Today’s Australian has the linguist Frances Kofod’s moving obituary for a Gija painter and law man, Hector Jandany. This is the good side of the Australian‘s coverage of Indigenous affairs. The bad side however has come to the fore this week.
Jane Simpson
FollowTransience and permanence on the web
An RSS feed is forever.. that’s what I forgot in the Technorati post (now deleted) – in my desire to avoid Technorati’s quick blog registration (which requires sending a valuable password into the Technorati ether, perhaps forever…). Sorry all! (And boy have we paid for it with streams of junk comments from strip poker sites!).
How do we know what they see? Field linguists and the appearance of things
Vivid pink plum trees, white cherry trees, soft masses of yellow wattle, japonica hedges with pink flowers leaping out of new green leaves, white cockatoos browsing on the ground. That was Canberra during the Rematerialising colour conference at ANU’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. How does the outsider linguist find out if speakers of another language have colour terms? This important question for field linguists and lexicographers was raised in two papers on the Australian language Warlpiri by David Nash and Anna Wierzbicka.
PhD scholarships at the University of Sydney
if you want to spend three years thinking and writing about languages and cultures of Australia and the Asia-Pacific region …
Nod to Ethics committee: HEALTH WARNING: and you’re not ESPECIALLY worried about whether you’ll find a interesting job afterwards….
… applications for the 2007 APA/UPA scholarships at the University of Sydney are now open. Information and an application can be downloaded from:
http://www.usyd.edu.au/ro/training/postgraduate_awards.shtml
Smoke, mirrors, language and Indigenous education
Kirsten Storry’s paper on the problems with Aboriginal education received a write-up was discussed by her in an opinion-piece in the Australian 31 August 2006. She is described as a ‘policy analyst’ for the Centre for Independent Studies. For her, problems with “literacy levels” equals problems with literacy in English – Indigenous languages are not on her radar. Hence the complexity of teaching second language students to read and write in a second language does not feature in her account. Remember when outsourcing was supposed to save government departments heaps of money, and also to improve efficiency of IT systems? Well, that’s Storry’s solution to Aboriginal education..
Sinhalese/Tamil or English? Guest blogger: Thushara Gamage
Following on the discussion of Sri Lankan Portuguese in the Speaking to God and Mammon post, Thushara Gamage, Linguistics department alumna, gives her view on what’s happening to the linguistic ecology of Sri Lanka, and why.
Speaking to God and Mammon
Two seminars were given last week at Sydney University on languages in contact – Helen Fulton (University of Wales, Swansea) on “Language on the Borders : Contacts between Welsh and English in the Marches of Wales after 1066”, and Ian Smith‘s (currently visiting the Linguistics Department for a year) Linguistics department seminar “Wesleyan missionaries and the conversion of Sri Lanka Portuguese”, on the new languages in Sri Lanka that developed from contact with Portuguese, Dutch and then English. In both cases aspirations for heavenly and worldly advancement provided motivations for language shift and language maintenance, sometimes in competition and sometimes in collaboration.
Gimme that old-time jukurrpa!
Two major recent events in the Northern Territory were Gurindji Freedom Day (discussed on the 7.30 report (21/8/06) (tx T & D for the link!)), and the Garma Festival. The song from the Lajamanu band that was played at Garma ‘Gimme that old-time jukurrpa!’ [jukurrpa = dreaming, law in Warlpiri] appeals to me for its lighthearted bringing together of present and past, English and Warlpiri, Christianity and Jukurrpa.