Word: dialectics
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When Makeba sings or talks in her native Xosa dialect, its expressive staccato clicks sound like the popping of champagne corks. Though she tries many styles, she never sings the Afrikaaner songs of white South Africa ("When Afrikaaners sing in my language," she says, "then I will sing in theirs"). But whatever mood she assumes, Miriam Makeba maintains a simple and primitive stoicism that sets her sharply apart from the emotional, often artificial style of American Negro singers...
Born on the island of Negros of part-Chinese ancestry (his last name is a cor ruption of the Fukien dialect and means "sixth son"), Lacson has been an amateur boxer, soccer player, anti-Japanese guerrilla, lawyer, professor and newspaper columnist. During the war he fought in the battles for Manila and Baguio, and was cited by the U.S. Sixth Army "for gallantry under fire." When Japan's touring Premier Nobusuke Kishi asked him if he had learned Japanese during the war, Lacson snapped, "I was too busy shooting at Japanese to learn any." Of Americans, he says: "They...
...Nehru displays none of the perfervid oratory of the demagogue, and could not if he wanted to, since he speaks only one Indian language, Urdu, with any proficiency. Ordinarily he gives long, rambling, extemporaneous talks in English, full of digressions and schoolmasterly asides, that are translated into the local dialect by interpreters. Vast crowds of up to a million assemble to hear him, but the contact is more emotional than verbal. What happens is called by Indians darshan, communion. The multitude is somehow comforted and reassured not by the words but by the presence of Nehru. And Nehru himself seems...
...daymares is Mr. Parkhill (Hyman renders it "Pockheel"), the earnest and durable idealist who teaches the beginners' grade of the American Night Preparatory School for Adults. Parkhill's melting pot simmers with some flavorful characters, though their jokes are unlikely to revive the vanishing art of dialect humor. To class repeaters, including Miss Mitnick. the blushing birddog of blackboard errors. Author Rosten has added some newcomers. There is Mr. Matsoukas. a muttering Greek for whom derivation is the mother of invention (" 'Automobile' is Grik! 'Airplane' is Grik! 'Telephone' is Grik...
Died. Mrs. William Sydney Porter, 91, widow of O. Henry, and herself a short story writer (the Bijie series), who drew on the dialect of the North Carolina mountains, where at 13 she first met O. Henry and where she returned at his death in 1910 after only three years of marriage; in Weaverville...