Following on from Jane’s announcement during the week of all the great news regarding successful grant applications, I have another bit of good news to share: James McElvenny and I recently applied for, and even more recently received, a grant from a philanthropic foundation to support our current work in compiling dictionaries.
Linguistics
FollowOn technology training in the speaker community – Andrea L. Berez
[From Andrea L. Berez, University of California, Santa Barbara]
A few weeks ago in Uppsala, Nick Thieberger and I gave a talk on the need for digital standards and training in language documentation. During the Q-and-A, a distinguished member of the audience asked us, “How do you suggest we go about making communities do all the things you’ve been talking about?”
He was referring to the examples I had just been discussing regarding Alaska, where local (i.e., non-university) efforts at documentation and archiving are underway in several villages. He wanted to know how we, as linguists, can convince speaker community members to take up arms in the race for documentation and revitalization. After a moment’s consideration, I could only reply, “I’ve never had any luck making the community do anything.”
Although it may have seemed like a flippant response at the time, it was also a true one: any time I have been involved in proactively bringing technological standards and digital language-related activities to Alaskan communities, the result has always been different from what I expected.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge proponent of local training in language technology, and I’ve actively participated some of that training myself. I believe knowledge is power, and I don’t subscribe to the notion that technology is somehow harmful or hegemonic. I consider it my responsibility to pass on my technical skills to anyone who wants to know. What I’m saying is that in my experience, attempts to introduce academic ideals about the “proper” way to do language documentation into the speaker community when nobody’s asked for it has led to frustration.
Pilbara language dictionaries – free, interactive and downloadable
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.
An “unsaleable bent stick”, boomerangs, and yardsticks
The (in)authenticity of accounts of early Sydney have been in the news recently. The fictionalised account of Lt William Dawes and his pioneering documentation of the Sydney Language in Kate Grenville’s new novel The Lieutenant has had mixed reviews, but the concurrent story about a possible 1770 boomerang has gripped me more.
Ten days ago the Sydney Morning Herald reported
A boomerang claimed to have belonged to Captain James Cook appears to have been withdrawn from sale on the eve of a London auction after advice from the National Museum of Australia that it was probably not the real thing.
The Times reported bluntly that
Arthur Palmer, an Australian ethnographer who independently appraised the boomerang, described it is [sic] an “unsaleable bent stick” which hails from about the 1820s — 40 years after the explorer’s death.
The colourful Arthur Beau Palmer‘s sizeable bucket of cold water can be hefted here; it is worth consulting for the view of early Sydney weapons. The story began in The Times of 21 August (with a photograph) and here in The Age on 22 August; there was an update in the SMH on 10 September.
Munanga
Munanga, ‘white person’ is widespread among the languages of the Arnhem Land region
as Jay Arthur (1996:161) notes in her compilation of written Aboriginal English, supported by citations from the northern NT 1977-1995.1 This extends to the present, as Wamut that munanga linguist can testify.
I was intrigued to learn recently that scholars don’t have much of an idea of the origin of the word. The AND (Australian National Dictionary 1988), now available online, has the earliest written citation
1912 Bulletin (Sydney) 15 Feb. 13/2 There is the much less widely known aboriginal term ‘myrnonga’. The myrnonga is a person of more promiscuous habits [than the combo] who – prowls with furtiveness when the moon is young.
but this is under the obscure headword murlonga ‘A white man who sexually exploits Aboriginal women’, with etymology
[Poss. a. Yolŋu sub-group munaŋa a white person.]2
Talkin’ ’bout them endangered languages, y’ know
I was interviewed last week for PRI’s the World: The World of Words for a podcast that was published on 26 September. The interviewer, Patrick Cox, who is based in Boston, contacted me after reading my Guardian Top 10 Endangered Languages and seeing a copy of the book 1000 Languages which I edited and which was published in North America on 1st September.
FEL, Fryslân and cultural wealth
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]
Engaged Scholarship
The issues of the engagement of social science researchers in direct involvement in community activism, integration of activism with research and scholarship, and ways to ensure wider communication of our research results were topics of a one-day meeting held in Chicago last week. The Interdisciplinary Institute on Engaged Scholarship and Social Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) organised a workshop entitled “Engaged Scholarship and Social Justice: Transcending the Campus, Transforming the Academy” on 12th September.
The topics explored at the workshop were:
- How do we translate our scholarship and research findings into an accessible language that allows us to then engage in discussions and debates with a diverse range of communities? Can we write books and dissertations that working class friends and relatives can actually read?
- How do we reconcile notions of ‘objectivity’ with our own passions for and commitment to issues and communities? Can you love a subject and still analyze, research and assess it as a scholar? Should we be accountable, responsible or concerned with the application and outcomes of our research?
- How do we forge creative new methodologies that help us ask new questions and get at new insights and information? How does pedagogy reflect politics? What’s the connection between what we teach and how we teach it?
- Where does ‘utopia’ and imagined futures fit into our work as social scientists and scholars in the humanities, and as teachers and students? Is our job to help students acquire skills and to better understand the known world, as well as to ‘dream’ of what we can only imagine?
Spreading the word
At the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB) conference held at the University of Essex last week, there was a discussion session with Professor Shearer West, recently appointed Director of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). During the discussion she emphasised that “knowledge transfer” is now an essential expectation of all AHRC grant applications, where “knowledge transfer” means “ensur[ing] that the research we fund can be used to make a difference beyond academia”. Apparently the AHRC feels that researchers in Arts and Humanities in the UK have been traditionally rather poor at disseminating their knowledge outside the ivy towers and wants to push them more in this direction. Specifically, this includes:
- promot[ing] the interests of arts and humanities research and its value to our social, economic and cultural life
- increas[ing] the amount of high quality research supporting special exhibitions, resdisplays and conservation
OZCLO- wanna be part of it?
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.