Konrad Rybka
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, PhD student in linguistics
Konrad Rybka is a linguist with an areal commitment to Amazonia and a penchant for interdisciplinary research. He specializes in the indigenous languages of the coastal Guianas, particularly Lokono (Arawakan) and Warao (isolate).
Konrad Rybka's doctoral research at the Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, focused on the linguistic encoding of landscape. The project aimed to describe how the Lokono people of Suriname categorize the geographic space around them linguistically and analyze this landscape categorization system within the larger context of Lokono spatial language and culture. Thanks to the affiliation to Prof. Burenhult's "Language, Cognition, Landscape" project at Lund University, Sweden during the project, Konrad collaborated with geographers, landscape architects, and G.I.S. specialists.
For his post-doctoral research, Konrad will explore the processes of linguistic borrowing against the patterns of socio-cultural contact in the Guianas. The aim of the project is to shed light on the mechanisms facilitating and obstructing borrowing in the larger context of Amazonian contact phenomena. The research will focus on plant, animal, tool, and star vocabulary in four languages: Lokono (Arawakan), Kari’na (Cariban), Wayãpi (Tupian), and Warao (isolate), and will be hosted by the Berkeley Linguistic Department, University of California.
Konrad is also actively participating in language documentation and revitalization of Lokono. Lokono a highly endangered Arawakan language spoken in the Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana. Konrad has created an digital, multimedia archive of Lokono; put into motion an orthography standardization project; created a digital Lokono bibliography; and given Lokono courses to the Lokono community in the Netherlands.
Supervisors: Prof. Kees Hengeveld and Dr. Eithne Carlin
Address: Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication, Department of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam
Konrad Rybka's doctoral research at the Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, focused on the linguistic encoding of landscape. The project aimed to describe how the Lokono people of Suriname categorize the geographic space around them linguistically and analyze this landscape categorization system within the larger context of Lokono spatial language and culture. Thanks to the affiliation to Prof. Burenhult's "Language, Cognition, Landscape" project at Lund University, Sweden during the project, Konrad collaborated with geographers, landscape architects, and G.I.S. specialists.
For his post-doctoral research, Konrad will explore the processes of linguistic borrowing against the patterns of socio-cultural contact in the Guianas. The aim of the project is to shed light on the mechanisms facilitating and obstructing borrowing in the larger context of Amazonian contact phenomena. The research will focus on plant, animal, tool, and star vocabulary in four languages: Lokono (Arawakan), Kari’na (Cariban), Wayãpi (Tupian), and Warao (isolate), and will be hosted by the Berkeley Linguistic Department, University of California.
Konrad is also actively participating in language documentation and revitalization of Lokono. Lokono a highly endangered Arawakan language spoken in the Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana. Konrad has created an digital, multimedia archive of Lokono; put into motion an orthography standardization project; created a digital Lokono bibliography; and given Lokono courses to the Lokono community in the Netherlands.
Supervisors: Prof. Kees Hengeveld and Dr. Eithne Carlin
Address: Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication, Department of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam
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Language Conservation by Konrad Rybka
Journal Articles by Konrad Rybka
Conference Presentations by Konrad Rybka
Lokono is a critically endangered Arawakan language spoken in Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana. The Lokono people live on the border between the peri-coastal savannas and the rainforest of the interior. Traditionally the Lokono are agriculturalists practicing hunting, fishing and gathering on a minor scale. Today, however, the type and intensity of the interaction with the landscape have changed as most people have entered into the local cash economy. The Lokono language itself is critically endangered, with only about 200 speakers in Suriname. Dutch, the official language of Suriname, and Sranantongo, the creole lingua franca, are spoken on a daily basis in the communities.
Compared to other Amazonian languages Lokono has few terms encoding vegetation patches—a possible reflection of the endangered status of the language. The extant terms are derived from a noun encoding a botanical resource with either the suffix –wkaro or –wkili, for instance, mokorowkaro ‘mokoro area’ (Ischnosiphon arouma) or awarhawkili ‘awarha area’ (Astrocaryum vulgare). Traditional elicitation methods failed to account for the difference in meaning between the two suffixes. As a result, I turned to methods popular in psychology and ethnobotany in order to determine if there is a semantic difference between the two types of terms. I first asked the participants to list all plants associated with each vegetation patch. The results were input into a hierarchical clustering analysis, which showed that wkaro- and wkili-ecotopes differ significantly from each other in terms of their floristic composition. Subsequently, I conducted two similarity judgment tasks, using a triadic comparison method and a pile-sorting method, to determine how many parameters best represent the ecotopic conceptual space. The results of both experiments were input into a multidimensional scaling algorithm, which showed that two parameters best fit the data. In a follow-up experiment, I asked the participants to justify their groupings in the pile-sorting task. The two parameters most frequently named were water saturation and density of vegetation, the former of which correlates with the linguistic distribution: wkili-ecotopes are deemed drier, and wkaro-ecotopes wetter.
Posters by Konrad Rybka
Books by Konrad Rybka
This book—a result of the collaboration between the author and the interdis- ciplinary project Language, Cognition, and Landscape at Lund University—explores these intriguing questions from a number of vantage points. It offers the reader a detailed examination of the linguistic means used to talk about landscape in Lokono—a critically endangered Arawakan language. The Lokono people live in Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana; this book fo- cuses on the Surinamese dialect. Its geographic focus in turn is the border area between the grass savanna and the rainforest riddled by a number of creeks and rivers.
The book caters for the interested semantician, who will find here a compre- hensive description of the landscape-related lexicon. The comparative analysis of landscape-related grammar in turn offers insights for descriptive linguists and linguistic typologists. The book contains also an elaborate description of the Lokono grammar of space. This allows the reader to locate the landscape- domain—the realm of geographic-scale space—within the larger domain of spatial relations. Being the first detailed description of spatial relations in an Arawakan language, the book is also an invaluable source of information for linguists interested in the cross-linguistic study of the grammars of space in general. Moreover, the book is rich in cultural information pertaining to the landscape domain, offering the linguistic anthropologist a glimpse of the Loko- no subsistence practices, material culture, and traditional beliefs inextricably linked to the local landscape. Finally, the interdisciplinary setting, in which the book took its shape, renders the book appropriate for other audiences in- terested in landscape, particularly geographers and landscape ethnoecologists.
Lokono is a critically endangered Arawakan language spoken in Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana. The Lokono people live on the border between the peri-coastal savannas and the rainforest of the interior. Traditionally the Lokono are agriculturalists practicing hunting, fishing and gathering on a minor scale. Today, however, the type and intensity of the interaction with the landscape have changed as most people have entered into the local cash economy. The Lokono language itself is critically endangered, with only about 200 speakers in Suriname. Dutch, the official language of Suriname, and Sranantongo, the creole lingua franca, are spoken on a daily basis in the communities.
Compared to other Amazonian languages Lokono has few terms encoding vegetation patches—a possible reflection of the endangered status of the language. The extant terms are derived from a noun encoding a botanical resource with either the suffix –wkaro or –wkili, for instance, mokorowkaro ‘mokoro area’ (Ischnosiphon arouma) or awarhawkili ‘awarha area’ (Astrocaryum vulgare). Traditional elicitation methods failed to account for the difference in meaning between the two suffixes. As a result, I turned to methods popular in psychology and ethnobotany in order to determine if there is a semantic difference between the two types of terms. I first asked the participants to list all plants associated with each vegetation patch. The results were input into a hierarchical clustering analysis, which showed that wkaro- and wkili-ecotopes differ significantly from each other in terms of their floristic composition. Subsequently, I conducted two similarity judgment tasks, using a triadic comparison method and a pile-sorting method, to determine how many parameters best represent the ecotopic conceptual space. The results of both experiments were input into a multidimensional scaling algorithm, which showed that two parameters best fit the data. In a follow-up experiment, I asked the participants to justify their groupings in the pile-sorting task. The two parameters most frequently named were water saturation and density of vegetation, the former of which correlates with the linguistic distribution: wkili-ecotopes are deemed drier, and wkaro-ecotopes wetter.
This book—a result of the collaboration between the author and the interdis- ciplinary project Language, Cognition, and Landscape at Lund University—explores these intriguing questions from a number of vantage points. It offers the reader a detailed examination of the linguistic means used to talk about landscape in Lokono—a critically endangered Arawakan language. The Lokono people live in Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana; this book fo- cuses on the Surinamese dialect. Its geographic focus in turn is the border area between the grass savanna and the rainforest riddled by a number of creeks and rivers.
The book caters for the interested semantician, who will find here a compre- hensive description of the landscape-related lexicon. The comparative analysis of landscape-related grammar in turn offers insights for descriptive linguists and linguistic typologists. The book contains also an elaborate description of the Lokono grammar of space. This allows the reader to locate the landscape- domain—the realm of geographic-scale space—within the larger domain of spatial relations. Being the first detailed description of spatial relations in an Arawakan language, the book is also an invaluable source of information for linguists interested in the cross-linguistic study of the grammars of space in general. Moreover, the book is rich in cultural information pertaining to the landscape domain, offering the linguistic anthropologist a glimpse of the Loko- no subsistence practices, material culture, and traditional beliefs inextricably linked to the local landscape. Finally, the interdisciplinary setting, in which the book took its shape, renders the book appropriate for other audiences in- terested in landscape, particularly geographers and landscape ethnoecologists.