Do-it-themselves recording

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Here’s an article [Thanks Nick!] on Steven Bird’s interesting attempt to increase data on an endangered language (Usarufa, Highlands New Guinea) by giving speakers voice recorders, and training them in documenting their language.

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Wunderkammer in Canberra

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Dearest Canberrans, I’ll be giving a presentation of the Wunderkammer mobile phone dictionary software at the ANU in Canberra at 11 am on 18 September. If you’re interested and in the area, come by. Full details, including the exact location, can be found here.

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Australian Indigenous Rights – UN Special Rapporteur

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Professor James Anaya, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, has given his preliminary impressions of the situation in Australia – see today’s Crikey. Most media attention is focussing on his comments about the Northern Territory Emergency Response,

…affirmative measures by the Government to address the extreme disadvantage faced by indigenous peoples and issues of safety for children and women are not only justified, but they are in fact required under Australia’s international human rights obligations. However, any such measure must be devised and carried out with due regard of the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination and to be free from racial discrimination and indignity.
In this connection, any special measure that infringes on the basic rights of indigenous peoples must be narrowly tailored, proportional, and necessary to achieve the legitimate objectives being pursued. In my view, the Northern Territory Emergency Response is not.

But also important are his comments that any partnership between Government and Indigenous people must be one that is

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New ELAR publications

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The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), based at SOAS, has recently published two new articles on the Endangered Languages Project website that may be of interest to readers of this blog: Bernard Howard’s detailed review of the new Zoom H4n audio recorder. Bernard puts the machine through its paces and concludes his review with the words: … Read more

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‘Anco’ Pelletier

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Narcisse Pelletier1 (1844-1894) spent half his adult life (1858-1875) with Aboriginal people on the eastern coast of Cape York Peninsula. He learnt their language and had no contact with outsiders, and in time he lost command of his native French. His removal from the coast at Night Island was as out of his control and as sudden as had been his arrival there seventeen years earlier. He then regained command of French over subsequent weeks and months, and upon return to his birthplace in France, he was interviewed by Constant Merland (1808-85) a French surgeon-turned-savant. Merland’s 1876 book Dix-sept ans chez les sauvages: Narcisse Pelletier is quite rare and apparently not held in any Australian library. It had been overlooked as an ethnographic source but last month it has appeared afresh and “Now, for the first time, this remarkable true story is presented in English, complemented by an in-depth introductory essay and ethnographic commentary” as the blurb accurately states.

The translator and annotator Stephanie Anderson has marshalled the help of anthropologists and linguists Athol Chase, David Thompson, Bruce Rigsby, Peter Sutton, and Clair Hill. Between them they show that the people who adopted Pelletier were speakers of a dialect of the language now known as Lockhart River ‘Sand Beach’ language comprising Kuuku Yaʔu and Umpila, probably the dialect known as Uutaalnganu, AIATSIS code Y211.

cover

The full account is spread through Pelletier : the forgotten castaway of Cape York published by Melbourne Books. The volume includes an ethnographic commentary by Athol Chase and an introductory essay by Stephanie Anderson who you might have heard talk about this in mid July on ABC’s Late Night Live.

Merland has a chapter on language. He had taken down some 70 words and a few longer expressions as recalled by Pelletier, but before he presents these, he starts from the general, “How thought is expressed”:

one point on which most people agree is that the degree of civilisation of different peoples can be gauged from the degree to which their language has evolved (p185)

Merland found that the language he recorded from Pelletier did not have the primitive properties that contemporary theorists described. Merland refers to the view that

Man’s first words were necessarily imitative words, onomatopoeic words, as grammarians call them (p185)

then points out that, on the contrary, judging from Pelletier’s vocabulary,

while there are still numerous monosyllabic words in our highly evolved language of French, these have completely disappeared from the language spoken by the savages of Endeavour Land. (p191)

Indeed, Merland records not one monosyllabic word — just as we with hindsight would expect of a Pama-Nyungan language(!).

Merland’s transcription (possibly influenced by Pelletier’s own spelling suggestions) has a few words with syllable-initial tr. These words match up with phonemic apical stop (apico-alveolar or possibly -domal) in Kuuku Yaʔu as recorded by the Rev DA Thompson (1988):

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Australian Indigenous language funding

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Two Ministers responsible for different aspects of Indigenous Affairs in Australia, Jenny Macklin and Peter Garrett, have jointly announced $9.3 million of funding for Indigenous languages. The grand aim is to “to help take 113 indigenous languages off the critically endangered list.”
Some good stuff:

“A focused and coordinated national approach is critical to safeguard indigenous culture and save these unique languages.”
Communities will be encouraged to use endangered languages as much as possible and all efforts will be made to pass them on.
… The policy will also encourage the teaching of indigenous languages in schools”

Some bad stuff:

“although it is understood not to alter the course in the Northern Territory, where bilingual education is set to be scrapped in 2010.” (out of date… in several schools, energetic principals and superintendants have already enthusiastically closed down bilingual programs).

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Look What They’ve Done to My Song (and other time-aligned data and analysis), Ma

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At the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute in Berkeley last week (17-19th July) the National Science Foundation sponsored Cyberling 2009, a workshop exploring how computational infrastructure (called “cyberinfrastructure” in the US, and e-Science or e-Humanities in the UK) can support linguistic research in a variety of fields. There was a panel discussion about data sharing that looked at the proposal:

“A cyberinfrastructure for linguistic data would allow unprecedented access [to] the empirical base of our field, but only if we collectively build that empirical base by contributing data. This panel addresses the benefits of data sharing and the obstacles to the widespread adoption of sharing practices, from the perspective of a variety of subfields”

But the bulk of the workshop was given over to closed discussion sessions by seven working groups looking at annotation standards, other standards, new multi-purpose software (so-called “killer apps”), data reliability and provenance, models from other fields, funding sources, and collaboration structure. The group discussions and resulting final day presentations are available on the Cyberling Wiki.
I was co-chair of Working Group 4 that was charged with discussing “protecting data reliability and provenance”, i.e. how to keep track of the creation of data and analysis and its passage through the electronic infrastructure as researchers access and use each other’s materials. As the Cyberling Wiki says, this is crucial

“for data creators (who need credit for the work they have done and the academic contribution of collecting, curating and annotating data) and the data users (who need to know where the data has come from so they can form an opinion of how much credence to give it and how to give proper credit to the originator of the data)”.

We also looked at how to establish a culture of data sharing and what mechanisms might be put in place to encourage people to share data. Clearly, for endangered language research where data are unique and fragile, these are very important issues.
After two and a half days of intense discussions our group came up with a set of proposals relating to data reliability and provenance that can be summarised as follows:

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Language perspectives

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The “Understanding Children’s Languages Project” of the Queensland Department of Education is developing a very rich website, (yay Denise!), which will have heaps of resources and sensible explanations of what’s going on with Indigenous children’s languages. Really useful if you have to explain things to teachers, parents, community members, or anyone who goes to sleep … Read more

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