网范文：“The Colonial Period of Orthography” 欧洲人第一次侵入非洲不仅带来了发明和思想,他们也带着语言文化植入了这块大陆。这篇语言范文讲的是正字法对非洲的作用。附带的是欧洲正字法的传统，一个随机的殖民语言是复杂，特别是叠加在非洲语言,而后者受到的不同拼写传统，至少有六种不同的欧洲语言。拼写在喀麦隆也不例外，英语论文题目，基于英语、法语或德语。为了了解这种情况是如何出现的，在喀麦隆有必要理解殖民历史的一些细节。
殖民时期开始于西非海岸欧洲贸易增长在1700年代末到1800年代。到1800年,英国统治尼日利亚和喀麦隆海岸,英语是商务的主要语言。下面的范文进行详述。
Abstract
The Europeans who first penetrated Africa not only brought European inventions and ideas, but they also arrived with “linguistic cultural baggage” (Samarin, 1984: 436ff). Included with this baggage were European orthographic traditions: A random patchwork of colonial languages was superimposed on the already complex map of African languages, and the latter were exposed to the varying orthographic traditions of at least six different European languages. (Baker et al., 1982: 5) Orthographic practice in Cameroon was no exception. For example, the affricate Ù was transcribed as ch, tch or tsch, depending on whether the transcription was based on English, French or German, respectively. Douala, a major Bantu language of southern Cameroon, had three orthographies. These are illustrated in (4), where the columns show corresponding forms in each orthography.
In order to appreciate how this situation arose in Cameroon it is necessary to understand some details of colonial history. The colonial period began with growing European trading along the West African coast in the late 1700s and into the 1800s. By 1800, Britain dominated the Nigerian and Cameroonian coast, and Pidgin English was the primary language of commerce (Fonlon, 1969: 10f). The English Baptist Mission was established in Cameroon by Alfred Saker in 1845, and it was responsible for the first orthography for the Douala language.
Germany narrowly beat Britain and France in the race to annexe “Kamerun” (1884), and began its conquest of the hinterland. The German explorers distributed flags, adopted traditional leaders into the colonial administration, and informed the locals that their land and people were now German. The English missionaries, who were responsible for the majority of the schools, were expelled by the German administration and replaced by German-speaking missionaries (the Basel Mission). The American Presbyterian missionaries, established in SE Cameroon since the 1870s, were allowed to stay on condition that they replaced English with German (Fonlon, 1969: 15f). During this period, Douala and other languages were given Germanbased orthographies. With the outbreak of World War I, Britain invaded Cameroon from the west and France invaded from the south. The territory was partitioned in 1916. By giving up its claims to German East Africa, France won over 80% of Cameroon, thereby gaining control of an uninterrupted stretch of territory from Algiers on the Mediterranean to Brazzaville in the Congo (Fanso, 1989: 55). The German missions and their vernacular educational programs were now transferred to French missionaries. The French administration tried to assimilate their new subjects and spread French civilization. “The policy aimed at assimilating or absorbing France’s colonial subjects to the point where they would actually be Frenchmen linguistically, culturally, politically and legally” (Fanso, 1989: 65).
Now French was taught in the schools, and “it was considered essential that instruction in the other subjects should be in French almost from the first day in school” (Fonlon, 1969: 20). As incentive to the independent mission schools, the administration offered a subsidy to raise staff salaries by two-thirds on condition that French be used as the medium of instruction (Fanso, 1989: 70). All of the orthographies developed during the colonial period were inspired by colonial languages.5 The fact that these orthographies adopted the sound distinctions, the characters, and the pronunciation rules of the successive colonial powers was symbolic of the subsidiary status ascribed to the languages. Tone was the most notable amongst the ignored sound distinctions; the colonial orthographers were completely naive about tone (Tucker, 1964: 610). These facts were later exploited in nationalist rhetoric. By the end of the colonial period, orthographies were established for about a dozen languages (Bot Ba Njock, 1966: 10), including Douala, Ewondo, Fe’fe’ and Basaa.
Linguistic identity in newly independent Cameroon
In 1960, the newborn nation state, the Federal Republic of Cameroon, was bequeathed a linguistic situation of bewildering complexity. Fonlon’s prosaic summation of the situation leads to a striking conclusion: Cameroon, thanks to its geographical position, has the singular character of being the one spot on the black continent where all the African peoples meet: here you have the Bantu who claim kinship with peoples as far South as the Cape, you have Sudanese peoples, you have the Fulani whose kinsfolk are found as far West as Senegal and Mauritania, you have Hamito-Semitic peoples like the Shuwa Arabs, you have the pygmies of the equatorial jungle. Thus, it is in Cameroon that the African Confusion of Tongues is worse confounded; and it has become absolutely impossible to achieve, through an African language, that oneness of thought and feeling and will that is the heart’s core and the soul of a nation.
We are left with no choice but to strive to achieve this unity through non-African languages; and, to make things more difficult, the Federal Republic of Cameroon, being composed of the former Southern Cameroons, British administered, and the former French Cameroons, has inherited two of them – French and English; and has therefore been obliged to become, constitutionally, a bilingual State. (Fonlon, 1969: 9f, emphasis in original) Thus, there was “no choice” but for Cameroon to become officially bilingual in English and French. Contrary to expectation, African identity would not be compromised but enhanced. In the words of President Ahmadou Ahidjo: As far as culture is concerned, we must in fact refrain from any blind and narrow nationalism and avoid any complex when absorbing the learning of other countries. When we consider the English language and culture and the French language and culture, we must regard them not as the property of such and such a race but as an acquirement of the universal civilization to which we belong. That is in fact why we have followed the path of bilingualism since we consider not only that it is in our interests to develop these two world-wide languages in our country but that furthermore it offers us the means to develop this new culture which I have just mentioned and which could transform our country into the catalyst of African unity. (Ahidjo, 1964)
In order to redirect and expand the education system, outside help was needed. Following the Ebolowa Conference of 1962, USCO funded a nationwide literacy program in English and French, which had 7,500 literacy centers (“l’Ecole sous l’Arbre”) at its peak. The program ran until around 1969, when it declined due to the lack of external funding (SIL, 1987: 12). Apart from the reliance on external funding, the shortage of well-trained and well-motivated teachers was a key problem in these years (Bot Ba Njock, 1966: 7). At the same time as French and English were receiving vigorous attention, literacy in the indigenous languages had been halted.
Tribal identity had been a threat to the colonial administrations,6 and now it was a threat to the state.7 The promotion of literacy in the indigenous languages was based in the schools; the government now asserted tight control over the education system and stopped these programs. For example, in Dschang, the school established by chief Djoumessi was raided by the state authorities, and the books, typewriters, and duplicator were confiscated. The aim was to halt education in the local language. Gregoire Momo, Djoumessi’s brother and director of the school from 1946–59, describes the seizure as “an act of vandalism in a period when the government did not take account of cultural treasure” (Momo, 1997: 13, my translation). Similar events were widespread, both in Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa, such as in Ethiopia: Haile Selassie saw in ethnic languages, and particularly afaan Oromoo, an obstacle to his “nation-building” project. Hence, possession of Oromo literature was declared illegal, and existing works in the Oromo language were destroyed. (Bulcha, 1997)
In those days, linguistic diversity was not something to be emphasized, much less acknowledged even. But at least it was possible to acknowledge the challenges that lay ahead. Two visionary articles written at this time had almost identical titles but rather different outlooks. In his piece, The Language Problem in Cameroon, Fonlon argued that “the target to aim at, for us, should be, not merely State bilingualism, but individual bilingualism: that every child that passes through our education system shall be able to speak and write both English and French” (Fonlon, 1969: 35, emphasis in original). Bot Ba Njock, in his piece Le Problème Linguistique au Cameroun, pointed out that, while Cameroon had chosen two official languages, it did not yet have any national languages. He argued for the selection of regional languages, one for each “linguistic zone” in the country (Bot Ba Njock, 1966: 12).
To this day neither vision has been realized. By the 1970s, a small group lead by Bot Ba Njock and François de Gastines began to re-assert the importance of indigenous languages. In order for their message to be heard by the post-colonial leadership, they tacitly adopted some of the same assumptions concerning linguistic identity. Jaffe (1996: 818) has called it the “European political ideology of language,” which is grounded in the idea that “linguistic identity is a prerequisite for cultural identity and political stability.” The group also argued that, for primary school education, literacy in the mother tongue was a better route to French and English literacy than using French and English from the start (Bot Ba Njock, 1966: 8f). Indigenous languages and literacy became safe topics once more. Although it was to take two generations of linguists, this group engineered a remarkable transition, from “preaching in the wilderness” (Bot Ba Njock, 1966: 3) to being employed by the government to coordinate language planning for the country. Just how this came about is described in the next two sections.()
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