Jane’s last post and a post on the ever excellent Language Log have got me thinking about permanence and accountability in the internet age. Its a theme that I encounter again and again, working for a digital archive.
Linguistics
FollowHow do we know what they see? Field linguists and the appearance of things
Vivid pink plum trees, white cherry trees, soft masses of yellow wattle, japonica hedges with pink flowers leaping out of new green leaves, white cockatoos browsing on the ground. That was Canberra during the Rematerialising colour conference at ANU’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. How does the outsider linguist find out if speakers of another language have colour terms? This important question for field linguists and lexicographers was raised in two papers on the Australian language Warlpiri by David Nash and Anna Wierzbicka.
PhD scholarships at the University of Sydney
if you want to spend three years thinking and writing about languages and cultures of Australia and the Asia-Pacific region …
Nod to Ethics committee: HEALTH WARNING: and you’re not ESPECIALLY worried about whether you’ll find a interesting job afterwards….
… applications for the 2007 APA/UPA scholarships at the University of Sydney are now open. Information and an application can be downloaded from:
http://www.usyd.edu.au/ro/training/postgraduate_awards.shtml
Plant species, shrub
In the field last year I meticulously gathered photos with audio recordings of many plants in the area I was working in PNG. I certainly don’t like creating lexicon entries all with a gloss of “tree/plant species” and I figured in this digital age, including a picture and audio recording of each plant was one way of increasing the identifiability of each plant (and animal… but they’re not so photogenic). Pictures are a much more salient identifier for speakers of the language than anything else. Never-the-less, scientific name are a good universal identifier for a plant, but they’re hard to get if you don’t have a botanist with you.
So earlier this year I sat down with Barry Conn at the National Herbarium of New South Wales to discuss interdisciplinary work between linguists and botanists. One of my questions was “what does a linguist need to do in the field to get a plant identified?”.
Here are some of my notes from the meeting, with some comments from Barry:
Sinhalese/Tamil or English? Guest blogger: Thushara Gamage
Following on the discussion of Sri Lankan Portuguese in the Speaking to God and Mammon post, Thushara Gamage, Linguistics department alumna, gives her view on what’s happening to the linguistic ecology of Sri Lanka, and why.
Speaking to God and Mammon
Two seminars were given last week at Sydney University on languages in contact – Helen Fulton (University of Wales, Swansea) on “Language on the Borders : Contacts between Welsh and English in the Marches of Wales after 1066”, and Ian Smith‘s (currently visiting the Linguistics Department for a year) Linguistics department seminar “Wesleyan missionaries and the conversion of Sri Lanka Portuguese”, on the new languages in Sri Lanka that developed from contact with Portuguese, Dutch and then English. In both cases aspirations for heavenly and worldly advancement provided motivations for language shift and language maintenance, sometimes in competition and sometimes in collaboration.
Gimme that old-time jukurrpa!
Two major recent events in the Northern Territory were Gurindji Freedom Day (discussed on the 7.30 report (21/8/06) (tx T & D for the link!)), and the Garma Festival. The song from the Lajamanu band that was played at Garma ‘Gimme that old-time jukurrpa!’ [jukurrpa = dreaming, law in Warlpiri] appeals to me for its lighthearted bringing together of present and past, English and Warlpiri, Christianity and Jukurrpa.
Training for speakers of indigenous languages in language work
Today I’ve been pointed to The Center for Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA):
“The Center hopes to help indigenous communities realize their goals of language recovery and widening the contexts of language use by providing technical education in fields related to language, with an emphasis on language maintenance, documentation, and applications to social institutions that depend on language and communication among all citizens.”
They have some excellent ideas about training and working with speakers of Indigenous languages.
SBS Program on PNG
I’ve just been pointed to an interesting program on SBS radio on language use in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville. Greg Muller interviews Bill Foley and Sana Banai who is a Hakö speaker from Buka Island, near Bougainville. Both Sana and Bill talk about language and identity, and vernacular literacy. And they both talk about the spread of Tok Pisin, how it is a unifying language, the language of mates, the most common language in Port Moresby, and now is becoming a lingua franca. (Surprising isn’t it that Tok Pisin isn’t taught in schools and universities in Australia? Where are the intensive courses for our soldiers going off to be peace-keepers?)