M. Lionel Bender

An argot of Addis Ababa unattached girls

A previously unreported Amharic argot, that of a clique of unattached young women in a bar district of Addis Ababa, is described and traced to its source in a schoolboy argot of some dozen years earlier. The argot rules are simple, ingenious, and effective. A brief comparison is made of this argot and others in terms of social setting and uses. (Amharic, argots, Ethiopia, expressive language, language in context, language play, sociolinguistics)

Numerical Taxonomy: Old Techniques and New Assumptions [and Comments and Reply]

Numerical taxonomists in biology and scholars in other fields interested in similar classification tasks have used varieties of two techniques: hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. They have tended to treat both kinds of techniques as all-purpose tools suited to all kinds of classification problems. Choices among techniques have been made in terms of which best accounted for inputted data matrices rather than with any attention to the formal properties of the techniques or the empirical problems to which they were being applied. Instead, the choice of technique should be based on the assumptions embodied in our theories of the processes that produce the distribution of the items in question. We should seek techniques that are capable of representing the regularities our theories assert to exist and that are immune to likely sources of error.

Proceedings of the 1980 Tel Aviv ethiopianist conference

Goldenberg, Gideon, ed. Ethiopian Studies: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference, Tel‐Aviv, 14–17 April 1980. Boston: A. A. Balkema, 1986. xiii + 530 pp. including chapter references and notes, photographs, and reproductions of texts.

Linguistic concepts : an introduction to tagmemics

54.00 cloth.