网范文：“Revival of mother-tongue literacy” 联邦大学的喀麦隆提出了一个统一的字母表，英语论文，在雅温得的正字法会议,一个著名的耶稣会在杜阿拉中学。自1960年代末以来,英航组织年度研究会对于土著语言，研究会的主要目的是培养中小学教师,使用特定语言的语音字母表的转录探讨。几乎没有收集对于这些会议的信息，除了重要的论文之外。这是一个令人畏惧的挑战关于母语教育来说。
在早期,在政治层面,他们试图说服执政UNC(喀麦隆国家联盟):“如果UNC真的想成为群众的党,它必须被人民接受。在教育方面,他们指出,政府重视农村教育的创始人,非英语环境的孩子应当考虑。下面的范文进行论述。
Abstract
Henri Bot Ba Njock was head of the linguistics department at the then Federal University of Cameroon and former student of the eminent French linguist André Martinet. He had proposed a unified alphabet for the languages of central Africa at the USCO-sponsored conference on orthography in Yaoundé in 1970 (Tadadjeu (1975: 61); Baker et al. (1982: 26)). François de Gastines was a French Jesuit priest at Collège Libermann, a prestigious Jesuit secondary school in Douala. Since the late 1960s, Bot Ba Njock and de Gastines organized annual workshops on indigenous languages at the Federal University and at Collège Libermann. “The main purpose of the workshops was to train secondary and primary school teachers, as well as other well-motivated individuals, to use the phonemic alphabet for the transcription of the specific languages studied” (Tadadjeu, 1975: 61).
Little information is available about these meetings except for the important collection of s that came out of the 1974 meeting (de Gastines, 1974). It was a daunting challenge to make the case for mother tongue education, as evidenced by the careful strategizing which had begun by the group. In the early days, members of the group placed themselves at personal risk, given the inherent dangers of encouraging tribal languages. At the political level, they sought to persuade the governing UNC (Cameroon National Union) that: “if the UNC really wants to be a party of the masses, it must reach the masses. And for that, there are no options but for the party to speak the [indigenous] languages spoken by Cameroonians” (Bot Ba Njock et al., 1974: 126f). In education, they pointed out that the government’s emphasis on rural education could founder, since it had not taken the non-French, non-English environment of the child into consideration. Primary school children were deserting school in droves, partly because the teaching was not adapted to their needs, and subjected them to “psychological and cultural trauma” (Bot Ba Njock, 1966: 7). In the socio-economic arena, they argued that the people needed to be informed about health, agriculture and tourism for the greater interests of the country, and this could only be done effectively using indigenous languages. The conclusion, while apologetic, linked language development to national unity: Cameroonian languages can, despite what one might think, contribute to the harmonious development of our country and to national unity. (Bot Ba Njock et al., 1974: 128)
From this point on, linguistic arguments for language development and for orthography creation and change had a rhetorical element which indirectly referenced national or African identity. Similar situations are found elsewhere. Mary Beavon (pers. comm. 1996), an SIL linguist in southeast Cameroon, recounts that Bot Ba Njock told villagers in the Nzime language area that they should not consider themselves to be true Cameroonians unless they write using tone marks, since these are distinctively Cameroonian whereas writing without tone marks is European. This gives us a key insight to the first question that was posed at the outset. Although established on linguistic principles, tone marking owed its continued existence primarily to nationalism and scientism. For many languages, no one checked to see that tone marking actually helped reading and writing fluency and comprehension. There was no obvious reason to do so. Parallel cases abound; e.g., Hornberger s the 3-vowel versus 5-vowel controversy for Quechua in Peru: The Peruvian linguists’ defense of Quechua includes vigilance for its purity from the influence of Spanish. They argue that writing Quechua with five vowels imposes Spanish conventions on Quechua and makes Quechua subservient to Spanish, which they view as another form of colonialism. (Hornberger, 1995: 198)
Another situation is the tone and vowel-length marking in Navajo, where Fishman observes that “such insertions may, therefore, come to have a certain authenticity appeal which can be ideologically activated and cultivated” (Fishman, 1988: 275). Many parallel situations may be found. An early example, dating from the fourteenth century, is the Abur alphabet devised by St. Stefan of Perm. This alphabet was based on the Greek and Church Slavonic alphabets, but St. Stefan “deliberately made the forms of the letters sufficiently different from either so that the Komi could regard the writing system as distinctively theirs and not an alphabet for another language” (Ferguson, 1967: 206). The logistical problem of choosing which languages to develop first, given limited resources, promised to wreak havoc. The process of choosing one language in preference to another would surely amount to tribalism. Here “linguistic science” promised some easy answers: Before resolving the problem, it is important to remember that linguistics is a science, and as such it wants to be objective. Linguistics is founded on impartial observations and the facts of language. It is not prescriptive or normative and its principles are neither aesthetic or moral. ... The choice between languages must operate on objective criteria, on a purely scientific basis. (Bot Ba Njock et al., 1974: 132)
“Linguistic science” could also remedy the confusion of incommensurate orthographies which had arisen during the colonial period. The IPA-based Africa Script (International African Institute, 1930), was an orthography standard for Africa developed by the phoneticians Westermann, Passy, Jones, Lloyd James and others (Tucker, 1971).9 This laid the foundation for the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages (Tadadjeu and Sadembouo, 1979). It is significant that the introduction to this historic document cited USCO and the regional orthography meetings (Bamako 1966, Yaoundé 1970, Niamey 1978) giving it an international dimension, effectively buttressing it against local criticism. Furthermore, the introduction carefully closed with an appeal to national identity once more:10 Any Cameroonian can use [the General Alphabet] in his effort to learn to read and write his own language or any other Cameroon language. (Tadadjeu and Sadembouo, 1979: 2)
Linking a standard orthography to national unity is a valid strategy: “A common script is a strong tool for unification. Neither China nor Mesopotamia would have survived and prospered without it” (Gaur, 1984: 183). These ideographic scripts could be understood by all. In contrast, the shared IPA-based script of Cameroon has limited value for facilitating inter-ethnic communication, and so the link with national unity is rather tenuous. However, this misses the point. The purpose behind the above statement was to evoke national identity in support of a new orthography standard. The idea continues to be reiterated: ... any person who learns to read one Cameroonian language ... will already be able to read any other Cameroonian language, even if he doesn’t understand what he reads... (Tadadjeu, in Hartell (1993: 58)) ... perfect knowledge of the general principles of transcription permits us to read any language, even if we cannot understand what we read. (Sadembouo, in SIL (1987), my translation)
No longer on the defensive
By the early 1980s, the promoters of indigenous language development had gained confi- dence. The earlier argument for indigenous language development had been expressed in an in-house publication of Collège Libermann. Now, the Science and Technology Review of the government science agency DGRST – Délégation générale à la Recherche Scientifique et Technique – published Bot Ba Njock’s which explicitly linked the mastering of indigenous languages now called national languages, to the mastering of socio-economic, cultural and political development (Bot Ba Njock, 1981). And national identity was not the only identity one could reference; orthography development in Cameroon was now linked to African linguistic integration (Tadadjeu, 1981). Although the General Alphabet was not made official by the government at the time (Bot Ba Njock, 1981: 90) or subsequently, this did not prevent its adoption as a de facto standard in the country, marking the start of a new politics of orthography.
The authors of the General Alphabet now worked for CREA – Centre de Recherches et d’Etudes Anthropologiques, the government body responsible for approving externally-funded anthropological and linguistic research in Cameroon, including all language development projects. The General Alphabet could be strictly enforced for these externally-funded projects, and these projects had the resources to publish pedagogical materials. The orthography standard was retro-actively enforced. For example, the SIL project on Lamnso was forced to replace the orthography developed a decade earlier with a new system which conformed to the national standard (Karl Grebe, pers. comm. 1996). Various digraphs were replaced with their IPA counterpart (e.g. ng ! N). Existing pedagogical materials had to be discarded and fresh materials had to be prepared, published and distributed, diverting limited resources away from other areas of language development. In stark contrast, major languages like Douala and Ewondo were immune to the standard; they did not depend on an inflow of external resources and so CREA had no control over them. The distinction between the orthographies controlled by CREA and the orthographies that CREA could not touch was further buttressed by technological developments. The orthography standard could not be widely adopted for internally-resourced language development projects, since the “Central African Typewriter” – alluded to by Tadadjeu (1975: 61) – was never realized and since the cost of converting a conventional typewriter was prohibitive.11 On the contrary, externally-resourced language development projects could make use of computer technology for handling special fonts within a few years of publication of the standard (Baer, 1984).
The new orthography standard also included specifications for tone marking. For example, SIL linguists working on Chadic languages in the north of Cameroon believed that tone marking was not necessary since the functional load of tone12 was evidently very low. However, they were overruled by the standard. The minimal use of tone in these languages was enough for them to be classed as tone languages, and tone languages had to be written with tone marks, period. Accordingly, there are non-tonal languages with gratuitous tone marking (many Chadic languages) alongside tone languages without tone marking (Douala and Ewondo). According to Robert Hedinger (pers. comm. 1997), the situation among Chadic languages was heavily influenced by linguists who argued that expatriates should be able to read the texts without knowing the language in question, a task which is greatly assisted by tone marks. The same situation is found elsewhere: 14 It is probable that the indication of vowel length and tone in modern Navajo orthography is primarily an aid to outside linguists and teachers whose mother tongue is English, rather than an aid for Navajo mother tongue readers and writers. (Fishman, 1988: 275)
The pattern of adoption of the new orthography standard in Cameroon described above added a new layer of complexity. In imposing an across-the-board solution to the tonemarking problem, substantive issues were swept under the rug, and a new kind of identity arrived on the scene, that of the language planning professional.()
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