Jane Simpson

New languages two – Old languages love

5 February 201115 October 2008 by Jane Simpson

[Update! See the comments! Darkness is lightened! How I overlooked Nick Thieberger’s QE2 I don’t know, but it is FANTASTIC news for PARADISEC! And on the computational linguistics side, good about Tim Baldwin’s project]
It’s Poverty Action Day. Whaddya know, speakers of small endangered languages are usually the poorest of the poor, and often don’t have the time/money to work on their own languages. That work gets done in partnerships with linguists and others from rich countries like Australia. No joy for this in the Australian Research Council funding results. This must be the worst year for funding endangered language work for a very very long time. (I whinged in 2006 about the ARC lottery results – but that was a FAR better year).
After wading through piles of .pdfs, I could only spot two grants for endangered language work – both for work on new languages in the Northern Territory, [plug! stemming in part from the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project]. Congratulations to

Caroline Jones, (based at the University of Wollongong) Phonological development in child speakers of mixed language
Felicity Meakins (based at the University of Queensland) Life after death: Exploring the birth of Gurindji Kriol, a new Aboriginal mixed language.

Also connected to Indigenous languages and cultures are:

PARADISEC’s Linda Barwick, who is a CI on a Linkage grant (Sustainable futures for music cultures: Toward an ecology of musical diversity [.pdf], first CI Prof Dr H Schippers, Griffith University)
Paul Burke’s ANU anthropology project Indigenous Diaspora: a new direction in the ethnographic study of the migration of Australian Aboriginal people from remote areas. Dead relevant to the Intervention…

Please lighten my gloom by noting if I’ve missed any projects of direct relevance to Transient Languages readers.

Pilbara language dictionaries – free, interactive and downloadable

5 February 201114 October 2008 by Jane Simpson

Wow! Sally Dixon has just pointed me to Wangka Maya (the Pilbara Language Centre)’s free downloadable interactive Pilbara language dictionaries for the following languages: Bayungu, Burduna, Jiwarli, Martu Wangka, Nyamal, Nyangumarta, Thalanyji, Warnman, and Yulparija.
“These may be downloaded and used for personal use at no cost.”
What a fantastic resource! And what a good way of ensuring that the material isn’t lost.
Lucky PC users, unlucky Mac users – they’re made in Lexique Pro, and so they run under Windows only. Off to the Windows emulator sigh.., as the LP people say firmly that they have NO plans to make Mac or Linux versions.

More on munanga – John Avery

5 February 20119 October 2008 by Jane Simpson

[from John Avery]
It’s inevitably guesswork, but I reckon munanga is one of those spirit-connected words – not far off devil or ghost. It is used widely in the central NT Gulf of Carpentaria and Tablelands.
Another word for white people is mandaji – the feminine is mandanga. You can hear these words at Elliott, especially from Gudanji, Wambaya or Nanka (Ngarnji). Aji/anga (also f. -ana) are personal suffixes. So -anga also could be a personal suffix attached to mun-.
Mun by itself means to curse or place a deadly curse on someone. The usual motive is jealousy. For example, a long time ago a devil from Manda waterhole on Beetaloo went up to Tanumbrini station which was the home of another devil. The Manda traveller was turfed out by the Tanumbrini devil who was jealous for the country. The Tanumbrini bloke ‘bin mun’ the Munda fella, so old Tanumbrini station is called Mun-min. The mun bit is more like muyin in Muyinmin, but by itself my informants say mun (i.e. shortway).

Recognition for PARADISEC!

5 February 20113 October 2008 by Jane Simpson

Last Wednesday, at the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference, PARADISEC was announced as the winner of the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) eResearch Prize (Humanities and Social Sciences category) for 2008. In the words of the judges: “PARADISEC is an outstanding application of ICT tools in the humanities and social sciences domain that harnesses the work … Read more

FEL, Fryslân and cultural wealth

5 February 201124 September 2008 by Jane Simpson

The 26th of September 2008 is the annual European Language Day, and this year is the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which among many other good things recognises “regional or minority languages as an expression of cultural wealth”.
So, when and where better to hold the Foundation for Endangered Languages‘ annual conference, than in Fryslân? It’s all happening from September 24 to 27 in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, at the Fryske Akademy, (who incidentally sponsor a Frisian spell-checker for MS Office – yes!)
The abstracts are on the web [.pdf]

FATSIL 2008 Indigenous Languages conference

5 February 201117 September 2008 by Jane Simpson

Indigenous voices of the language to come together in the International Year of Languages Federation of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Languages (FATSIL) 2008 Annual General Meeting & Indigenous Languages Forum Theme 2008: Same kinship, different languages Place: Watermark Hotel, Gold Coast, Queensland Dates: 29th and 30th October 2008 Deadline for proposals: 29th September Contact: … Read more

Indigenous research fellowships at AIATSIS

29 June 201115 September 2008 by Jane Simpson

This arrived in the e-mail – and would be a great opportunity for an Indigenous researcher interested in languages to work with the fabulous audio-visual collection at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra, or to engage with the Government on language policy.

A good win

5 February 201114 September 2008 by Jane Simpson

The inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award (Non-Fiction) has been won by Philip Jones for his book Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers (Wakefield Press, 2007).
[ Update 6/10/08 And the book has now also won the Chief Minister’s NT History Book award against some fine competitors, including the author and Anna Kenny (Muslim cameleers), Darrell Lewis (Murranji track), Alec Kruger’s autobiography, and Amanda Nettlebeck and Robert Foster on murderous Constable Wilshire].
The book is a pleasurable mingling of history and reconstructed ethnographic fragments, presented as a series of stories about encounters between Aborigines and non-Aborigines from 1788 to the early twentieth century. Each chapter is a reflection on an artefact in the collection of the South Australian Museum. These are the stories that are shrunk into a single line caption in a museum display. The stories are about the people involved – the maker, the collector, their friends, associates and relations – bringing in the history of the artefact and the wider context in which it was collected, and what this may say about the relations between Aborigines and non-Aborigines.

OZCLO- wanna be part of it?

5 February 201110 September 2008 by Jane Simpson

I raved on about how good OZCLO was in an earlier post.
So, now here’s your chance to get involved….
Call for Expressions of Interest
OZCLO – Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad 2009
The Inaugural Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OZCLO) was held earlier this year at the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney. The three winning teams from the State rounds in both states competed to solve problems in Icelandic agreement, finite state automata, Mayan hieroglyphs, Manam Pile directionals, and spectrograms of English in the national round in August. Competitors ranged from year 9 to year 12, and came from both state and private schools. The competition was a huge success and a lot of fun for all involved. We would like to hold it again next year, and are hoping to expand it into other states, depending on the level of interest (we already have interest from Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia). So we are now calling for expressions of interest from colleagues around Australia who would be willing to be involved in next year’s competition.

Grammar-writing group (2) – general properties

5 February 20112 September 2008 by Jane Simpson

It’s yellow everywhere in Canberra – it’s Wattle Day. Meanwhile, inside the honeycomb Coombs building at ANU, the grammar-writing group wrestled with Ulrike Mosel’s article, ‘Grammaticography: The art and craft of writing grammars’, in Catching language: The standing challenge of grammar writing (Eds. Felix K. Ameka, Alan Dench, Nicholas Evans, Mouton de Gruyter, 2006, pp.41-68).
The name ‘Grammaticography’, while way way behind in the ‘most elegant word of the day’ competition, leads into the nice comparison made by Mosel between preparing dictionaries and preparing grammars. Front matter, macro structure, microstructure and all. It also led to us thinking about the growing fuzziness of the boundary between lexicon and grammar- all those Advanced Learners Grammars with heaps of information about subcategorisation, or the OED with its definitions of suffixes, all those grammars with information about the meanings of words.
One thing that grammars have over most dictionaries however, is the notion of publishing an accompanying set of texts. Falsifiability has traditionally been more of a concern for grammarians than for lexicographers. We all agree it’s a good thing to publish glossed texts so that readers can check out the hypotheses proposed in the grammar, and expressed by the glossing. The classic example is Jeffrey Heath’s careful analysis of R. M.W. Dixon’s Dyirbal texts (HEATH, J. 1979. Is Dyirbal ergative?. Linguistics 17, 401-463) to argue against DIxon’s claim about Dyirbal being syntactically Ergative. Can anyone think of further examples?