Last Saturday was the launch of Aboriginal Placenames: Naming and re-naming the Australian landscape by the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, at University House, ANU. You can find the details on this excellent book, (edited by Harold Koch and Luise Hercus) here, although not, alas on the publisher (Aboriginal History)’s website. Facebook friends of Julia Miller can see rather good piccies. And there’s a little bit about it in the news.
Rudd started with his favourite rhetorical structure: Why am I launching this book? He answered himself: Three reasons. First, Harold and Grace Koch are Decent Human Beings. (Wild applause at this point). Second, interest in Indigenous studies. And third, appreciation of scholarship.
All good reasons*..
Scholarship shines through the book — lots of papers stuffed with interesting data, from careful linguistic reconstructions, to fine observations of attitudes to introducing names, to details on the stories behind names, to methods for studying placenames. It’s interdisciplinary: Indigenous owners of places, linguists, historians,geographers, pastoralists, archaeologists, anthropologists all have ideas to share. Workshops and meetings of the Geographic Names Boards have provided places for this sharing. And, as so often, Luise Hercus’s paper brings us back to the places themselves, with photographs that show us why people wanted to give them names.
More will be done – Rudd noted a reason why another book on place-names is needed – the table of contents reveals Only One Paper on Queensland placenames – Paul Black’s paper on Kurtjar.
The lovely thing was celebrating unusual achievement – in this case, intelligent, modest people gathering and interpreting information in sensible and enlightening ways, and producing a book whose wealth of material will make it last.
FollowChair of Endangered Languages – University of Adelaide
The first bilingual education program for children speaking Indigenous Australian languages ran in Adelaide around 1840. A hundred plus years later, the first university position in Australian languages was offered at the University of Adelaide, held by the Arrernte-speaking linguist T G H Strehlow – albeit combined with English literature at the start… [The other … Read more
Wilma Mankiller
The Economist 24/4/2010 p.76 has a moving obituary for Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to be elected chief of the Cherokee Nation, and someone who did an extraordinary amount of practical good against extraordinary odds. She co-wrote Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women (2004) with Vine Deloria, Jr., and Gloria … Read more
NT Ex-Bilingual Schools
UPDATE: check out Greg’s post on the new Crikey language blog Fully (sic) Greg Dickson has done a great service by looking at the figures on attendance rates in NT schools with large numbers of first language speakers of Indigenous languages – you can find his discussion on the Friends of Bilingual Learning website. One … Read more
Information Technologies and Indigenous Communities – Conference
Language work has been one of the main areas in which Indigenous people and people working with them have used special purpose software, and have had to confront the problems of data management. There’s a call for papers for a conference, Information Technologies and Indigenous Communities, to be held at the Australian National University, 13-17 … Read more
Fieldwork training workshop in Manchester
The Institute for Linguistics and Language Studies (ILLS) at The University of Manchester and the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies are co-organising a fieldwork training workshop to be held in Manchester on 20th May. This event is aimed at both postgraduate students and lecturers with an interest in teaching field methods for … Read more
One missing slash equals an object lesson in keeping backups
This semester, I have been helping out Jane with her wonderful Field Methods class in technical matters such as recording, uploading files onto the server and allowing students to securely and quickly download both .wav and .mp3 files. I took this course myself some years ago, and it was a great experience for me and the whole class, and many members of that class have continued on in their studies to do field research of their own, and I’m sure the Field Methods class was as much a help to their research as it was to mine.
But this post is not about when I took the class. Instead, it’s about how I almost buggered up this semester’s class in what can best be described as a lesson in keeping backups of your recordings.
(Warning: Some computer nerd stuff follows after the fold.)
Doing Great Things with Small Languages
Doing Great Things with Small Languages is an ARC funded project run by Nick Thieberger and Rachel Nordlinger at the University of Melbourne.
Linguists routinely record minority endangered languages for which no prior documentation exists. This is vitally important work which often records language structures and knowledge of the culture and physical environment that would otherwise be lost. However, while it is typical for the interpretation and analysis of this data to be published, the raw data is rarely made available.
Bienvnus a Dgernesi
As part of the MA in Language Documentation in the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP) at SOAS, students are able to participate in a two-week fieldtrip to Guernsey, Channel Islands, to undertake first-hand fieldwork and document the local highly endangered indigenous language Dgernesiais (or Guernesiais). The fieldtrip is organised by Julia Sallabank, Lecturer in Language … Read more
How long is a piece of string?
Last month I received the following email query from a colleague:
“I am currently submitting a grant application for a small grant at the HRELP to document …. One concern I have is how many hours it will realistically take to transcribe one hour of text. I have done fieldwork in the past, but this would be the first time that I will have trained a transcriber who would work (mostly) independently. (The linguists on the project would consult with them.) I would like to give some sort of concrete number of total hours transcribed and translated (in contrast to fully annotated).”
Since this is an issue I have been asked about several times, I present here an elaborated version of what I wrote back to my correspondent (here I am using ‘source language’ to refer to the language of the recording, and ‘target language’ to refer to the language of a translation of the recording. I restrict my remarks to transcription of spoken languages).
I wrote back:
The answer to your questions is kind of like the answer to the question: ‘How long is a piece of string?’
There are so many variables: