Google Books

Google books is actually pretty awesome. With both of the authors that I'm checking out, you can read a bunch of their books in full on Google Books.

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o:
Devil on the Cross

Koigi wa Wamwere:
I Refuse to Die: My Journey for Freedom

In the introductions to these books, there are some good examples of variations of English that the authors use when they write.

More Suff

Here's some more stuff that I have...just wanted to post it up on the blog.

As far as author's go these two have a good deal of information:

Ngugi wa Thiong'o
http://www.ngugiwathiongo.com/

Koigi Wa Wamwere
http://www.artemisia.no/koigi/

Also, the Wikipedia pages have a ton of information on the books that they have written
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C5%A9g%C4%A9_wa_Thiong%27o
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koigi_wa_Wamwere

Thank you Dr. Dillon!

Yes! Dr. Dillon showed me how to use the ICE Corpus for East African English and now it's working! I just checked some of the data I collected and found that the words school and tone used as verbs cannot be confirmed by the ICE Corpus. However, in the first 60 entries there are five examples of the word rest used as a transitive verb (as in, "till transport is arranged, rest the patient "). There were no entries for the word sack used as a noun in the context of to fire someone as it says in Zuengler (1982: 116). I wonder if this is a typo by Zuengler and she actually meant used as a verb. Anyways, it's working, so I'm off and running.

Still no luck!

Well, I went back to the ICE Corpus to see what I could do and found I could do little. Today my strategy was to cut and paste the examples given to see if they worked. The first two and fourth did, but the third, fifth, sixth, seventh, etc. didn't. I was really hoping the third would work because according to one source there are certain nouns that are used as verbs in East African English and I wanted to check some of those. Oh well, I'll ask Professor Dillon about this in class tomorrow.

A little frustrated

Today I finally turned to the ICE Corpus and tried to check some of the syntactic tendencies I've found cited in regards to East African English. I was able to check on single word inquiries like plural forms of words that I would usually use in the singular (e.g., bums, laps, bottoms, etc.). What I could never figure out was how to do multiple word inquiries. For example, if third person personal pronouns are variable between gender, how do I check for something like "my husband...she..."? I tried looking at the examples and user's manual and even cut and pasted some things, but that didn't get me anywhere. After spending more than an hour trying to make headway I've decided to move on to other work I need to do and give it another shot tomorrow.

A syntactic tidbit

Melchers and Shaw (2003: 133) state that it is common in East African English to use the question tag "not so" as in, "You like the Kenyan singer Nameless, not so?".

Another quick interview

Here's another 3-minuted interview from a Kenyan living in Japan. He's talking about environmental issues in Kenya.

<http://www.elllo.org/english/0901/T921-David-Forest.htm>