edition in 2015, also at Indiana University. This comprehensive bibliography covers all works written on Chadic and Hausa languages and linguistics dating from 1790 to the present. In addition to published books and articles, the bibliography includes unpublished Ph.D. dissertations and master's theses. The bibliography is international in scope and covers works regardless of the language in which they were written. For example, there are close to a hundred works written in Hausa. Titles of works in languages other than English, French, or German are accompanied by English translations. Russian titles in Cyrillic script are transliterated into Roman script. Book reviews are listed under the entry for the book being reviewed. A new feature of this 3rd edition is the addition of a Book Review Author Index, which indicates all the books that any individual has reviewed. Finally, the bibliography contains a section consisting of obituaries, (auto-) biographical essays, and related works on major scholars, now deceased, who have contributed significantly to Chadic or Hausa linguistics

Proportional Integral Differential (PID) Controller

Piezoelectric ceramics are used in many areas of applications. One of such areas of applications is in controlling electronic devices for accuracy and improved precision. Piezoelectric ceramics however have the problem of inherent high resonance frequency resulting in the piezoelectric ceramic suffering from hysteresis and delay in response to input parameters. PID controllers have been used in providing improved control and response to the piezoelectric ceramic so as to overcome the problem of hysteresis as well as the inherent high resonance frequency and slow response of the piezoelectric ceramic. However, PID controllers have the problem of overshoot as a result of sub-optimal selection of PID tuning parameters. PID controllers also take a long time in adjusting to changes due to error. This paper presents a firefly algorithm based PID controller (F-PID) for minimizing the effect of hysteresis in piezoelectric ceramics and also improving the response of the PID controller