Wenn Baumstämme sprechen. Trommelsprache in Kolumbien und Peru. Reihe: MitWissenschaft. WeltSprachen – SprachWelten

In the organizer's words:

Communication at a distance can be difficult in the impassable Amazon region. This is why the Bora, who live on both sides of the Colombian-Peruvian border, use a language substitute: drum sounds. The deep sounds produced by the hollowed-out tree trunks known as manguarés reach much further than the human voice.

Strictly speaking, the instruments used are not drums, but "idiophones", i.e. self-tuners. The sound is not produced by a vibrating membrane, as with a classical drum, but the entire body of the instrument vibrates.

Linguist Frank Seifart and ethnomusicologist Maurice Mengel will discuss with each other and the audience how such signal drums are created and how messages can be reproduced with just a few tones.

Participants

Sabrina N'Diaye studied ethnology and political science. She learned the craft of journalism at ZDF, after which she worked for SWR and ARTE. She has been with RBB since 2016, where she presents the rbb24 Spätnachrichten news show and writes longer documentaries.

Frank Seifart researches linguistic diversity at the CNRS laboratoire Structure et Dynamique des Langues, Villejuif, France, and is a private lecturer at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since 1999 he has been working on the Bora language in the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon. His research focuses on language documentation and description, language history and contact, and language comparison in the Amazon region and worldwide.

Maurice Mengel is an ethnomusicologist and completed his doctorate with a thesis on a Romanian music archive in Bucharest and its role in socialist cultural policy until 1970. Since 2019, he has been head of the Media Department of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, which includes extensive and historically significant holdings of film, photo and sound recordings such as the Berlin Phonogram Archive.

- 5 EUR, reduced 2.50 EUR

- from 16 years

- Language: German

- Location: Room 3, ground floor

- Part of: WithScience