Uncategorized – Page 6 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Aboriginal Languages Workshop 2014

8 January 2014 by Jane Simpson

Don’t miss the annual Aboriginal Languages Workshop 2014 to be held at ANU’s beautiful Kioloa Coastal campus. The workshop web-page is up http://chl.anu.edu.au/languages/alw2014.php And for some previous workshops: 2012 on North Stradbroke Island and 2009 at Kioloa See the web-page for the call for abstracts – deadline: Jan 18, 2014.

ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

20 December 2013 by Nick Thieberger

We have great pleasure in announcing that the ARC has funded a Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language over seven years. This project will be led by Nick Evans at ANU with a collaborative team from there, the University of Western Sydney, the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne, and with many partners from other universities and institutions including AIATSIS and Appen.

We want this to be a centre for collaboration, for generating ideas and inspiration for linguistics in Australia and the world. In the New Year we’ll be putting up a web-page to give more information, In the meantime, here’s an overview of what we are planning.

Research, records and responsibility conference: Ten years of PARADISEC

11 December 2013 by Nick Thieberger

The conference celebrating ten years of PARADISEC in early December had a suitably interdisciplinary mix of presentations. Joining in the reflection on building records of the world’s languages and cultures were musicologists, linguists, and archivists from India, Hong Kong, Poland, Canada, Alaska, Hawai’i, Australia, the UK and Russia. The range of topics covered can be seen in the program: http://paradisec.org.au/RRRProgram.html

The conference ended with a discussion of what was missing in our current tools and methods. While it is clear that linguists have done pretty well at using appropriate tools for transcribing and annotating text, and building repositories to provide long-term citation and access to the material, there is still a long way to go.

19 October National Day of Mourning

19 October 2013 by Jane Simpson

Today is 12 years since an unnamed boat sank on the way to Australia. The boat became known as SIEV X (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel, Unknown). At least 146 children, 142 women and 65 men from Iraq and Afghanistan drowned; their names are tracked on a non-official website. The voices of the survivors are rarely … Read more

Vale Peter Newton

8 October 2013 by Amanda Harris

Readers of this blog will be saddened to hear of the passing of Peter Newton last week after a short struggle with illness. Peter was a poet, linguist, writer and editor, Associate Sydney Jazz Club and Jazz Archivist. Peter worked closely with PARADISEC to identify, sort and catalogue the extensive linguistic collection of Arthur Capell, … Read more

The NT Government gets animated

16 September 2013 by David Nash

New animations with spoken audio in Anmatyerr (‘Anmatyere’), Kriol, Luritja, Warlpiri, and Yolŋu Matha were published on You Tube a couple of weeks ago. There are eight nicely done animations of a minute or two explaining aspects of the water supply in each of the five languages, all available through the NT Power and Water … Read more

The long road to language resources—CLARIN

2 July 2013 by Nick Thieberger

CLARIN, the ‘Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure’ is a European initiative to support the creation, curation and exploration of language material for research purposes and for as broad an audience as possible. The stated aim is that you should not need to be a technical expert to use the corpora, lexica and annotations that are targeted in CLARIN.

It is part of the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC). This is a huge project, with a budget of some €104 million. CLARIN-D is the German section of CLARIN and it recently had its 2-year showcase, which I was able to attend (see current activities at http://clarin-d.net/de/aktuelles/). Given that this is the first two years of a longterm project it has clearly achieved a great deal already, and certainly more than can be glimpsed in a short blog post.

This is part of a ‘roadmap’ process that actually leads somewhere, unlike the Australian version I reported on earlier that appears to have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars only to have been abandoned even before it was published.

Light Warlpiri hits the news!

19 June 2013 by Jane Simpson

Wow! Light Warlpiri has hit the news big time. Carmel O’Shannessy just published a paper in Language on it. And it’s been taken up as news: The Atlantic, and you can see it and other renditions in Google News. And the Atlantic makes use of the material on Carmel O’Shannessy’s research page. OK – they … Read more

Supporting language use and learning

25 May 2013 by Jane Simpson

In the midst of Endangered Languages Week there is the good and the bad. The good was the delight of reading Rob Munro’s post on what his company Idibon intends to do for NLP for endangered languages. The company is advised by Chris Manning, and I learned today that his wonderful Warlpiri dictionary presentation tool … Read more

Print on demand, again

24 May 2013 by Nick Thieberger

In an earlier post I talked about getting texts from Toolbox into books for use in the language community. The print-on-demand service I was so enthusiastic about and which I pointed to for copies of my books, has now closed, fallen victim to a change of bookshop ownership at Melbourne Uni. After talking with Manfred … Read more