Endangered Languages and Cultures

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.

Non-intrusive video taping or spying on your informants?

5 February 201122 September 2006 by admin

(Following a previous post and a reply from Claire at Anggarrgoon)
Is it possible to reduce the intrusiveness of video taping someone?
Before I launch into this… let me just say: “flashing lights and ethical alarm bells!”. What I’m going to talk about is the paradox of fully informing your informants that you’re going film them, and then trying your hardest to seem like you’re not there!

Noongar, Native Title, Linguistic evidence: a small celebration before the night

5 February 201121 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

The cause for celebration is Justice Murray Wilcox’s finding that Noongar people have ‘native title’ to certain parts of the Perth Metropolitan area (Federal Court (Bennell v State of Western Australia [2006] FCA 1243), Perth, 19 SEPTEMBER 2006).
The pursuit of native title (like the Snark) has cost heaps and caused much grief. But when native title is recognised, it’s great, and when the value of linguistic evidence in determining it is recognised, this is also great. Wilcox’s findings have lots of interesting things to say about Noongar language, what the claimants said, and the expert linguistic evidence provided by PARADISEC’s Nick Thieberger.

Media Cannibals

5 February 201119 September 2006 by admin

Media watch devoted their entire episode on the 18th of September to analysis of this embarrassing stoush between channel 7 and channel 9. Until next monday, you can view this week’s Media Watch online, the transcripts should be up for a bit longer than that.
Perhaps my only criticism on the Media Watch coverage is that they focused mostly on the content of the fight between the two channels, but didn’t look so much at how ridiculously improbable the scenario was. I guess a follow up on this Paul Raffaele character, and a real discussion of life and hardships of people living in Papua (AIDS springs to mind…amongst many other issues), is content for a real news show rather than a show that critiques the media…
incidentally…I love the title “why 7 ate 9”

Market value of ‘Aboriginal’ words

5 February 201119 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

Diverting myself from contemplation of pronouns, I was led via the Indigenous alert (you get this by e-mailing library.research AT facs.gov.au) to a story on a spa in Queensland where the writer was testing

“Lowana from Li’Tya, a range of products and treatments which draw inspiration from indigenous Australian culture”

‘Lowana’ caught my attention, since I have been idling around with the etymology of lubra, which takes in Oyster Bay Tasmanian lowana ‘woman’. HO, I thought, a Tasmanian enterprise perhaps. ‘Woman’ I thought, good name for spa consumers. ‘Lowana’ – fits English speakers’ sense of euphony. So I went further to Spa care from the Australian Dreamtime. My machine was instantly taken over by a buzzing drone-pipe, but I fought on (with the help of the volume control), wading through the piccies of cute painted-up people, in search of WORDS..