Browsing by Subject "Languages"
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Item Built upon the Tower of Babel : language policy and the clergy in Bourbon Mexico(2016-05) Zakaib, Susan Blue; Deans-Smith, Susan, 1953-; Twinam, Ann; Butler, Matthew; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia; McDonough, KellyThis dissertation provides the first in-depth analysis of the “Bourbon language reforms”—a series of royal and ecclesiastical policies aimed at spreading the Spanish language in New Spain (now Mexico), enacted primarily between the 1750s and 1770s under the rule of the Bourbon dynasty. The limited scholarship on these reforms has assumed that a monolithic Bourbon state sought to mold a monolingual, Spanish-speaking empire. It has also suggested that creoles (American-born Spaniards), mendicants (Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars), indigenous peoples, or some combination thereof responded by uniformly opposing the Bourbon state’s oppressive measures. I challenge both of these arguments by analyzing the central Mexican Catholic Church’s “language regime”—not only official policies, but also their historical context, and predominant ideologies about indigenous languages and their speakers—between 1700 and 1821. I demonstrate that indigenous languages were deeply integrated into the inner workings of the Church—not only its religious services, but also its bureaucracy and hierarchy. Native language competency helped to determine clerics’ career paths, forge socioeconomic hierarchies within the Church, and shape political disputes between warring royal and ecclesiastical factions. This key role of native languages in the Church helped induce the Bourbon language reforms. In spite of the reform effort, however, native languages continued to play a critical role in ecclesiastical administration through the end of the colonial period. This was due in large part to the fact that the Bourbon state did not seek uniformly to eradicate these languages; indeed, royal and ecclesiastical authorities could not even agree on precisely what their language policy should entail. Few priests (creole or not) felt the need to resist a reform effort that was contradictory, piecemeal, and of limited consequence for the Church. Contrary to many scholars’ assumptions, these findings indicate that modern Mexico’s linguistic inequality is not a persistent vestige of colonial policy. Instead, 18th-century language policy was only an early step in a centuries-long process leading to today’s particular brand of linguistic discrimination.Item Bulletin No. 1, Issued by the Committee on Affiliated Schools, The University of Texas, Suggestions Concerning Courses of Study and Methods of Teaching in High Schools, Austin, Texas(University of Texas at Austin, 1901-02) University of Texas at AustinItem Does Lateral Transmission Obscure Inheritance in Hunter-Gatherer Languages?(Public Library of Science, 2011-09-27) Bowern, Claire; Epps, Patience; Gray, Russell; Hill, Jane; Hunley, Keith; McConvell, Patrick; Zentz, JasonIn recent years, linguists have begun to increasingly rely on quantitative phylogenetic approaches to examine language evolution. Some linguists have questioned the suitability of phylogenetic approaches on the grounds that linguistic evolution is largely reticulate due to extensive lateral transmission, or borrowing, among languages. The problem may be particularly pronounced in hunter-gatherer languages, where the conventional wisdom among many linguists is that lexical borrowing rates are so high that tree building approaches cannot provide meaningful insights into evolutionary processes. However, this claim has never been systematically evaluated, in large part because suitable data were unavailable. In addition, little is known about the subsistence, demographic, ecological, and social factors that might mediate variation in rates of borrowing among languages. Here, we evaluate these claims with a large sample of hunter-gatherer languages from three regions around the world. In this study, a list of 204 basic vocabulary items was collected for 122 hunter-gatherer and small-scale cultivator languages from three ecologically diverse case study areas: northern Australia, northwest Amazonia, and California and the Great Basin. Words were rigorously coded for etymological (inheritance) status, and loan rates were calculated. Loan rate variability was examined with respect to language area, subsistence mode, and population size, density, and mobility; these results were then compared to the sample of 41 primarily agriculturalist languages in [1]. Though loan levels varied both within and among regions, they were generally low in all regions (mean 5.06%, median 2.49%, and SD 7.56), despite substantial demographic, ecological, and social variation. Amazonian levels were uniformly very low, with no language exhibiting more than 4%. Rates were low but more variable in the other two study regions, in part because of several outlier languages where rates of borrowing were especially high. High mobility, prestige asymmetries, and language shift may contribute to the high rates in these outliers. No support was found for claims that hunter-gatherer languages borrow more than agriculturalist languages. These results debunk the myth of high borrowing in hunter-gatherer languages and suggest that the evolution of these languages is governed by the same type of rules as those operating in large-scale agriculturalist speech communities. The results also show that local factors are likely to be more critical than general processes in determining high (or low) loan rates.Item Emily Nash Interview(2021-08-20) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Emily Nash, a case manager and aspiring social worker in Austin. Emily reflects on her upbringing, including growing up lower class and the influences that caused her to pursue social work as a career. She discusses her current job as a case manager for elderly and disabled clients in Austin. Emily talks about how the Texas Freeze impacted the health and safety of her clients, as well as its impact on her own mental health and the state at large.Item Emmad Mazhari Interview(2022-06-16) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Emmad Mazhari, a software designer and photographer living in Houston, TX. Emmad talks about his childhood in Pakistan and his move and adjustment to the United States. He talks about his relationships to the places he has lived as well as his relationship to his Pakistani Muslim culture. Emmad describes the artistic projects he is planning and working on and shares some of his artistic inspirations.Item Exploiting hardware heterogeneity and parallelism for performance and energy efficiency of managed languages(2015-12) Jibaja, Ivan; Witchel, Emmett; McKinley, Kathryn S.; Blackburn, Stephen M; Batory, Don; Lin, CalvinOn the software side, managed languages and their workloads are ubiquitous, executing on mobile, desktop, and server hardware. Managed languages boost the productivity of programmers by abstracting away the hardware using virtual machine technology. On the hardware side, modern hardware increasingly exploits parallelism to boost energy efficiency and performance with homogeneous cores, heterogenous cores, graphics processing units (GPUs), and vector instructions. Two major forms of parallelism are: task parallelism on different cores and vector instructions for data parallelism. With task parallelism, the hardware allows simultaneous execution of multiple instruction pipelines through multiple cores. With data parallelism, one core can perform the same instruction on multiple pieces of data. Furthermore, we expect hardware parallelism to continue to evolve and provide more heterogeneity. Existing programming language runtimes must continuously evolve so programmers and their workloads may efficiently utilize this evolving hardware for better performance and energy efficiency. However, efficiently exploiting hardware parallelism is at odds with programmer productivity, which seeks to abstract hardware details. My thesis is that managed language systems should and can abstract hardware parallelism with modest to no burden on developers to achieve high performance, energy efficiency, and portability on ever evolving parallel hardware. In particular, this thesis explores how the runtime can optimize and abstract heterogenous parallel hardware and how the compiler can exploit data parallelism with new high-level languages abstractions with a minimal burden on developers. We explore solutions from multiple levels of abstraction for different types of hardware parallelism. (1) For asymmetric multicore processors (AMP) which have been recently introduced, we design and implement an application scheduler in the Java virtual machine (JVM) that requires no changes to existing Java applications. The scheduler uses feedback from dynamic analyses that automatically identify critical threads and classifies application parallelism. Our scheduler automatically accelerates critical threads, honors thread priorities, considers core availability and thread sensitivity, and load balances scalable parallel threads on big and small cores to improve the average performance by 20% and energy efficiency by 9% on frequency-scaled AMP hardware for scalable, non-scalable, and sequential workloads over prior research and existing schedulers. (2) To exploit vector instructions, we design SIMD.js, a portable single instruction multiple data (SIMD) language extension for JavaScript (JS), and implement its compiler support that together add fine-grain data parallelism to JS. Our design principles seek portability, scalable performance across various SIMD hardware implementations, performance neutral without SIMD hardware, and compiler simplicity to ease vendor adoption on multiple browsers. We introduce type speculation, compiler optimizations, and code generation that convert high-level JS SIMD operations into minimal numbers of SIMD native instructions. Finally, to accomplish wide adoption of our portable SIMD language extension, we explore, analyze, and discuss the trade-offs of four different approaches that provide the functionality of SIMD.js when vector instructions are not supported by the hardware. SIMD.js delivers an average performance improvement of 3.3× on micro benchmarks and key graphic algorithms on various hardware platforms, browsers, and operating systems. These language extension and compiler technologies are in the final approval process to be included in the JavaScript standards. This thesis shows using virtual machine technologies protects programmers from the underlying details of hardware parallelism, achieves portability, and improves performance and energy efficiency.Item Jaime "Mujahid" Fletcher Interview(2022-01-25) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Jaime “Mujahid” Fletcher, founder of IslamInSpanish. Jaime shares about his youth, during which he was involved in gang activity in Alief then developed his value of education in Colombia. After his conversion to Islam at twenty-three, Jaime began to translate Islamic literature and thought into Spanish so his Latino family and community could better understand Islam. Jaime goes on to describe the growth of IslamInSpanish from its inception as a family project to its current state as a vibrant community in the Centro Islamico in Alief. He also discusses the social justice projects IslamInSpanish is involved in and shares his advice for working toward social change.Item Jessica Disla Interview(2022-02-25) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Jessica Disla, a member of the IslamInSpanish community and an aspiring teacher. Jessica talks about growing up and family dynamics in a Dominican-American family in Dominican Republic and New York City. She shares her journey in her career and education and is currently working towards her bachelor’s in education in order to teach ESL. She discusses spiritual seeking and asking difficult questions about religion, and how her curiosity eventually led to IslamInSpanish and her conversion to Islam. Jessica describes her love for the IslamInSpanish community and the many ways she participates in it.Item Juan Coronado Interview(2021-08-18) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Dr. Juan Coronado, a professor from the Río Grande Valley. Juan reflects on growing up surrounded by Latino culture and on his exposure to migration and the presence of the border. He talks as a historian about his impressions of changes at the border and in the US at large that followed 9/11. Juan also discusses the effects of wars in the Middle East on Middle Eastern populations, American troops, and American culture.Item Maesha Meto Interview(2022-02-22) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Maesha Meto, a public affairs grad student and activist in Austin, TX. Maesha talks about her childhood experiences as a young immigrant, such as learning English and feeling alienated from her peers. She shares stories of the Islamophobia she and her family experienced while she was growing up. She also talks about her political awakening and her activist involvement, including police reform work in New York City.Item Nahuatl Holdings of the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas at Austin(1988) Schwaller, John FrederickItem Potential Ethnic Territories: Mapping Linguistic Data from Modern Andean Censuses(1989) Knapp, GregoryItem Sandy "Sakinah" Gutierrez Interview(2021-06-11) Institute for Diversity & Civic LifeThis interview is with Sandy “Sakinah” Gutierrez, a Colombian-American revert to Islam and co-founder of the non-profit IslamInSpanish. Sakinah tells the story of being a spiritual seeker alongside her husband, and how the two ultimately found fulfillment in Islam. She talks about how several members of their family decided to accept Islam due to the example and education she and her husband offered. Sakinah also discusses the founding and growth of IslamInSpanish, whose mission is to make information about Islam available to Spanish-speaking Latinos.Item Sola Akinola Interview(2022-08-04) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Sola Akinola, a musician and musical instructor in Grand Prairie, TX. Sola talks about his childhood as the son of Nigerian immigrants, describing a sense of alienation from both his peers and his culture. He discusses his interests such as favorite school subjects, stories, games, and musical involvement that led to his current career. Sola shares his experiences of discrimination and racism as a Black man and first-generation American, and he describes how these experiences have impacted his relationship with and understanding of the United States. He also talks about the intersection of these aspects of his identity with his neurodivergence.Item UbiPAL : secure messaging and access control for ubiquitous computing(2015-05) Bielstein, Cameron Taylor; Alvisi, Lorenzo; Dickerson, Robert F.The ubiquitous computing environment and modern trends in personal computing, such as body sensor networks and smart houses, create unique challenges in privacy and access control. Lack of centralized computing and the dynamic nature of human environments and access rules render most access control systems insufficient for this new category of systems. UbiPAL is an object-oriented communication framework for ubiquitous systems which provides secure communication and decentralized access control. UbiPAL uses a modified SecPAL implementation to provide reliable, ad hoc access control. The UbiPAL system uses cryptographically signed, publicly held namespace certificates and access control lists in the style of TLS certificates. This approach allows message authentication and authorization in an ad hoc, completely decentralized method while maintaining human readability of policy language. UbiPAL was implemented as a C++ library, made freely available at (1), and evaluated to have minimized overhead. Even on the slowest device evaluated, a Raspberry Pi, UbiPAL authentication and authorization adds less than 20 milliseconds to the delivery a message with a message overhead of 153 bytes. The UbiPAL programming model separates access policy from application programming and results in small amounts of code required from the application programmer, creating an accessible paradigm for programming ubiquitous computing systems.Item Victoria Ferrell-Ortiz Interview(2022-03-17) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Victoria Ferrell-Ortiz, an education and urban planning organizer in Dallas. Victoria describes the disconnect she saw at a young age between the resources available to the Mexican-American side of her family and to the White side. She talks about other organizers she has worked with and been inspired by in Dallas, including her co-founders of the Rayo Planning nonprofit. Victoria shares her experiences of religion throughout her life, and how her relationship to Christianity has changed over the years. She also details her work, such as with educational and urban planning nonprofits and with oral history.