December 2006 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Three Australian Indigenous Language events in 2007

5 February 201127 December 2006 by Jane Simpson

16-18 March 2007 Workshop on Australian Indigenous languages at the Crommelin Field Station, Pearl Beach. This is organised by the Departments of Linguistics of the Universities of Sydney and Newcastle. There’s a call for papers out. 24 -26 April 2007: Puliima National Indigenous Languages Information Communication Technology Forum “Modern ways for ancient words” at Newcastle. … Read more

Power, open access and language rights

5 February 201121 December 2006 by Jane Simpson

Whether languages can be property has generated further discussion, on Language Log, and on several anthropology blogs (thanks Kimberly!). Two themes emerged: power, and the potential conflict with open access.

Click here – new grammar of a Papuan language

5 February 201119 December 2006 by Jane Simpson

Hilário de Sousa’ s doctoral thesis is now available in the University of Sydney thesis repository. It’s a grammar of Menggwa Dla, an endangered Papuan language of the Senagi family spoken in Papua New Guinea and West Irian. The language has complex cross-referencing and is undergoing an amazing change in how switch reference works – … Read more

Are your chopsticks fast?

5 February 201118 December 2006 by admin

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.

Barking up the same tree: the need for digital archives

5 February 201111 December 2006 by Jane Simpson

The surprise for me from the Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork workshop (aka Suzzy Data..) was how much plant taxonomists and field linguists have in common. And how much we need to work together with librarians and archivists. We both have to look after records – the decaying recordings of the languages, and the dried specimens in the herbariums. We both work with the living communities, the trees that will get logged and the communities that live with the trees, and the families and children who will switch to speaking another language.

Suzzy Data Workshop – Guest blogger Bruce Birch

5 February 201111 December 2006 by admin

Dear ELAN Workshop attendees, and anyone who might find this of interest,
There were a few loose ends left at the end of the ELAN workshop last week. I’d particularly like to address one, the question as to whether we should aim for a standard set of ELAN templates which everyone uses.

Suzzy Data Workshop – Guest blogger Simon Musgrave

5 February 20117 December 2006 by Jane Simpson

Several of the regular bloggers here are associated with PARADISEC, and they are modest folk. We cannot therefore expect them to tell you that the conference which they held this week (Sustainable data from Digital Fieldwork) was a huge success and a really wonderful event.
But this is a message which should be broadcast, so I felt that a guest post was appropriate.

Canada’s Shame

5 February 20116 December 2006 by iansmith

In 1998, the Canadian government established the Aboriginal Languages Initiative (ALI) to fund projects aimed at preserving and protecting Aboriginal languages. Initial funding was CAD 5M per year. In Dec. 2002 the government announced funding of $175M for a proposed Aboriginal Languages and Cultures Centre (ALCC), which would replace the ALI. The Task Force on … Read more

Multiple distortions: the story of an Australian place name

5 February 20112 December 2006 by admin

Australian Indigenous place names often suffer distortion in form and meaning when they are adopted into English. The distortion can have many different causes: English speakers might not be able to hear the sounds of the source language properly or they might not understand what place the name really refers to. In the case of Tayan Pic (32º58’4″S, 150º12’58″E – picture shown below), a mountain near Kandos in New South Wales, however, the name has suffered further distortion after its adoption into English because of a misreading of the English transcription of the name. We first have to investigate the evolution of the name in English before we can begin to look into its Australian origin.