Endangered Languages and Cultures

Blog-catcher – Aragonese and Fiji

5 February 20114 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Thanks to prowling around the web, we’ve come across Vakaivosavosa, a blog about Fiji and the Pacific, life, history and culture, which has lots of links to material on the Pacific and other blogs. AND – how cool is this.. TLaC’s first citation in a blog about a minority language in that minority language! o … Read more

Tin trunks, gender, wax and emotion

5 February 20112 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Every dead ethnographer (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) had a tin trunk in which all the information on the people, the language, the culture, anything, yes anything you want to know, could be found. But, I’m sorry, aunty died last week, and we don’t know WHERE that tin trunk is now. (Source of observation: Michael Walsh). The anthropologist Ursula McConnel who worked with Wik Mungkan people on Cape York Peninsula, died in 1957, and people have been looking for her trunk ever since.

Summer school courses in Australian Indigenous languages

5 February 201130 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

Want to learn some Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay in Sydney this January? John Giacon passes on this information. Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative and Many Rivers Aboriginal Language Centre, in association with the Koori Centre at the University of Sydney, are facilitating Ngaawa-Garay, a summer school which will offer one week courses in Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay from Monday 15 – Friday 19 January, 2007.

Congratulations

5 February 201129 September 2006 by admin

Running a bit late on this post, but, congratulations to Stan Grant Senior on being awarded the 2006 Deadly for “Outstanding Acheivement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education”, for his work on Wiradjuri language revival. And of course, congratulations too to all the other recipients!

HCSNet Summer School 2006

5 February 201129 September 2006 by admin

Registration for the Human Communication Sciences Network SummerFest06 (Nov 27th – Dec 1st) opens today. There looks to be an interesting line up of courses. I’m hoping I can head along to the courses on Bayesian Networks and Markov Models and Statistics for Linguistics amongst others. I heard that Trevor Johnston’s course on sign languages … Read more

Bush School: The Warlmanpa and the Bakers

5 February 201128 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

There was an engaging documentary Bush School on SBS tonight, about Warrego School in a ghost mining town out of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. It started a few years ago with eleven Warlmanpa children from the Mangarlawurru [Mungalawurru] Aboriginal community travelling 80 km each day to get to there. They’re still going, singing their lessons in the bus. They attend 100% of the time, achieve national benchmarks in English literacy and numeracy, focus on horse-riding and swimming. The school is working hard to combat the hearing loss that most of the kids suffer from (ear infections have meant that several of the children have hearing aids). And they’ve sent one of their brightest students to study at a private girls school in New South Wales.

Where have all the old blogs gone?

5 February 201127 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

I got inspired to preen our blogroll, by following up blogrolls on other linguistics blogs (notably Language Log). This meant hours of pleasure going through musings, dead blogs, frozen blogs, (very!) personal blogs, e-learning blogs exhorting us to use blogs in teaching, e-learning blogs exhorting not to use them, pictures of cats, gardens, parrots, business blogs, meta-blogs..
The results?

Geo-tagging your photos

5 February 201126 September 2006 by admin

There’s an interesting post on slashdot today, on a product that will geo-tag your photos. Geo-tagging a photo means recording some geographic information at the time you take your photo, typically the longitude and latitude.
At first glance I thought it might be another on of these data-loggers, but actually, with a minor addition, it’s a pretty nifty bit of hardware.

‘How about a cuppa tea?’ On techniques for recording naturalistic conversation.

5 February 201125 September 2006 by admin

This posting is topically aligned with two excellent postings (one by Tom on this blog and one by Claire at Anggarrgoon) about problems relating to video recording and the observer’s paradox. In my comments to Tom’s posting, I talked about some of the problems I’d had recording naturalistic conversation on video and that I’d had more success with straight audio. So I’ll now talk about the audio recording of conversation, which is where I have had more success.

invitation… to the launch of the Yuwaalaraay-Gamilaraay Language Programs resources

5 February 201124 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

To all our readers who’ll be in the Tamworth area (New South Wales) on Friday 20 October, 2006. Remember the post on the excellent new Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay resources?
Well this is your chance to admire the resources, and to see performances from the kids learning the Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay languages. John Giacon passes on this invitation.