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.
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When language met law
There’s an interesting post up on slashdot today about a legal battle between the Mapuche people of Chile and Microsoft. It seems that the tribal leaders of the Mapuche are unhappy about Microsoft working on a Mapudungan version of their Office suite of software.
Slashdot is a geek oriented web site that likes to track court cases against Microsoft. Cultural group ownership is a slightly left of field topic. The site generally advocates open source software and more liberal IP laws, so it was interesting to read the attitudes of the commenters on the main article.
UPDATE: 25/11/06
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Mark Liberman of Language Log weighs in.
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UPDATE: 27/11/06
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See a second post by Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log, and also see Jane Simpson’s post for a thorough and very interesting analysis of the Australian situation.
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Zotero: 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.
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.
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
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
Hello Visitors…
Hello Language Hat readers If you’re new here, we’re a blog based roughly on the theme of endangered languages and cultures. All of the authors are based at Sydney University as either staff or students. If you’re interested in Indigenous Langauge Education, Australian or Papua New Guinean languages, Fieldwork and Fieldwork Technology, amongst other topics … Read more
Automagic commenting
We’ve been making some minor changes to the blog in the last couple of days. Hopefully we can boost the feedback-ability of the site. We get a lot of visitors to old posts, who’s comments simply get buried, so we’ve introduced “Recently commented on” in the sidebar. Second, given that we have a pool of … Read more