Linguistics – Page 14 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Is mine big enough?

5 February 201115 January 2008 by admin

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.

Dying to be counted: commodification of endangered languages in documentary linguistics

5 February 201113 January 2008 by admin

[Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS, reporting on a joint poster presentation with Lise Dobrin (University of Virginia) and David Nathan (SOAS) at the 2008 LSA annual meeting]
They came. They saw. They chuckled. Some snickered, and a few laughed out loud. A couple even went “what the…?”
Such was the range of reactions to the poster which Lise Dobrin (University of Virginia), David Nathan (SOAS) and I presented at last week’s Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Chicago dealing with the topic of commodification of endangered languages, ie. their reduction to things to be counted and standardised, and their treatment as if they were a tradeable commodity.
At David’s suggestion we decided to adopt a satirical approach using the metaphor of a newspaper front page to deal with what is, of course, a very serious topic. It was the only (deliberately) funny poster at the LSA this year, and probably ever. Ten points to avid readers who get all the allusions and jokes. View thumbnail of image or full size poster here.

How do you say that in Aboriginal?

5 February 20111 January 2008 by admin

One of the “pleasures” that come with being known as a specialist in Australian Aboriginal languages is the string of requests one gets to translate various things into “Aboriginal”, especially names for pets, houses, boats or even children (one of my favourites happened when I was at La Trobe University and someone called wanting a translation for “Happy Anzac Day”). Sometimes the reverse holds and the “meaning” of a word “in Aboriginal” is asked for. Nowadays there are websites devoted to this task, such as this one which promises: “Thousands of ABORIGINAL NAMES for your DOG, CAT, HORSE, PET AND CHILD! From Chinaroad Lowchens of Australia”. This site at least mentions “these names/words are taken from several different Australian Aboriginal Languages”, though none is mentioned by name.
Recently, David Nash pointed out to me that an Aboriginal word, which he identified as coming from the Diyari language, had made its way onto a koala at the Planckendael Zoo in Belgium (located near Antwerp). The zoo established an “Australia” section in May 1998 where various Australian animals are exhibited, including koalas, each of which has been given an “Aboriginal” name. Information about the koala names can be found in both Dutch and French, Belgium being officially bilingual. Here is my translation of what they say:

Murriny Patha’s ‘Elided Progeny’ Construction

5 February 201127 December 2007 by admin

Murriny Patha is fun. Especially if you like “kintax” (Evans 2003), cause it’s got it in spades. Murriny Patha keeps delivering weird phenomena that require unconventional nomenclature (see for instance Walsh 1996). “So what”, I hear you asking, “is the ‘elided progeny’ construction?” In Murriny Patha it constitutes a subclass of what are clearly a group of “triangular” referring expressions, whereby a person-referent is referred to via “triangulation” – that is indirectly, via another person or persons. The most common of these are possessed kinterms: my father, your uncle, their cousin etc. The person that the kinterm is anchored to is frequently termed the propositus. Other classes of people may also take a propositus: e.g., John’s bank manager. Arguably all kinterms are anchored to a propositus, regardless of whether the propositus is expressed overtly or not. Thus when an adult addresses a child, “Hey, where’s daddy?”, the altercentric kinterm Daddy has an implied 2^nd person propositus. However the same adult, when talking to another adult, may use egocentric kinterms with an implied 1^st person propositus i.e., “Mum is driving me mad.”

The “elided progeny” construction is a kind of kin-based triangulation, but the kinterm corresponding to son or daughter is just missing. These things are very common in Murriny Patha conversation. In fact “triangulation” is generally a very common means of referring to people. I wouldn’t say it’s the default method of referring to persons, but it probably is the preferred choice for “upgrading” reference to persons. So how does this construction work? It’s basically a special case of the Murriny Patha possessive construction.

The hy-phen at Port Jackson

5 February 20119 December 2007 by David Nash

Mark Liberman’s post at Language Log ‘On
the origins of ‘American Indian hyphens’ (with updates) locates
“the practice of writing American Indian words — especially proper
names — with multiple internal hyphens” in the 19th century. The
earliest usage Mark has found so far is in an 1823 publication about an
1819-20 expedition across the USA.

Here in Australia, by about 1791 hyphens between
syllables were common when the Sydney Language was being
written down by the English colonists (who had arrived in 1788).

A good example is David Collins’ list near the end of his 1798 An account of the
English colony in New
South Wales (pp.407-413 in 1975 edition; at “What
follows is
offered only as a specimen, not as a perfect vocabulary of their
language”).

Spreading sounds of joy

5 February 20115 December 2007 by Jane Simpson

‘Tis the season for workshops.
Deck the walls with electropalatograms and nasal airflow measurements
These blazed out of powerpoints in the David Myer Building at La Trobe University, where about 25 or so people interested in the sounds of Australian languages gathered for a workshop organised by Marija Tabain.
Many of the papers were collaborative, often between descriptive linguists and phoneticians or phonologists, named as authors or in acknowledgments. The success demonstrated a point that Gavan Breen made (Reflecting on retroflexion):
“grammars, especially of languages that have been worked on by only one researcher are likely to have systematic errors in them, and they need checking”

Noisy placenames

5 February 201130 November 2007 by Jane Simpson

This week saw a conference on placenames held in Ballarat Trends in Toponymy: Indigenous identity and theoretical developments in placename research, (organised by Ian Clark and Laura Kostanski). I got to the first two days of talks, which sparkled with maps and pictures of the places whose names were under discussion. Here are some ideas that struck me.

What’s the default language for an Indigenous writer?

5 February 201119 November 2007 by Jane Simpson

When Australians talk about ‘Indigenous writing’, ‘Indigenous writers’ and ‘Indigenous literature’ in Australia, they usually don’t mean ‘writing in Indigenous languages’. They mean English. You’d never guess that Indigenous Australians wrote in their own languages from reading Lisa Slater’s review [1] of Penny van Toorn’s recent book (2006) Writing never arrives naked: Early Aboriginal cultures of writing in Australia. (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press). Go instead to Mary-Anne Gale’s (1997) book Dhaŋum Djorra’wuy Dhäwu: a history of writing in Aboriginal languages. Adelaide: Aboriginal Research Institute, University of South Australia. (and go to the end of this post to see how to get a copy!).
In fact, Van Toorn does have a little about early writings in Indigenous languages, but not much, because she mostly focuses on the east coast of Australia and Tasmania. The English monolingual mindset has always been very strong on the east coast since the early settlers spoke mostly English, or Gaelic, which was not highly valued as a language of learning. The monolingual mindset was less strong in South Australia (which, with the Northern Territory, is the focus of Gale’s study), since the early settlers included a relatively large group of speakers of German. German was one of the major languages of science in the nineteenth century, English speakers studied it, and the SA German settlers published in German and ran German language schools until World War 1.
That’s perhaps why bilingual education in Indigenous languages, and the production of literature in Indigenous languages has been strongest in South Australia and the Northern Territory, (which was part of SA during its first effective settlement from 1863 – 1911, and which, after 1911, retained close links with SA in relevant institutions such as churches and the law). Van Toorn suggests (p.14) that the German missionaries used the local languages because they knew very little English. Much more relevant are the language policies of the London Mission Society and the Lutheran mission societies, as well as the early SA missionaries’ discussions with the Governors of South Australia, about what languages to use in schools [2].

World Language Centre conference on cultural and linguistic diversity

5 February 201118 November 2007 by admin

The Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Institute of Foreign Languages at the University of Iceland organised a conference on cultural and linguistic diversity on 2nd and 3rd November. The conference was associated with a proposal to set up a World Language Centre in Reykjavík and two main topics were discussed:
1. future visions for the World Language Centre to be established at the University of Iceland; and
2. comparative research in linguistic, literary and cultural studies
The conference was opened by Geir H. Haarde, the Prime Minister of Iceland (John Howard please note) who stressed the importance of multilingualism in the modern world and the need for people to learn several languages, not only for their economic advantages, but also to appreciate the richness and beauty of their own native language and culture. The Prime Minister is himself a fluent speaker of Icelandic, English, Danish, Swedish, German and Italian (beat that Alexander Downer). The PM was followed by Vigdís herself, the former President of Iceland (1980-1996) and UNESCO goodwill ambassador for languages, who stressed the need for academics and the general public to appreciate cultural and linguistic diversity. We non-Icelanders in the audience were wishing that we had even a fraction of this top-level political support for linguistics and languages back in our home countries.

Wikid plug

5 February 201115 November 2007 by admin

Recently Jangari proudly told me that his Wikipedia page on Wagiman was ranked as “good” by wikimedia. Well they got that right. Check it out, it’s fantastic. Good on you Mali. Give the man a PhD scholarship! He’s clearly ready for big things.