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Niger‐Congo's Kwa and Benue‐Congo zones, jointly covering most of tropical Africa, run between isolating and agglutinative types. Historical phonology finds few innovations above the local cluster, but assuming the phase theory of generative syntax, a clear division emerges based on the timing (early/VP vs late/TP) of PF‐Spell‐Out.

This chapter focuses on Juliani's songs that tackle issues of love, sex and sexuality, politics, religiosity, and economics, along with his ability to play with words to make even more intriguing inroads into Kenya's sociocultural planes. It also highlights Juliani's ability to engage with tough social issues through creatively woven lyrics and rhyme. By analyzing Juliani's songs from his three albums (Mtaa Mentality, Pulpit Kwa Street, and Exponential Potential) as well as his mixtape (Vultures vs. Voters), this chapter identifies certain recurrent themes that appear in almost all of his work. Some of the themes are sexuality, love, and relationships; tensions between perceived and real social practices; masculine and feminine identities; socioeconomic and political challenges; and the everyday experiences of spiritual life.

Gaius plinius secundus had witnessed a lot of violence in his life—war in Germania, Sicilian raids, Nero’s reign of terror—but killer whales really seemed to scare him. Known to history as Pliny the Elder, he penned the first known description of Orcinus orca in his encyclopedic Naturalis Historia, completed shortly before his death in 79 CE. It painted a bloody picture. The orca “cannot be in any way adequately described,” Pliny asserted, “but as an enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth.” Whereas dolphins sometimes befriended people and even helped fishermen, the killer whale preyed on mother baleen whales and their vulnerable calves. “This animal attacks the balaena in its places of retirement,” he wrote, “and with its teeth tears its young, or else attacks the females which have just brought forth, and, indeed, while they are still pregnant.” Fleeing whales could expect no mercy from orcas, who “kill them either cooped up in a narrow passage, or else drive them on a shoal, or dash them to pieces against the rocks.” So frightful were these battles to behold, Pliny noted, that it appeared “as though the sea were infuriate against itself.” In short, the destructive power of a killer whale had to be seen to be believed. Pliny himself had seen one. Around 50 CE, an orca had wandered into the harbor of Ostia, Rome’s port city. The animal had been drawn there, it seemed, by a ship from Gaul, which had run aground and spilled its cargo of hides. As the whale investigated, it became stuck in the shallows, unable to maneuver. Soon its back and dorsal fin were visible above the water, recounted Pliny, “very much resembling in appearance the keel of a vessel turned bottom upwards.” Sensing an opportunity, the emperor Claudius arrived from Rome, ordering local fishermen to net off the harbor. After waiting for a crowd to gather, he led his praetorians into battle against the trapped whale. The result was “a spectacle to the Roman people,” wrote Pliny. “Boats assailed the monster, while the soldiers on board showered lances upon it.” But the orca fought back, sinking at least one vessel before it succumbed.

Linguists have traditionally supposed that languages become radically analytic via two mechanisms: (1) pidginization and related processes of heavy and disruptive adult acquisition; and (2) ‘drift’ into analyticity due to withdrawal of stress from final syllables, or other grammar-internal processes sparked essentially by chance. However, theoretical economy directs us to suppose that radical analyticity emerges solely from adult acquisition, and that radically analytic languages such as Chinese and Yoruba can be identified as having experienced heavy second-language acquisition in their histories despite this not having been recorded historically. In support of this hypothesis this chapter notes that radically analytic languages are quite rare worldwide; that both older radically analytic languages and creoles bear the hallmark of eliminating contextual inflection rather than inherent; and that in this and other facets, radically analytic languages do not differ from synthetic ones only in degree of boundedness of morphemes. Rather, synthetic languages tend to mark a great deal of semantic distinctions that radically analytic ones do not mark with free morphemes, suggesting the operation of second-language acquisition rather than ‘drift’.

This chapter presents a reading of This Place Called Absence by Asian Canadian Lydia Kwa and Fox Girl by Asian American Nora Okja Keller. These novels bear witness to the horrors of being a prostitute to foreigners either in one’s own or in another country. Both novels attempt to give voice to women whose stories have not been well documented in history in order to “make people remember what they do not know first-hand.” By depicting prostitutes in familial situations, by revealing the ways they negotiate their queer desires and aspirations, and the way they reconcile themselves to their physical and material states, Kwa and Keller highlight the absent voices in trans-Pacific and transnational history, the gaps in the understanding and knowledge of the postcolonial past and its neocolonial legacy.