Congratulations to Katie Bicevskis who presented her PhD completion talk last Friday. The PhD thesis is a grammar of Marri Ngarr, an Indigenous language from the Northern Territory, one of what are known as the Daly languages (https://dalylanguages.org/view_language.php?id=10). It has few speakers today, as most Marri Ngarr people now speak Murrinhpatha as a first language.
This thesis was based on materials recorded by earlier observers, in particular by Ian Green. In 2015, with funding from the the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Rachel Nordlinger arranged to have all of Ian Green’s tapes and field notes digitised. This collection was archived in PARADISEC so that it could be found and then be licensed for access.
In the initial stages of the project, because she had a small child, Katie was unable to carry out fieldwork in the speech community so her work initially was focussed on transcribing 50 hours of recordings, using notes and handwritten transcripts of some of the recordings to help with the work. Subsequently Katie was able to travel to work with speakers, checking and adding to the analysis after having established a working knowledge of the language from the archival records. The PhD has enriched the archival record by providing transcripts and so making the recordings more accessible, and re-usable by speakers and by future researchers.
This is an excellent example of the importance of accessible archives of language materials, with recordings that can be used in a timely manner while speakers can still understand the records and discuss their contents.
Follow
Here at Endangered Languages and Cultures, we fully welcome your opinion, questions and comments on any post, and all posts will have an active comments form. However if you have never commented before, your comment may take some time before it is approved. Subsequent comments from you should appear immediately.
We will not edit any comments unless asked to, or unless there have been html coding errors, broken links, or formatting errors. We still reserve the right to censor any comment that the administrators deem to be unnecessarily derogatory or offensive, libellous or unhelpful, and we have an active spam filter that may reject your comment if it contains too many links or otherwise fits the description of spam. If this happens erroneously, email the author of the post and let them know. And note that given the huge amount of spam that all WordPress blogs receive on a daily basis (hundreds) it is not possible to sift through them all and find the ham.
In addition to the above, we ask that you please observe the Gricean maxims:*Be relevant: That is, stay reasonably on topic.
*Be truthful: This goes without saying; don’t give us any nonsense.
*Be concise: Say as much as you need to without being unnecessarily long-winded.
*Be perspicuous: This last one needs no explanation.
We permit comments and trackbacks on our articles. Anyone may comment. Comments are subject to moderation, filtering, spell checking, editing, and removal without cause or justification.
All comments are reviewed by comment spamming software and by the site administrators and may be removed without cause at any time. All information provided is volunteered by you. Any website address provided in the URL will be linked to from your name, if you wish to include such information. We do not collect and save information provided when commenting such as email address and will not use this information except where indicated. This site and its representatives will not be held responsible for errors in any comment submissions.
Again, we repeat: We reserve all rights of refusal and deletion of any and all comments and trackbacks.