Nick Thieberger

Seeking your help with tool development

1 May 201527 March 2015 by Nick Thieberger

We are in the process of identifying gaps in tools for fieldwork and data analysis that can be filled as part of the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. I’d like to ask for your input into the requirements for a metadata entry tool. In part, this analysis asks for your opinions on … Read more

Grammar writing: where are we now?

1 May 201527 February 2015 by Nick Thieberger

Ruth Singer recaps last week’s Linguistics in the Pub, a monthly informal gathering of linguists in Melbourne to discuss topical areas in our field.

Linguistics in the Pub on Tuesday the 24th of February, 2015 centred around the theme: grammar writing. Harriet Sheppard (Monash University) led the discussion. The announcement and short background reading are here.

The descriptive grammar although often reported to be dead is a form of scholarship that is still very much alive. And although e-grammars are said to be the way of the future, most grammars still take the form of a hard copy, whether it is a PhD thesis or published book. The discussion in this session of linguistics in the pub was kicked off with a discussion of the article by Ulrike Mosel cited below, part of a special publication of LDC on grammar writing.

Playing texts and media—EOPAS again

19 July 2014 by Nick Thieberger

While I obviously like EOPAS as a model for corpus presentation (see the earlier blog post about it here), I found a renewed enthusiasm for it today as I was checking the meaning of a word in a text I was translating from South Efate. The word lunak does not appear in any of my notes nor in the dictionary, but appears a few times in a story told by the late Kalsarap Namaf. I wrote to Joel Kalpram, who is from Erakor village and speaks the language, and asked him if he knew the word.

Language documentation index

10 July 20151 June 2014 by Nick Thieberger

The map below is built on information produced by a group of linguists working in Vanuatu. It is a sample documentation index that provides a visualisation of what is known about each language. Note that this is not a language vitality index of the kind outlined in Harmon and Loh (2010). Leaving aside thorny questions of what constitutes a language and language name (see Good and Cysouw 2013) and choosing to use a given set of language names (that is not limited to ISO-639-3), this exercise produced a map of the languages of Vanuatu, with each language assigned an index number on a 21 point scale assigning 1-5 points for each of four categories: Grammar; Lexicon; Texts; Media corpus. The icons are colour-coded (white = 0; red = 1-5; purple = 6-10; yellow = 11-15; green =16-20). 54 languages in this list have a zero rating, indicating that virtually nothing is known about those languages.

Somali phone dictionary

18 June 201428 May 2014 by Nick Thieberger

On June 13th we Arnold Zable will launch a Somali-English Dictionary app for both Android and iOS platforms, using the successful Ma! Iwaidja dictionary model. Opening screen of the Somali dictionary app This is the product of a collaboration between the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne and Burji Arts, a Melbourne-based Somali arts and cultural organisation. The app contains some 26,000 Somali words and English equivalents with audio for selected items, so users can hear words or phrases. This app will have the capability of accepting input from users who can contribute items and suggest alternate pronunciations.

First Footprints, Farsd Fatbrontz, Verst Pitprands: Spelling as if the language matters

21 December 201320 December 2013 by Nick Thieberger

I have watched the excellent series First Footprints a couple of times. It is a great overview of the origins of human occupation of Australia, with fantastic visual effects and photography. It starts with the declaration that “First Footprints seeks to treat Indigenous cultures and beliefs with respect”. Respecting Indigenous Australian languages should involve at least treating them the way you would any other language and checking that words in Australian Indigenous languages were written accurately. Think of the times you have watched a film that had misspelled English subtitles in it and what it makes you think of the care the subtitler took. It only took me a little effort to check on the following mistakes by web-browsing and by talking to people with experience in the particular languages.

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.

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.

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