Endangered Languages and Cultures

New languages two – Old languages love

5 February 201115 October 2008 by Jane Simpson

[Update! See the comments! Darkness is lightened! How I overlooked Nick Thieberger’s QE2 I don’t know, but it is FANTASTIC news for PARADISEC! And on the computational linguistics side, good about Tim Baldwin’s project]
It’s Poverty Action Day. Whaddya know, speakers of small endangered languages are usually the poorest of the poor, and often don’t have the time/money to work on their own languages. That work gets done in partnerships with linguists and others from rich countries like Australia. No joy for this in the Australian Research Council funding results. This must be the worst year for funding endangered language work for a very very long time. (I whinged in 2006 about the ARC lottery results – but that was a FAR better year).
After wading through piles of .pdfs, I could only spot two grants for endangered language work – both for work on new languages in the Northern Territory, [plug! stemming in part from the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project]. Congratulations to

Caroline Jones, (based at the University of Wollongong) Phonological development in child speakers of mixed language
Felicity Meakins (based at the University of Queensland) Life after death: Exploring the birth of Gurindji Kriol, a new Aboriginal mixed language.

Also connected to Indigenous languages and cultures are:

PARADISEC’s Linda Barwick, who is a CI on a Linkage grant (Sustainable futures for music cultures: Toward an ecology of musical diversity [.pdf], first CI Prof Dr H Schippers, Griffith University)
Paul Burke’s ANU anthropology project Indigenous Diaspora: a new direction in the ethnographic study of the migration of Australian Aboriginal people from remote areas. Dead relevant to the Intervention…

Please lighten my gloom by noting if I’ve missed any projects of direct relevance to Transient Languages readers.

Pilbara language dictionaries – free, interactive and downloadable

5 February 201114 October 2008 by Jane Simpson

Wow! Sally Dixon has just pointed me to Wangka Maya (the Pilbara Language Centre)’s free downloadable interactive Pilbara language dictionaries for the following languages: Bayungu, Burduna, Jiwarli, Martu Wangka, Nyamal, Nyangumarta, Thalanyji, Warnman, and Yulparija.
“These may be downloaded and used for personal use at no cost.”
What a fantastic resource! And what a good way of ensuring that the material isn’t lost.
Lucky PC users, unlucky Mac users – they’re made in Lexique Pro, and so they run under Windows only. Off to the Windows emulator sigh.., as the LP people say firmly that they have NO plans to make Mac or Linux versions.

Road Testing the Nagra Ares BB+ – Ana Kondic

5 February 201110 October 2008 by Amanda Harris

[from Ana Kondic at the University of Sydney]
I have just spent eight months doing field work in Mexico where I used a Nagra Aress BB+ (with a Sony ECM-MS 957 Microphone) for audio recording that I borrowed from PARADISEC at Sydney University.
I worked with a highly endangered Mayan language, South Eastern Huastec. It is spoken in the region of La Huasteca, in the municipality of Chontla, in the North of Veracruz, Mexico, where the majority of the population speaks this as their first language, alongside Spanish.
The area of la Huasteca is tropical, with high temperatures and a very high humidity. I chose the “cold” period from October to May, with pleasant months of December and January (about 20 C during the day, and gets to low 5 C or so during the night), but very warm April and May (up to 35 C). The humidity is very high all year, mostly 85-95%.

More on munanga – John Avery

5 February 20119 October 2008 by Jane Simpson

[from John Avery]
It’s inevitably guesswork, but I reckon munanga is one of those spirit-connected words – not far off devil or ghost. It is used widely in the central NT Gulf of Carpentaria and Tablelands.
Another word for white people is mandaji – the feminine is mandanga. You can hear these words at Elliott, especially from Gudanji, Wambaya or Nanka (Ngarnji). Aji/anga (also f. -ana) are personal suffixes. So -anga also could be a personal suffix attached to mun-.
Mun by itself means to curse or place a deadly curse on someone. The usual motive is jealousy. For example, a long time ago a devil from Manda waterhole on Beetaloo went up to Tanumbrini station which was the home of another devil. The Manda traveller was turfed out by the Tanumbrini devil who was jealous for the country. The Tanumbrini bloke ‘bin mun’ the Munda fella, so old Tanumbrini station is called Mun-min. The mun bit is more like muyin in Muyinmin, but by itself my informants say mun (i.e. shortway).

Uppsala Language Documentation and Language Description workshop

5 February 20117 October 2008 by Nick Thieberger

A workshop on Language Documentation and Language Description was held at Uppsala University (30 September – 1 October 2008) as part of the 23rd Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics. Uppsala University was established in 1477 and the town has grown around the university, famous also as the place where Carl Linnaeus taught in the late 1700s.
The keynote speakers for the workshop were Michael Noonan and Donald Stilo, and the list of presenters can be found here. Of interest to ELAC readers will be the paper by Michael Riesler and Jacquelijn Ringersma on the software tools used to annotate Kildin Saami lexical data. They are using LEXUS, a lexical database created by the MPI for their DoBES teams. It has lots of nice features if you want to create various kinds of lexicons and if you don’t want to gloss texts (this team is using Toolbox to gloss texts), but it is only an online tool at the moment. It conforms to the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) also incorporates ViCOS (Visualising Conceptual Spaces) which provides for semantic domains and for navigating a word-net through the lexicon.

An “unsaleable bent stick”, boomerangs, and yardsticks

5 February 20116 October 2008 by David Nash

The (in)authenticity of accounts of early Sydney have been in the news recently. The fictionalised account of Lt William Dawes and his pioneering documentation of the Sydney Language in Kate Grenville’s new novel The Lieutenant has had mixed reviews, but the concurrent story about a possible 1770 boomerang has gripped me more.

Ten days ago the Sydney Morning Herald reported

A boomerang claimed to have belonged to Captain James Cook appears to have been withdrawn from sale on the eve of a London auction after advice from the National Museum of Australia that it was probably not the real thing.

The Times reported bluntly that

Arthur Palmer, an Australian ethnographer who independently appraised the boomerang, described it is [sic] an “unsaleable bent stick” which hails from about the 1820s — 40 years after the explorer’s death.

The colourful Arthur Beau Palmer‘s sizeable bucket of cold water can be hefted here; it is worth consulting for the view of early Sydney weapons. The story began in The Times of 21 August (with a photograph) and here in The Age on 22 August; there was an update in the SMH on 10 September.

Munanga

11 February 20114 October 2008 by David Nash

Munanga, ‘white person’ is widespread among the languages of the Arnhem Land region

as Jay Arthur (1996:161) notes in her compilation of written Aboriginal English, supported by citations from the northern NT 1977-1995.¹ This extends to the present, as Wamut that munanga linguist can testify.
I was intrigued to learn recently that scholars don’t have much of an idea of the origin of the word. The AND (Australian National Dictionary 1988), now available online, has the earliest written citation

1912 Bulletin (Sydney) 15 Feb. 13/2 There is the much less widely known aboriginal term ‘myrnonga’. The myrnonga is a person of more promiscuous habits [than the combo] who – prowls with furtiveness when the moon is young.

but this is under the obscure headword murlonga ‘A white man who sexually exploits Aboriginal women’, with etymology

[Poss. a. Yolŋu sub-group munaŋa a white person.]²

Recognition for PARADISEC!

5 February 20113 October 2008 by Jane Simpson

Last Wednesday, at the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference, PARADISEC was announced as the winner of the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) eResearch Prize (Humanities and Social Sciences category) for 2008. In the words of the judges: “PARADISEC is an outstanding application of ICT tools in the humanities and social sciences domain that harnesses the work … Read more

Talkin’ ’bout them endangered languages, y’ know

5 February 201128 September 2008 by admin

I was interviewed last week for PRI’s the World: The World of Words for a podcast that was published on 26 September. The interviewer, Patrick Cox, who is based in Boston, contacted me after reading my Guardian Top 10 Endangered Languages and seeing a copy of the book 1000 Languages which I edited and which was published in North America on 1st September.

FEL, Fryslân and cultural wealth

5 February 201124 September 2008 by Jane Simpson

The 26th of September 2008 is the annual European Language Day, and this year is the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which among many other good things recognises “regional or minority languages as an expression of cultural wealth”.
So, when and where better to hold the Foundation for Endangered Languages‘ annual conference, than in Fryslân? It’s all happening from September 24 to 27 in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, at the Fryske Akademy, (who incidentally sponsor a Frisian spell-checker for MS Office – yes!)
The abstracts are on the web [.pdf]