Dhanggati people (Dhanggati is the language of the Macleay Valley) and linguists are well served by a new 205 page reference book on the language.
Lissarrague, Amanda. 2007. Dhanggati grammar and dictionary. Nambucca Heads: Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Cooperative 14 Bellwood Road, Nambucca Heads NSW 2448.
It’s another Muurrbay product (in 2006 they published a reference book on the Hunter River language by Lissarrague) which really justifies the funding from the Maintenance of Indigenous Languages and Records programme, now housed in the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.
Linguistics
FollowEndangered Languages on TV
A series of five documentaries on languages is scheduled to air on OBE (Original Black Entertainment) TV in the UK starting on 13th April 2008. OBE TV is a freeview 24 hour Channel on Sky Digital Channel 204 with a primary target audience from the African, Caribbean and other ethnic communities in the UK and Ireland, Europe, North Africa and beyond. OBE TV reaches over 7.8 million satellite subscribers in the UK and Ireland alone.
The documentary series is called World – Speaking in Tongues and the episodes are…..
Honourable mentions
Since 1963 the Australian National University has annually awarded the University Medal as its most prestigious undergraduate academic prize. At each conferring of degrees ceremony the University’s most outstanding first class honours students are recognised with the award. An Honour Board displaying the names of all University Medal winning students was launched in February 2008 and is now on display in the Great Hall, University House, Canberra. There is a Virtual Honour Board on the ANU website.
Between 1974 and the present 17 Linguistics students have been awarded the medal, and quite a few names that will be familiar to readers of this blog are among them. They include a number of students who went on to do PhDs and further research describing and/or documenting endangered languages:
Cool times at Kioloa
This year’s Australian languages workshop, the seventh, was very well organised by Kazuko Obata, Jutta Besold, Jo Caffery and the rest of their committee. It was held at Kioloa [kai’oʊlə], ANU’s field station on the NSW south coast. Spongy green grass and tall green trees make it a far cry from drought-ridden Canberra, and the extent of the wilderness is restful. Walking along a white beach to the Murramarang Aboriginal area (very good signs with information on local words for sea creatures and traditional practices). Generations of rainbow lorikeets trained by generations of students to perch on arms, shoulders, knees. Boobook owls calling in the night as we looked at the Milky Way during Earth Hour.
The weather was perfect, warm, and the papers were cool..
Australian Linguistics Institute and LingFest 2008
The Australian Linguistics Institute is now open for online registration [finally – oh the pain of making a rego page that’s secure AND university-compliant, tax-compliant, human-compliant...]. Short, intensive courses will be presented by some excellent linguists from 7th – 11th July 2008, at the University of Sydney. It is a great opportunity for linguists, language professionals, graduate students and advanced undergraduates to learn more about a wide range of topics in language. Plus there’s to be a three day Indigenous Languages Institute sponsored by the Koori Centre which will bring heaps of Indigenous people working on languages together to work on problems of language maintenance and language revitalisation.
Participants may register for up to four courses during the week-long ALI. Each course is offered for 1.5 hours each day for five days. Topics include psycholinguistics (Anne Cutler), first language acquisition (Rosalind Thornton and Stephen Crain), morpho-syntax (Brett Baker, Greville Corbett, Mark Harvey, Rachel Nordlinger, Gert Webelhuth and Regine Eckhardt), computational linguistics (Robert Dale, Mary Dalrymple, Mark Dras), Japanese grammar (Nerida Jarkey and Harumi Minagawa), sociolinguistics (Jennifer Hay, Michael Clyne, Diana Eades), semantics (Bert Peeters, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka), discourse and conversational analysis (Celia Kitzinger, Jim Martin, Sigrid Norris), sign language linguistics and grammaticalisation (Louise de Beuzeville and Trevor Johnston), contact language typology (Ian Smith), quantitative methods (Carsten Roever) and educational linguistics (William Armour, Ryuko Kubota, Ahmar Mahboob, Aek Phakiti).
Do book your accommodation early, as the combination of World Youth Day and the Pope’s visit the following week mean that accommodation may be taken up.
Words for new ideas: ‘What’s your age?’
Mari Rhydwen is working with people developing resources for teaching Indigenous languages of New South Wales. She asks if speakers of traditional languages in Australia have engineered terms for talking about age in years and, if so, how they did it. It’s quite possible that they have invented terms for other things (reading, school, money), but haven’t felt the need to talk about people’s ages in terms of years, except in English.
I could only think of age grade and status terms (child, woman with children etc) in traditional languages to describe someone’s age, and of the use of ‘Christmas’ to mean ‘year’, but I couldn’t recall an instance where someone described someone’s age in terms of Christmasses.
Over to blog-readers for their ideas. Here’s a start from Robert Hoogenaad:
Australia’s linguistic exports
There is an article in Tuesday’s Education supplement of the The Guardian newspaper with the byline “Bowling Google a googly” about Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media Studies at Brighton University, who recently gave her inaugural lecture there. Professor Brabazon hails from Perth and the interview article makes much of her Australian connections (including her 2002 book Ladies Who Lunge that includes a discussion of another Australian academic export to the UK, Germaine Greer).
At the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Chicago two weeks ago, among the assembled linguists were seven Australians now established overseas:
More on language documentation corpora
We had an interesting discussion about documentation corpora in the course I taught last week for the LOT winter school at the Universiteit van Tilburg.
In the course I took the somewhat strong view that a documentary corpus minimally consists of: (a) media or text recordings (inscriptions), with (b) time-aligned transcription, and (c) time-aligned translation, and (d) relevant metadata about the documentation and communicative context. Thus, on this view, the 150 hours of untranscribed video collected by a project that one of the students is involved in is not part of any corpus (though it might be what Himmelmann (2006:10) calls ‘primary data’ (“recordings of observable linguistic behaviour and metalinguistic knowledge”), or what OLAC calls ‘a resource’, and it might become part of the corpus when it is worked on in the future). Neither is the audio recording of a 6-person conversation that another student made in Sri Lanka that neither he nor his consultants are able to transcribe. Media recordings without transcription or translation thus do not constitute data by themselves and don’t document anything. This view of what a corpus is also appears in the DoBeS guidelines as presented in Brugman 2003, available here, and on the HRELP website. A corpus can be enriched by annotation (see Bird and Liberman 2001) with the addition of linguistic information like morphemic analysis, morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, part of speech tags etc (see Schultze-Berndt 2006), or non-linguistic information like kinship relations or cultural practices etc (see Franchetto 2006).
Is mine big enough?
At the recent Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Chicago, Sandra Chung from University of California Santa Cruz gave an invited plenary address on the topic “How much can understudied languages really tell us about how language works?” She argued, among other things, that data from understudied languages should play a crucial role in the development of linguistic theory since only by including them can we get a full picture of the array of phenomena found in human languages that need to be taken account of. She illustrated her talk with examples from her work on Chamorro, an endangered Austronesian language spoken on Guam.
During the question time following Sandy’s talk, one person commented something along the following lines (I paraphrase, since I was rather stunned to hear the opinion being openly expressed before a linguistics audience, and don’t recall the exact formulation):
Linguistic research needs to concentrate on working with corpora and for the sort of languages you were talking about, like Chamorro, you will never be able to put together a corpus of sufficient size to be able to do anything meaningful. We should give up on the small (and disappearing) languages and concentrate on ones where we are likely to be able to get a decent sized corpus.