admin There has been an interesting discussion on the LINGTYP linguistic typology list over the past week about publishing fieldwork data (archived here). David Gil argued that:
One’s collection of transcribed texts constitutes a set of complete objects, each of which could (if there were a willing publisher) stand alone as an electronic or hardcopy publication. Barring the discovery and correction of errata, once the text is transcribed, that’s it, it’s done.
Almost ten years ago, the late Ken Hale argued that global language destruction will lead to loss of important information to linguistics and other sciences. In an article called “On endangered languages and the importance of linguistic diversity” published in Endangered Languages: Language Loss and Community Response edited by Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley. Ken wrote:
The loss of linguistic diversity is a loss to scholarship and science. – While a major goal of linguistic science is to define universal grammar, i.e. to determine what is constant and invariant in the grammars of all natural languages, attainment of that goal is severely hampered, some would say impossible, in the absence of linguistic diversity.
As someone who is currently supervising PhD students undertaking fieldwork in various locations around the world, the health and safety of my students is a fundamental concern. This was especially brought home a week ago when an 8.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami devastated coastal villages in the western Solomon Islands, including the village on Ranongga Island where one of our PhD students is working. Fortunately she was in a boat at sea when the earthquake hit and was OK; the same cannot be said for Ranongga Island however. Communications with the area are difficult but it appears that several people died, many were injured, and the village and everything in it (including her fieldnotes and equipment) may have been destroyed.
I spent last week in Lyon working on plans for collaborative teaching and research with Colette Grinevald and her colleagues at Lyon-2 University and the CNRS DDL research laboratory. This will include a summer school on language documentation planned for June-July 2008 (we will announce more details soon), joint workshops and conferences, and development of a European Masters programme.
On Saturday (31st March) Michel Bert, who also teaches at Lyon-2 and is a researcher in the CNRS ICAR research laboratory, invited Colette and me to accompany him south from Lyon along the Rhône River to visit the field sites where he has been collecting data on the Franco-Provençal language over the past 10 years. Michel’s PhD dissertation is a detailed study of this language based on data he collected from over 150 consultants.
My nightmare with Windows is finally over.
Yay! Crossover! It rules!
Late last year my G4 ibook came to a premature demise, probably a victim of all the dust and the ruts on the road to Wadeye from Daly River, which I did enough times to make me and my car age. Can’t have done the laptop much good.
So I bought an Intel mac thinking ‘great now I can run Toolbox‘. I really wasted a lot of time. I didn’t lose any data. But when I discovered what Windows was going to cost me, plus the emulator Parallels, in order to run Windows, it was the best part of A$300. I also spent a lot of time, trying just about anything to avoid paying for Windows after forking out for a new computer (for the second time in my PhD candidature). All that just to run Toolbox which is a freely downloadable application.
In a previous posting ‘Modern Grammar from nineteenth century mission materials’ Jane Simpson refers to the 2005 University of Adelaide doctoral dissertation, The language of the chosen view: the first phase of graphization of Dieri by Hermannsburg Missionaries, Lake Killalpaninna 1867-80 by Heidi Kneebone who, she says ‘takes linguists to task for NOT looking at early grammars of the languages they’re working on’.
Now I don’t have a copy of this dissertation and only had a few hours in Canberra recently to skim through a copy lent to me by Luise Hercus. I was impressed by the historical work Kneebone had done with Lutheran sources (some written in an old German handwriting that is incredibly difficult to read, at least for me) and how she turned up materials written in Diyari by native speakers that I had not seen before. But since the thesis makes claims about my own research on Diyari, spoken in northern South Australia, and appears to suggest that the language I recorded thirty years ago from the last generation of fluent speakers was in part a missionary creation, I would like to take this opportunity to make a couple of points.
I bought myself a new digital SLR camera for Christmas, and it revived in me a love for photography. Back in my teenage years I had an Olympus OM-1 – the classic journalism camera of the seventies. I’d run around shooting everything and then come back home to process the film. Fortunately my school had a great darkroom set up… although, it sucked up a lot of time I should have spent on other things.
Its great to have full control of the image again, and I’m not feeling too nostalgic about the darkroom side of things (although that was half the fun!). Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras give you a lot of control over your image, but there are several things that you need to know to get started. But even if you’re not into the raw technicalities, you can take good photos with a point and shoot camera.
Chinese Pidgin English is most certainly a transient language — it arose from contact between English and Chinese traders in the late 17th century and ceased to be spoken by the early 20th century. During its short life Chinese Pidgin English donated several expressions to standard varieties of English, where they live on. Among these donated expressions is chop-chop, meaning ‘hurry up’. Most etymologies of the English word chopsticks (e.g. those in the the Oxford English Dictionary, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Hobson-Jobson Anglo-Indian dictionary) claim that it is also derived from Pidgin English. Chopsticks is taken to be a semi-calque on the word 筷子 kuàizi (Mandarin pronunciation), which is the usual word for chopsticks in many Chinese dialects.1 The 筷 kuài in kuàizi is homophonous in many dialects with the word for ‘fast’, 快 kuài. The theory is that the English word chopsticks comes from the Pidgin word chop ‘fast’ plus the English word stick. The true story may not be that simple, however.
Dear ELAN Workshop attendees, and anyone who might find this of interest,
There were a few loose ends left at the end of the ELAN workshop last week. I’d particularly like to address one, the question as to whether we should aim for a standard set of ELAN templates which everyone uses.
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