Comments for Endangered Languages and Cultures

Comment on Discussion about Social Variation and Language Documentation: LIP Discussion by Adam Schembri

Adam Schembri — Tue, 01 May 2012 09:38:32 +0000

Thanks for this post: wish I’d been there!

Comment on Book launch: Kaytetye Dictionary by Claire

Claire — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:49:04 +0000

Alas! No overseas shipping from IAD…

Comment on Hammers and nails by Edward Garrett

Edward Garrett — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:18:46 +0000

Yet another side-effect of excessive focus on interlinear glossing might be the marginalization of linguistic theory in some strands of language documentation. When I was a graduate student, studying mostly theoretical syntax and semantics at UCLA, although faculty were supportive of fieldwork on diverse languages, IGT was never pushed as an end goal. Sometimes it was useful, but the idea of systematically glossing texts was definitely seen as less important than the advances that could be made by analyzing those texts for specific features of interest, or discussing those features with native speaker consultants in elicitation. Peter’s point is so much about allocation of time and resources: is the attention paid by fieldworkers to glossing commensurate to its actual importance?

Comment on Is Toolbox the linguistic equivalent of Nietzsche’s typewriter? by Claire

Claire — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:23:39 +0000

I am just old enough to have started fieldwork in the system Peter mentions; with AIATSIS white/green audition sheets, a cassette recorder, and no reliable electricity on fieldwork (and certainly no laptop!), but shifted to fully digital by the end of the project. My early tapes are probably easier to find things on, since I have fairly detailed running summaries (handwritten, now scanned), but when playing snippets back to speakers on a recent trip, and when looking for examples from the grammar, I tend to search through Elan, and so the second part of the collection is rather easier to use. Roughly equal percentages of the recordings are transcribed, I’d guess, but almost all the transcripts for the second part are time-aligned, whereas only some of the first part is (thanks to one of my students, who has been helping me with this). Having said that, very little of my corpus is interlinearised. Almost all the transcriptions are Bardi and English free translation, with annotation but not interlinearisation. My metadata for early recordings is more consistently better than for the later ones, but once I got back in the habit of annotating both the elicitation notebooks and adding information about recordings to a database, it didn’t make much difference I don’t think. One big issue (and something to be addressed down the road) is that I no longer have a single searchable set of transcripts for Bardi; there’s the pre-Elan (dumped into a text file) and the post-Elan search done through Elan.
There must be others in this situation – e.g. get all the ANU and Melbourne PhD students between 1995 and 2005 who are still working in the area and analyse their corpora!

Comment on Hammers and nails by Bill

Bill — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:14:09 +0000

I’m not sure how practical this would be on a large scale, but it’s possible to do summary annotation with Praat (by adding a tier to the bottom on which you only put boundaries for large blocks of discourse; you can type in as much description as you want, although it won’t display well at all zoom levels). Since the annotation files are plain-text with time stamps, you could make multifile “maps” out of them with some tinkering.

Comment on Hammers and nails by Peter Austin

Peter Austin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:31:32 +0000

@Aidan — thanks for your comment which does add another element (I was tempted to include it when I wrote this post last night but it was getting too long). If you go back even further, to Stephen Wurm’s tapes from NSW and Qld you will see total economy of recording because on his 1955 trip he only had £100 from Capell to cover his whole NSW-Southern Queensland trip and a handful of tapes. He recorded only samples and then only the speaker uttering language forms in a stop-start fashion (you can occasionally hear him shouting “Now!” just before someone speaks). When I started my Diyari fieldwork Bob Dixon told me to be sparing with my use of tapes, and not to use them like Dr XXXX who “used tapes like toilet paper”. There is a downside to this approach, of course, and one you mention, which is the value of recording “mistakes” that can later make sense once you have understood the language structure and use better (if you manage to go back to them, of course!). Tamsin Donaldson once told me she regretted Bob’s advice not to record elicitation sessions and to only record the Ngiyampaa bits of texts and NOT the English translations or commentaries. Now she can’t go back and hear what her consultants had to say in English about the materials.

I know of at least one DoBeS grant that was given money for a 1-year extension with the explicit instruction to NOT collect any more data but to work on processing the mountain of digital files that had already been collected in the previous 4 years. When I mentioned this in a recent workshop there were gasps of horror from some members of the audience (“But you might miss something” being one response I got).

Comment on Hammers and nails by Don

Don — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:24:38 +0000

I also find your idea that this comes from Toolbox interesting, incidentally. I’ve had discussions with other linguists about Flex, many of whom have disliked it precisely because it pigeonholes you even more into certain ways of thinking. I don’t want to criticize SIL too much about this, as I do appreciate all that they do. But I’m also not aware of a single alternative program for either Toolbox or Flex developed by any academic or secular scholar (alternative, meaning used for the same purpose.. ELAN just has different functions in my opinion, complementary but not overlapping that much). Perhaps if our tools changed, so would our mentality?

Comment on Hammers and nails by Peter Austin

Peter Austin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:19:29 +0000

‎@Don — I’m not suggesting giving up interlinear glossing. What I am saying is don’t be blinded into thinking that it is the only way to do annotation, and indeed it should be done selectively. To organise and manage a corpus it is better to use other techniques in combination with it, overview annotation of the whole corpus (as originally promoted by my colleague David Nathan) is one of those.

Comment on Hammers and nails by Don

Don — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:15:32 +0000

I don’t disagree with your ideas, but another factor does play a role, namely the career aspect. I’m not entirely sure people will want to give up interliner glossing because it would split language documentation and description even further. With it, you can still combine descriptive linguistics with language documentation, and a language documentation project you worked on will still work just fine for later work at a university writing a grammar or more analytical articles. The recordings and such don’t go away, but it does mean a lot more work later on if you want to do analysis.

Comment on Yet another 40 years on by Alan Butters

Alan Butters — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 02:42:07 +0000

Sorry I missed the blog post last year but one of our family memories is of you listening to the shortwave radio programmes in their original languages. It has always amazed me you have been able to work in so many different languages.