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I am down in Adelaide at the moment delivering the Kaurna electronic dictionaries we’ve been working on to the Kaurna Warra Pintyandi group. We’ve produced a Kirrkirr Kaurna dictionary and a mobile phone Kaurna dictionary, based on the work of the 19th century German missionaries Christian Teichelmann and Clamor Schürmann. Both dictionaries were well received. The mobile phone dictionary seemed to be particularly well received by the young people, but I guess we can really appreciate these things. I’ve put up a demonstration version of the dictionary for download so that a wider audience can try it out. I’ve also put up information about how the dictionary works and provided the source code and instructions on how to port other dictionaries into the program.

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I just received copies from the publishers of a new book that may be of interest to readers of this blog. It is called 1000 Languages: The Worldwide History of Living and Lost Tongues and is edited by yours truly. The book was published by Thames and Hudson in the UK and associated countries, and by University of California Press in the US. It is available on UK Amazon, or readers in the UK can get it for an even cheaper price via the Tesco on-line store.

The book is issued in hard cover and runs to over 300 pages and includes over 400 colour illustrations, a series of maps, a glossary of linguistic terms, and a list of references. It is organised topically by geographical regions and each chapter explores the sources, interrelationships and characteristics of that region’s languages, including the major and minor ones of the area. It includes chapters on the topical issues of endangered and extinct languages. Each main entry details numbers of speakers, geographical spread, growth, development and key features of the language. The following is a list of the chapters and authors:

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Well, Endangered Languages Week 2008 has drawn to a close, and apart from feeling knackered after a week of full-on EL activities, we at SOAS reckon it all went pretty well. We had a lot of fun, especially during the kick-off debate about What is your language footprint? when the “for team” of David Nathan, Chaithra Puttaswamy and Juliette Rutherford were soundly defeated by the “against team” of Peter Austin, Julia Sallabank and Peter Sutton. Superior debating skills combined with some bad jokes won the day. Another highlight of the week was the UK Premiere of the film “The Linguists” which was attended by over 90 people, many of whom got to meet in person K. David Harrison, one of the dynamic duo who star in the film.
Our main goal for EL Week 2008 was showing what we are doing in EL research, teaching, and archiving at the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project and communicating with as wide an audience as possible. We feel we achieved that, both in the real and virtual interactions we had with visitors, most of whom have never come to Project activities before. Some students even travelled from Paris to attend the workshops and films. We also made contact with the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies which is a publicly funded service, providing UK-wide support and services for higher education in these three areas. They featured EL Week 2008 on their website and mailed out a special e-bulletin about our activities to their 3,000 subscribers – as a consequence, a number of teachers came to SOAS during the week, and we now have great opportunities for future collaboration.
So, here are some statistics about the week (all numbers are approximate):

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During the recent federal election we frequently saw one of the most peculiar exceptions in Australian spelling practice, the name of the Australian Labor Party, where Labor is spelt without a u even though most Australians would include a u and write this word as labour in every other context. Although the spelling of the name of the Labor Party is exceptional today, it is not an isolated aberration but is rather one of the last remnants of variation that existed in spelling practice in Australia in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century but which has since disappeared. There may have been social and political factors that drove this variation but today the story that lies behind this variation is very difficult to piece together.

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This morning I read the transcript of Marion Scrymgour’s very moving Charles Perkins address. I was struck by the tragic story of her recently-departed father who was taken away from his parents. He passed away never without ever knowing who his mother was.
As I read this transcript, I got a phonecall from my mum who asked me about whether I’m coming home for Christmas. She lives in Perth. The juxtaposition of these two things made me revisit questions I often ask myself, “Where is home and how do I know that it’s there?” A question I get all the time that I struggle with it is “Where are you from?” Sometimes here in Sydney, I’m able to give a dismissive answer, “Western Australia”, and hope that the person asking the question doesn’t realise how big WA is. But really the question is not so easily dismissed.

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Chinese Pidgin English is most certainly a transient language — it arose from contact between English and Chinese traders in the late 17th century and ceased to be spoken by the early 20th century. During its short life Chinese Pidgin English donated several expressions to standard varieties of English, where they live on. Among these donated expressions is chop-chop, meaning ‘hurry up’. Most etymologies of the English word chopsticks (e.g. those in the the Oxford English Dictionary, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Hobson-Jobson Anglo-Indian dictionary) claim that it is also derived from Pidgin English. Chopsticks is taken to be a semi-calque on the word 筷子 kuàizi (Mandarin pronunciation), which is the usual word for chopsticks in many Chinese dialects.¹ The 筷 kuài in kuàizi is homophonous in many dialects with the word for ‘fast’, 快 kuài. The theory is that the English word chopsticks comes from the Pidgin word chop ‘fast’ plus the English word stick. The true story may not be that simple, however.

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