In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure. Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first “insider’s” view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history. With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera’s Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.

The first global history of African linguistics as an emerging autonomous academic discipline, covering Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.

This book provides an overview of a recent and flexible approach to speech synthesis design to develop the first statistical parametric speech synthesizer for Ibibio, a West African tonal language. The design precludes the inflexibility encountered when modeling tonal features of the language and can be used for other tonal African languages. Mobile use and technological innovations in developing African nations have exploded. With mobile technology, many of the barriers caused by infrastructure issues have vanished. In order to address issues that are unique to African tonal languages, the book uses Ibibio as a model. The text reviews the language's speech characteristics, required for building the front end components of the design and propose a finite state transducer (FST), useful for modelling the language’s tonetactics. The statistical parametric approach discussed in the text, implements the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) technique, with the goal of creating a generic structure that learns the model from the text itself, and uses the data-driven approach to input specification.

The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.

This dictionary covers marketing communications in the broadest sense, including advertising, but also extending to public relations which concerns many organizations not involved in marketing and which have little to do with advertising. Entries have been gathered from around the world, and this dictionary will therefore be valuable to those operating in an international environ ment where different term~, or terms with different spellings, are used. There are also terms with different meanings, depending on their country of origin. For example, in the UK newspapers are called press media, while in the USA the term print media is more usual. In the UK, print usually applies to printed items, such as sales or edu!;;ational literature. Likewise, there are big differences between European and American broadcasting systems, and sponsored radio or TV can mean different things around the world. Outdoor advertising also has different terminology in different countries, especially in North America and the UK. In many cases, alternative British and American terms are given, while some are either European or American. Some terminology is specific to a certain country. Entries have been collected from all parts of the world, including the oramedia or folk media of the Third World. Financial terms have been included because of their increasing im portance in advertising and public relations, and the dictionary reflects the increasing relevance of satellites and computers.