It was a perfect cool and sunny Canberra afternoon. Some of the Wednesday Lunch Linguists wanted to avoid spending it on marking. And so we headed off to Peter Bellwood’s seminar at ANU, Early farmers and the spread of languages in South Asia. This was partly based on a paper he gave at the Harvard Kyoto Roundtable in 2005 [1]. Prehistorians can tell grand stories, and this was grand by their standards – wheat, barley, rice and the linguistic history of the whole of India and Pakistan.
FollowZotero: endnote for e-research?
Last week, one of my favourite blogs, BoingBoing, had an interesting link to a new web based research tool. I’ve been having a go over the weekend.
Good things in the Language Archives Network News newsletter (No.8)
Check out the latest Language Archives Network News [sorry Dave!]newsletter here. It’s got helpful information on how the Max Planck Institute (Nijmegen) can help you set up a local archive, a system of cataloguing linguistics information (IMDI) about your recordings, and on getting permanent unique resource identifiers for stuff stored on the web. And it’s also got an article on recording information about plants and animals in the field that you might read in conjunction with Tom’s post on this topic.
Government money and Indigenous languages in Australia
The present Australian government’s approach to coordinating and delivering (funding for) general services to Indigenous people has failed on its first trial. That’s the conclusion drawn in an article on a leaked report by Bill Gray (Chris Graham and Brian Johnstone in the National Indigenous Times). So, what happens about coordinating and delivering money for maintaining and documenting Indigenous languages in Australia? How much is spent? Does more go on documenting than on maintaining and supporting education? I got asked these questions the other day, and had to admit surprised ignorance. (Hey, I SHOULD know. I’m a tax-payer). Here’s a start on answering – based on web-trawling.. and maybe some readers can add to it – help, is there an econo-statistician handy?
Papuanists’ Workshop Wrap-up
In spite of a few early setbacks – including the workshop venue being eaten by termites – the Pearl Beach Papuanists’ Workshop, or perhaps I should say the Itinerant Papuanists’ Workshop, was held last weekend.
Everyone had something interesting to say at the workshop. We heard from a range of people from SIL field linguists to PhD students to professors. The weekend was filled with intensive (and exhausting) discussion of many different aspects of Papuan languages and linguistics. Our exhaustion was kept at bay, however, by the New Guinea Fair Trade coffee that Tom so thoughtfully provided.
Paper work in the Western Desert
The making of contemporary Aboriginal learning and literacy: Ngaanyatjarra engagement with changing western practices was a seminar given by Inge Kral today at the Centre for Aboriginal Policy Research. The seminar raised questions about reading and writing practices in Indigenous communities, and about the survival of small Indigenous communities faced with increasing demands from governments for paper work.
Blog catcher: Africa, America, Australia, art, language, literacy, software, travel
Sociolingo’s Africa is a general blog which includes posts about languages (the writer’s based in Mali but draws together material from across Africa). There are some interesting posts on linguistics, literacy – including mother tongue language education. So much seems so familiar. Thanks to this blog I’ve learned about Litcam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for … Read more
HCSNet SummerFest06 registration closing
Registration for HCSNet’s SummerFest06 closes tomorrow (Friday 27th October). If you’re in Sydney in early december late November (27th and 28th to be exact… thanks Linda), there’ll be lots of interesting courses related to Human Communication Sciences, including: Introduction to Music Perception & Cognition, Introduction to Human Computer Interaction: Personalisation and User Control, Introduction to … Read more
One crap spelling system is better than two good ones
Suppose you’re a linguist working in a community where
• the speakers have a shaky grasp of literacy
• community development workers have a shaky grasp on the speakers’ languages
• there’s an existing orthography which is crying out for improvement
My advice – block your ears to its cries….
Fifth East Nusantara Conference: CALL FOR PAPERS
from the website: In the past, four International Conferences for East Nusantara Linguistics have been held; three in Leiden (1998, 2001, 2005), and one at the ANU in Canberra (2000). With this fifth conference the location moves to Indonesia, and more specifically to the East Nusantara region. Also, the focus of the conference has been … Read more