Since 2005 I have been teaching a one Term introductory course each year on Historical Linguistics at SOAS and enjoying it a lot. The students especially like the coverage of semantic change, loanwords, and borrowing and language contact. One of the (standard) topics in this area that I cover is so-called folk etymology and typically … Read more
Further to my post about the SOAS Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) holding much less (70 collections) than could be expected given the number of ELDP funded projects (216), I thought it would be interesting to look at archival holdings and the amount deposited in language archives now, after a decade and a half of language … Read more
Jandamarra’s War was on ABC tonight. It’s based on the book Jandamarra and the Bunuba resistance (Howard Pedersen and Banjo Woorunmurra, Magabala Books). In the jagged red and grey country of the Bunuba, a boy is enticed by new technology and new ways of behaving and relating to others, which gradually estrange him from his … Read more
For young people in remote areas of Australia, there’s a correlation between speaking an Indigenous language and better well-being. That’s today’s message from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Here’s their media release. “The report found that in 2008, almost half (47%) of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth (aged 15–24 years) in remote areas … Read more
The published grammar of the Kalkatungu language of western Queensland has this entry in the ‘Weapons, tools, etc.’ section of the glossary:
‘pump’ (decoy device for attracting birds) kuɭumpu1 (Blake 1979:179)
‘What on earth is that?’ I said to myself, and wondered also why whatever it is would attract the English word for a fluid pumping device (let alone a type of footwear!).
CALL FOR PAPERS Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital scholarship Dates: 12-14th December 2011 Venue: University of Melbourne, Australia A PARADISEC conference http://paradisec.org.au/2011Conf.html Digital methods for recording information are now ubiquitous. In fieldwork-based disciplines, like linguistics, musicology, anthropology and so on, recordings are typically of high cultural value and there is great … Read more
Linguist Position – Northern Territory Department of Education and Training, Central Australia 6 month contract July-Dec 2011 The NT DET linguist is responsible for supporting Indigenous and non-Indigenous teachers working in Indigenous Language and Culture programs in remote and urban Central Australian schools. This involves travel to remote communities, organising and facilitating professional learning workshops, … Read more
Peter Austin has raised his voice on this blog to ‘protect [his] legal rights and those of the Dieri people who have contributed to [his] knowledge of their language’ (source). He suggests that the PanLex project is guilty of ‘theft’ for using, without citation, data from a Dieri-English word list contained in his 1981 grammar … Read more
As I pointed out here and here, speakers of minority and endangered languages are using Web 2.0 social networking applications like Facebook as a means of interacting and communicating. Well , according to wakablogger, it seems Twitter, the short message site, is also being used by these communities as well. The problem is: how to … Read more
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