The lost voices of Guizhou

Taking Confucian temples in Southwest China as an example, this paper discusses the combination of traditional temple architecture in East Asia and mountain topography. Based on the fieldwork survey of 14 existing mountain Confucian temples in Southwest China, the paper provides the first systematic examination of the topographical influences on courtyard spatial layouts and landscape environment of Confucian Temple. The author discusses the topographical influences on the orientation and axis sequence organization of the Confucian temple. Then, the diversity of the guiding space layouts is explored by combining the theory of Figure-ground and Space Syntax. On this basis, the author takes the most representative “vertical interface” of the mountain Confucian temple as a point of departure for re-examining the plant configuration and water environment that match the mountain topography. The finding of the paper shows how to implement a set of mature building complex under mountain topography and create an amazing landscape environment in Southwest China during the 15th- 19th centuries. The work enriches the discourse in the study of the traditional temple in East Asia and provides the theoretical basis for the conservation of Confucian temple architectural heritage.

This paper discusses the development of a typologically rare phonological contrast in an under-documented language called Somali Bantu Kizigua. The contrast in question is a contrast between two coronal places of articulation for NC (Nasal + Consonant) clusters, a genetic feature found across Bantu languages. The argument of this paper is that shift-induced interference as a mechanism for contact-induced change (Thomason & Kaufman, 1988) played a crucial role in the development of this contrast. The linguistic data comes from consultant work with speakers from a Somali Bantu refugee community in the US. This data was compared with data from missionary publications from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (Kisbey, 1897, 1906). The comparison shows a two-place coronal contrast in the recently collected data, but only one place of articulation for coronal stops in the older data. To build a case for contact-induced change, relevant socio-historical information is presented. This discussion shows that the Zigua people, originally from Tanzania, migrated to Somalia in the 19th Century as part of the East African Slave Trade. This forced migration eventually brought the Zigua in contact with Chimwiini speakers. Some Chimwiini speakers absorbed themselves into the Kizigua speech community in Somalia through intermarriage. Language shift from Chimwiini to Kizigua is argued to have introduced retroflex NC into Kizigua. The subsequent borrowing of Standard Swahili loan words with alveolar NC then introduced the two-place coronal contrast found in the language as spoken by speakers today. What is most intriguing about this change is how retroflexion of historic alveolar NC results in a pattern identical to what would be expected of a Neogrammarian sound change. The fact that it is not and the fact that cases of shift-induced interference are under-reported in the literature raises the question of how many other purported cases of internally-motivated change may actually be due to shift-induced interference.

The latest materials of the excavations of medieval sites in the Vychegda basin and the Upper Kama region confirm the ethno-cultural proximity of the Rodanovo and Vym archaeological cultures associated with the related peoples – the ancestors of the Komi-Permians and Komi-Zyryans, which was proved by A.P. Smirnov, V.A. Oborin, A.F. Melnichuk, R.D. Goldina and other researchers. It can be traced in the most conservative, traditional elements of culture – in funeral rites, ceramics, and women's costume decorations. Both cultures are characterized by underground burial grounds, burials in which are made by the method of inhumation and cremation. Ceramics are represented by stucco vessels of cup-shaped and pot-shaped forms, ornamented with comb, rosette stamp, and cord prints. Common adornments of women's costume are umbonoid, arched, anchor and bronze bi-anchor rattle pendants, a variety of tubular thread decorations. The greatest affinity to the Rodanovo culture is found in the sites adjacent to the Upper Kama areas – Sysola, Mid-Vychegda, dating back to the 10th – 11th, 11th – 12th centuries. On the Sysola river, three burial grounds were investigated, different from the Vym, Mid- and Low Vychegda ones. The Votcha burial ground on the Middle Sysola river, dating back to the 10th – 11th centuries, refers to the earliest ones. According to the funeral rite and ware implements, it shows the greatest cultural proximity to the sites of the Kama region, which is most likely due to the relocation of a small group of the Kama population to the Sysola basin. The Uzhga I and II burial grounds on the Upper Sysola are distinguished by their great originality. The burial rite of the Uzhga burial grounds is characterized by dismembered burials, burials of individual skulls, and the tradition of deliberate destruction of graves for ritual purposes. These features of the funeral rite find analogies in the Upper Kama burial grounds, in particular, Averino I in the Afanasyevsky district of the Kirov region, as well as Plotnitsy, located in the Kudymkar district of the Perm region. It is most likely that the population that had left Uzhga burial grounds, was part of the same territorial–tribal association as the northern Upper Kama population, associated with Zyuzdino Komi-Permians, which is confirmed by the data of ethnography and linguistics. The infiltration of the Rodanovo population into the Vychegda basin in the 11th and 12th centuries is documented by the excavations of the Chezhtyyag and Vym Kichilkos I burial grounds. They belong to the Vym culture of the Vychegda Perm, the early complexes of which, dating from the 11th –12th centuries, may be associated with the Rodanovo newcomers. In the burial 37 of the Chezhtyyag burial ground, a characteristic Rodanovo women's costume is represented. At the Kichilkos I burial ground, numerous highly artistic Bulgar silver articles from the Kama region were found, as well as typical Rodanovo decorations, stucco vessels similar in shape and ornamentation, and burials that show the greatest similarity to the Early Rodanovo ones. These materials testify not only to the active trade and cultural relations between the population of the Vym and Rodanovo cultures, but also to the infiltration of the Upper Kama Rodanovo groups into the Vychegda basin in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Dabaca: necropola din jurul bisericii din Gradina lui A. Tamas Cateva idei privind evolutia habitatului de la Dabaca / Dabaca: the Churchyard Cemetery in the Garden of A. Tamas. Some Ideas on the Evolution of the Medieval Habitat in Dabaca

The goal of this study is to outline the translation strategies used in The Dancer, the translation of Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk. Novel Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk was originally published in Bahasa Indonesia. The Javanese terms found in the novel are essential to reveal further. The translator faces a significant challenge in transferring Javanese cultural terms into English. This research is a descriptive-qualitative study that uses documents in both of the novels as data sources. The documents are a novel entitled Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk and its English translation. The data includes linguistic and statistical data in translation. The linguistic data was collected through data analysis and translation. The result is the use of the techniques such as borrowing, calque, transposition, description, generalization, compensation, and established equivalence are all translation techniques. Borrowing and calque are used to translate words into words, which is a characteristic in translating. Transposition and description are phrase to-phrase translations. For word to phrase, there are description and generalization, as well as phrase to word found in established equivalence technique.

Any study of Branson, Missouri, must include a discussion of the Ozark Mountain region because so much of the region's geography, history, and culture have directly affected Branson itself. In fact, Branson's ascent to a popular culture entertainment center has been greatly enhanced by its location in the Ozark mountains. Logically, the first subject for analysis will be the Ozarks, understanding the forces that have shaped hem into a unique cultural area. Such analysis will create a regional context in which to explain Branson's phenomenal growth and development. The Ozark Mountain region is more dramatic than the rest of the central-Mississippi valley area. Limestone outcroppings form rugged topography that is covered with thick stands of Eastern red cedars, post oaks, and pines. The Ozarks, though lying like a large island west of the Appalachians, are part of the same geologic mountain system. More accurately described as a plateau, they consist of relatively at table lands with deep hollows cutting zig-zag patterns across the surface. Soils of the Ozarks ate relatively thin, leaving this fragile ecosystem vulnerable to erosion. Below the rugged terrain lies a vast system of underground rivers, giving rise to many natural springs. The vegetation of the Ozarks has experienced significant change in recent centuries. At the time when the first white explorers, such as Henry R. Schoolcraft, made their way into this area in the early 19th century, the landscape was coveted mostly by oaks (Ingenthron 189). Similar to the indigenous peoples, namely the Osage Indians, early Anglo-American pioneers relied extensively on the forests for most of their needs. This extensive reliance on local resources led many families towards self-sufficiency, and author E. Joan Miller contends tat this self-sufficiency had an isolating effect, ethnically and linguistically, on the people of the Ozarks (68). Families were wholly independent economic units, speckling the backwoods in clearings hacked out of the forests; Though pines and cedars are also numerous, oaks still represent the majority of timber. This is, in part, a result of the logging activities that were central to the region's economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Transportation and travel within and through the Ozarks centered around the White River, the largest river in the region. Land travel proved much more difficult because of the many steep inclines and dense forests covering the countryside. In fact, the Ozark Plateau, in contrast to the flatter lands of the central Mississippi Valley, was often avoided by the various waves of westward migration throughout the 1800s, further is dating the region from the rest of the nation. This isolation had a preserving effect on the local culture (Rayburn 46) With minimal external influence, lifestyles of the people of the Ozarks experienced little change throughout the 19th century. Major routes to the Far West developed through Chicago and St. Louis to the north, and Memphis to the south. Compared to the rest of the country, this left the Ozarks less traveled, more sparsely populated, and relatively unknown. This isolation has had several effects on the region's development and people. First of all, with less trade and communication than other areas to both the north and south, no large cities formed, and the towns that did spring up tended to remain relatively small. Population densities of Taney county, in which Branson lies, remained low into the 20th century. As if on an island, the inhabitants of the Ozarks have developed a rather strong sense of identity. For them, the Ozarks constitute a well defined geographic location, and thus local traditions and customs have formed and flourished. Some of these cultural patterns are still noticeable today. Miller makes an effort to define the region using two methods: 1) the folk material collected by folklorist Vance Randolf, and 2) the ethnic origins and cultural boundaries that were determined using subjects of folk tales in conjunction with linguistic data (51-77). …

Modern high resolution 3D-measuring techniques are widely used in quality control and industrial production, because they allow precise and reliable inspection of objects. Their potential to monitor surfaces, however, must not be restricted to industrial objects. Also in cultural heritage applications a detailed and reliable spatial description of surfaces is often useful and opens up new possibilities for conservation, analysis or presentation of objects. In the actual work we have considered Buddhistic stone inscriptions (8th- 12th centuries) which are important cultural assets of China. They need to be documented, analyzed, interpreted and visualized archaeologically, art-historically and text-scientifically. On one hand such buddhistic stone inscriptions have to be conserved for future generations but on the other hand further possibilities for analyzing the data could be enabled when the inscriptions would be accessible to a larger community, for instance the understanding of the historical growth of Buddhism in China. In this article we show innovative techniques for the documentation and analysis of stone inscriptions located in the province of Sichuan - south-west of china. The stone inscriptions have been captured using high precision 3D- measuring techniques what produces exact copies of the original inscriptions serving as base for further processing tasks. Typical processing might be directed towards an improvement of the legibility of characters or may try to automatically detect individual letters, to automatically identify certain text passages or even to characterize the written elements with respect to a potential style of the monk or the executing stonemason. All these processing steps will support the interpretation of the inscriptions by the sinologists involved with the analysis and evaluation of the texts. The concept and features of the image processing applied on the captured inscription as well as the aims and the effect of an interpretation based on algorithms for identifying and analyzing the inscriptions are demonstrated. In order to present the outcome to a large community, the results of the stone inscription reconstruction, the done interpretation and additional 2D / 3D maps are published within an interactive web platform.

Highly negative oxygen isotopes in precipitation in southwest China and their significance in paleoclimatic studies

Reconstruction of the East Asian Summer monsoon rainfall distribution at centennial scale during the Last Glacial Maximum

The rapid development of computer software and network technologies has facilitated the intensive application of specialized statistical software not only in the traditional information technology spheres (i.e., statistics, engineering, artificial intelligence) but also in linguistics. The statistical software R is one of the most popular analytical tools for statistical processing a huge array of digitalized language data, especially in quantitative corpus linguistic studies of Western Europe and North America. This article discusses the functionality of the software package R, focusing on its advantages in performing complex statistical analyses of linguistic data in corpus-driven studies and creating linguistic classifiers in machine learning. With this in mind, a three-stage strategy of computer-statistical analysis of linguistic corpus data is elaborated: 1) data processing and preparing to be subjected to a statistical procedure, 2) utilizing statistical hypothesis testing methods (MANOVA, ANOVA) and the Tukey post-hoc test, and 3) developing a model of a linguistic classifier and analyzing its effectiveness. The strategy is implemented on 11 000 tokens of English detached nonfinite constructions with an explicit subject extracted from the BNC-BYU corpus. The statistical analysis indicates significant differences in the realization of the factors of the parameter “Part of speech of the subject”. The analyzed linguistic data are employed to build a machine model for the classification of the given constructions. Particular attention is devoted to the methodological perspectives of interdisciplinary research in the fields of linguistics and computer studies. The potential application of the elaborated case study in training undergraduate, master, and postgraduate students of Applied Linguistics is indicated. The article provides all the statistical data and codes written in the R script with comprehensive descriptions and explanations. The concluding part of the article summarizes the obtained results and highlights the issues for further research connected with the popularization of the statistical software complex R and raising the awareness of specialists in this statistical analysis system.

Atmospheric S and N deposition relates to increasing riverine transport of S and N in southwest China: Implications for soil acidification

Process-based land surface models are important tools to study the historical and future effects of climate change and land use change. The planting date has a considerable effect on crop growth and consequently on dynamic parameters used in land surface models, for example albedo and actual evapotranspiration. If planting dates can be related to climate, scenarios can use this relation to estimate planting dates. Such a relation is expected to differ according to agro-ecological zone. In this study, spring and summer maize planting date observations at 188 agricultural meteorological experiment stations of China, as well as monthly weather records, over the years 1992–2010 were used as the data source. In order to quantify the relation between planting dates and climate parameters, growing season monthly average minimum temperature (Tmin), mean temperature (T), and precipitation (P) were used. The time trend analysis of planting dates and weather data, principal component analysis (PCA) of weather data, and multivariate regression of planting dates as affected by weather data were used. Both Tmin and T increased during this period in most zones, whereas precipitation showed no trend. In southwest and northwest China, maize planting dates advanced significantly for both spring and summer maize. However, in the north China plain (summer maize) and northeast China (spring maize), the planting date was significantly delayed. Ordinary least squares multivariate regression models were able to explain 33% and 59% of the variance of planting dates in the southwest China (i.e., the humid subtropics zone) for spring and summer maize, respectively. However, only 3% could be explained in the Loess Plateau. Thus, adjusting planting dates in scenario analysis using land surface models is indicated for some zones, but not others, where socioeconomic factors are dominant.

Southeast Asia in the Ancient Indian Ocean World BAR International Series S2580 TOM HOOGERVORST pp., 157 including Linguistic Appendix, 60 b&w figures, 8 tables British Archaeological Reports, 122 Banbury Rd, Oxford, OX2 7BP, 2013, £31 (sbk), ISBN 978-140

The intraseasonal oscillation (ISO) of the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) is an important factor affecting summer precipitation in China, but the relationship between the ISO of the EASM and summer precipitation in southwest China is currently still unclear. The relationship between the two is discussed, and the following conclusions are drawn: (1) there is a significant positive correlation between East Asian monsoon surge intensity and summer precipitation in southwest China. When the monsoon surge is stronger (weaker), the precipitation in southwest China is more (less). However, the areas where the monsoon surge has a more obvious effect on the summer precipitation in southwest China are mainly located east of 105° E, and the monsoon surge has no obvious effect on the area west of 105° E. This may be more (less) the case in monsoon surge years, when a low-frequency oscillation of 30–60 days (10–20 days) plays a dominant role. The East Asian region has a longitudinal wave train of “+ − +” (“− + −“), the western Pacific subtropical high is westerly (easterly), the South China Sea and western Pacific is affected by anticyclone (cyclone), the EASM is active (suppressive), eastern southwest China has water vapor convergence (divergence) and upward (downward) airflow. (2) We found that 1998 was a typical year for the 30–60 days ISO of the EASM. There are two obvious 30–60 days oscillation cycles. In this year, when the intensity of the ISO of the EASM increases (decreases), the range of positive precipitation anomaly region in southwest China extends (decreases). The atmospheric circulation characteristics show that, when the western Pacific subtropical high is west (east) and south (north), and there is obvious anticyclonic (cyclonic) circulation in China–western Pacific, and the EASM is stronger (weaker), which leads to more (less) precipitation in southwest China.

The research note discusses some marginalia in a 13th-century parimeinik from the collections of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (Tip. no. 60), which have not yet received a detailed description. The author proposes certain amendments to previous publications of the marginalia, partially reconstructs their lost fragments, interprets some extralinguistic information that gives an idea of the name and occupations of the scribe, and linguistic data in the field of phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary in their connection with the corresponding phenomena of the main text of the parimeinik. The author concludes that the marginalia reflect some phonetic innovations present in the main text; their grammatical innovations, on the other hand, are not supported by the main text, the stability of which is due to the genre. At the lexical level, some units make it possible to supply Russian historical lexicography either with an earlier dating for the first fixation of a lexeme in written sources or with a new contextual combination.