The inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award (Non-Fiction) has been won by Philip Jones for his book Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers (Wakefield Press, 2007).
[ Update 6/10/08 And the book has now also won the Chief Minister’s NT History Book award against some fine competitors, including the author and Anna Kenny (Muslim cameleers), Darrell Lewis (Murranji track), Alec Kruger’s autobiography, and Amanda Nettlebeck and Robert Foster on murderous Constable Wilshire].
The book is a pleasurable mingling of history and reconstructed ethnographic fragments, presented as a series of stories about encounters between Aborigines and non-Aborigines from 1788 to the early twentieth century. Each chapter is a reflection on an artefact in the collection of the South Australian Museum. These are the stories that are shrunk into a single line caption in a museum display. The stories are about the people involved – the maker, the collector, their friends, associates and relations – bringing in the history of the artefact and the wider context in which it was collected, and what this may say about the relations between Aborigines and non-Aborigines.
FollowOZCLO- wanna be part of it?
I raved on about how good OZCLO was in an earlier post.
So, now here’s your chance to get involved….
Call for Expressions of Interest
OZCLO – Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad 2009
The Inaugural Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OZCLO) was held earlier this year at the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney. The three winning teams from the State rounds in both states competed to solve problems in Icelandic agreement, finite state automata, Mayan hieroglyphs, Manam Pile directionals, and spectrograms of English in the national round in August. Competitors ranged from year 9 to year 12, and came from both state and private schools. The competition was a huge success and a lot of fun for all involved. We would like to hold it again next year, and are hoping to expand it into other states, depending on the level of interest (we already have interest from Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia). So we are now calling for expressions of interest from colleagues around Australia who would be willing to be involved in next year’s competition.
Glossed texts — the fiddle factor
In a recent blog post, Jane Simpson reported on opinions expressed by a group at ANU meeting to discuss grammar writing:
“We all agree it’s a good thing to publish glossed texts so that readers can check out the hypotheses proposed in the grammar, and expressed by the glossing.”
I’d like to inject a note of caution here. It seems to me that many times published texts, with interlinear glossing or not, and especially those that derive from transcriptions of spoken language, have often been fiddled with (or to put it more politely ‘edited’) on their way from recording to printed page. This is also often true of published texts that are based on written originals produced by literate native speakers. It is rarely the case that, as Wamut commented about Jeffrey Heath’s work on Ngandi at the end of Jane’s blog post:
“What is especially great, is that when you go back to Heath’s archived field recordings, the spoken texts are there in pristine form, that is, the spoken text and written text correlate perfectly” [emphasis added]
Heath adopted the same principle of “perfect correlation” in his published work on other languages such as his 1980 Nunggubuyu Myths and Ethnographic Texts which clearly states in the introduction: “in the texts presented here I have not ‘weeded out’ false starts, intrusive English words, or grammatical errors by the narrators”.
In many other cases of text publication, I know editing has taken place — I have done it myself, and some other researchers have admitted to it (though rarely indicating exactly what editorial changes were made — more on this below). The texts in my 1997 book of Texts in the Mantharta Languages, Western Australia. [Tokyo: ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies] were heavily edited, though I didn’t mention that in print at the time, and it was only when it came to creating a multimedia Jiwarli website where both published texts and original recordings were presented that I had to confess: “[y]ou may also notice that the Jiwarli texts are not word for word identical to the sound files, as Jack Butler, after recording the stories, made his own corrections in the texts”. There was no attempt to deceive here, rather it was Jack’s explicit wish that the stories be edited for publication.
As an example, consider published Text 50 (which appears on the website here) and the way it corresponds to the original recording (italics indicates material on the tape which was deleted in the editing process, bold indicates text added during editing, and { x == y} indicates substitution during editing):
Grammar-writing group (2) – general properties
It’s yellow everywhere in Canberra – it’s Wattle Day. Meanwhile, inside the honeycomb Coombs building at ANU, the grammar-writing group wrestled with Ulrike Mosel’s article, ‘Grammaticography: The art and craft of writing grammars’, in Catching language: The standing challenge of grammar writing (Eds. Felix K. Ameka, Alan Dench, Nicholas Evans, Mouton de Gruyter, 2006, pp.41-68).
The name ‘Grammaticography’, while way way behind in the ‘most elegant word of the day’ competition, leads into the nice comparison made by Mosel between preparing dictionaries and preparing grammars. Front matter, macro structure, microstructure and all. It also led to us thinking about the growing fuzziness of the boundary between lexicon and grammar- all those Advanced Learners Grammars with heaps of information about subcategorisation, or the OED with its definitions of suffixes, all those grammars with information about the meanings of words.
One thing that grammars have over most dictionaries however, is the notion of publishing an accompanying set of texts. Falsifiability has traditionally been more of a concern for grammarians than for lexicographers. We all agree it’s a good thing to publish glossed texts so that readers can check out the hypotheses proposed in the grammar, and expressed by the glossing. The classic example is Jeffrey Heath’s careful analysis of R. M.W. Dixon’s Dyirbal texts (HEATH, J. 1979. Is Dyirbal ergative?. Linguistics 17, 401-463) to argue against DIxon’s claim about Dyirbal being syntactically Ergative. Can anyone think of further examples?
Top 10 Endangered Languages
After some delay due to a backlog of other “Top 10s”, my promised article entitled Top 10 Endangered Languages appeared on the Guardian website on Tuesday last week. It has been attracting some attention and comment. Several things seem to have happened to the article in the blogosphere:
- the content was copied whole (with citation) by a number of bloggers – here, here
- only part of the content attracted the attention of some bloggers, eg. Ainu here and here, Ket here, Yuchi here, the loss of cultural heritage here and the parameters I adopted to help me choose here
- Claire Bowern was prompted to come up with her own list of Top 10 endangered languages on her Anggarrgoon blog
- David Crystal mentioned it on his blog which resulted in a comment linking to Claire’s list, and a snappy commentary on Claire’s choice of Mapundungun as an endangered language
- it was listed on Deliggit.com, which claims to track “the social sites most interesting urls”
- it was dug (digged?) on Digg, with 1059 diggs and 154 comments so far. It is currently on the first page of Digg, which is apparently a cool place to be.
1st Call for Papers for a graduate student colloquium on Language
1st Call for Papers for a graduate student colloquium on Language Documentation, to be submitted as part of the 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation at the University of Hawai’i, March 12-14 2009. This colloquium, organized by and for graduate students, will provide an opportunity for graduate students to share their research and experiences. The main conference website is at http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ICLDC09.
ABSTRACT DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 20th 2008.
Burning languages
The appalling war in the Caucasus is the subject of an article “Barriers are steep and linguistic” by Ellen Barry in the New York Times, 24/8/08 [thanks Philip!]. She looks at it from the point of the view of the languages of the region (mostly Georgian – about 4 million speakers, Abkhaz and Osetin with about 100,000 speakers each according to Ethnologue), and interviews several linguists (One of them, Bill Poser, has a useful post (plus Map! ) on Language Log about the linguistic background to the article, which has attracted some interesting comments on linguistic diversity and political clashes ).
Most of the quotations from linguists show their helpless grief over the fate of the people whose languages they study. There’s the odd statement to take issue with – e.g. the claimed lack of language documentation in the Soviet era. It was no worse than in America and Australia at the same time, and for some (not all) small languages in the USSR it was better – they got orthographies, material published in their own languages and recognition.
Here’s how the article ends.
Springtime and the grammar-writing workshop
In late August, the sun, blue skies and daffodils turn a person to cleaning up the old (spring-cleaning, grave-tending, proof-reading), and starting up the new. The new this time is a grammar-writing workshop that Nick Evans has started at the Australian National University.
Thirteen of us (ANU students, staff, visitors and hangers-on) met today for the first meeting. Each of us confessed/asserted/laid out something about the grammars we hope to work on (ranging from biblical Hebrew, to languages of Timor and PNG, to some (like mine on Warumungu and Kaurna) that have been waiting for a lo-o-o-o-ng time.
Nick’s idea is that the group will work on a 4 week cycle
- Week 1. Orientation to the topic (presented by one or more of the convenors)
- Week 2. Reading of two or three key papers.
- Week 3. Critical presentation by selected participants of how this issue is treated in one or more of their ‘adopted’ grammars [Adopting grammars means looking at a grammar of a language related to the one you’re working on, and one which is quite unrelated.[2]]
- Week 4. Presentation by two or three selected participants of special problems they are facing in working up this part of the grammar of the language they are researching.
Indigenous Languages in Argentina
I just got back to London after 9 days in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the invitation of Dr Lucia Galluscio, Instituto de Lingística, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Lucia is one of the leading researchers on indigenous languages of Argentina, having worked for over 30 years on a range of languages including Mapundungun (spoken by the Mapuche in southern Argentina), and Mocovi, Tapiete and Vilela (from the Chaco region in the north of Argentina – she leads the Chaco DoBeS project). Lucia is also a staff member of CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), the national Argentinian research agency, modelled on the CNRS in France, and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship among other awards.
I was invited to participate in four events while I was there:
Counting on language and cognition – Felicity Meakins
[From our woman in the Victoria River District and Manchester, Felicity Meakins]
“Humans have an in-built ability to do mathematics even if they do not have
the language to express it, a research team has suggested. A study in Australian Aboriginal children, whose languages lack number words, found they did just as well as English-speaking children in numeracy….” (BBC)
This study [1] compared Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa kids with English-speaking kids from Melbourne between the age of 4-7 years. Check out the article for the tasks the kids were made to do.
In essence, though, the Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa kids didn’t perform any differently from the English kids. So the results from this study contradict similar studies from the Amazon [2].
I am kinda curious though about whether they had any age-related differences. Surely 5-7 year old Warlpiri and Anindilyakawa kids are already being exposed to English and English counting – unless perhaps they are in transition bilingual programs. They might find some differences with the 4 year old Warlpiri and Anindilyakawa kids in that respect. A bit more info about the kids’ language input might validate the findings a bit.