: Rainmaking Rites of Tswana Tribes . I. Schapera.

The Legal Aspects of Rainmaking

The rites of spring

Every spring I get depressed. Last month I had the stunning realization that graduate student recruitment is a major cause of my spring depression. Each year, as the days lengthen, graduate programs engage in their ritualistic seduction of prospective students. In the past 15 years, US institutions, including the most elite and respected, have evolved mating displays worthy of birds and fish. T...

The Nanoscience of Clouds, Rain and Rainmaking

The range of scales is immense. At the high end we are looking at changes in the ice caps near the North and South poles, at the global ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns and, on a shorter time scale, at the motion of weather patterns around the globe. The length scale in each of these cases is in the thousand kilometre range, and this is not the subject of the present article, though w...

Downstep in Tswana (Southern Bantu)

The article investigates the realization of adjacent high tones across word boundaries in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language. The results show that downstep, a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones, takes place across word boundaries within the same phonological phrase. Downstep does not occur across phonological phrase boundaries. The study confirms an empirical phenomenon a...

Nasal - only syllables in Tswana

In Tswana parsing of nasals in syllabic peak position is avoided by deletion. This implies the general ranking *P/NAS >> MAX. However, there are three distinct environments where faithfulness is respected and the marked nasal peaks are preserved onto the surface. These three environments are when the nonparsing of the nasal will result in: (i) a word below the minimal word length requirement of...