Endangered Languages and Cultures

“First Contact” experience?

5 February 201115 September 2006 by admin

With a language group that has 10,200 hits on google and a definition in wikipedia! Hmmm… Bill Foley, from the Linguistic Department here at Sydney Uni did an interview this afternoon and will be on channel seven’s news tonight commenting on the disgraceful “Wa-Wa” scandal.

Making journalists accountable – rules of evidence and the right to silence?

5 February 201115 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

Today’s Australian has the linguist Frances Kofod’s moving obituary for a Gija painter and law man, Hector Jandany. This is the good side of the Australian‘s coverage of Indigenous affairs. The bad side however has come to the fore this week.

Language in Australia and New Zealand?

5 February 201113 September 2006 by admin

a post from Nick Thieberger
David Nash just alerted me to http://www.mouton-online.com/ausbib.php which is promisingly called: ‘Language in Australia and New Zealand’, and, for a mere 248 euros would seem to be an indispensible aid to the Australasian linguist. I popped in and got a guest logon which they generously (but perhaps ill-advisedly) offer for free. It seems to be a bibliographic listing (but in the days of Google Scholar and other such resources it may already be redundant?). I put in the name of my favourite Aboriginal language, Warnman, and got zero hits. Curious I thought.

Bits and obits

5 February 201112 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

The Central Australian Ngumbin-Yapa languages Warlpiri and Gurindji feature in this entry, together with obituaries for a Nyamal lawman, and an anthropologist who studied Maori oral literature.

Permanence and Accountability

5 February 201112 September 2006 by admin

Jane’s last post and a post on the ever excellent Language Log have got me thinking about permanence and accountability in the internet age. Its a theme that I encounter again and again, working for a digital archive.

Transience and permanence on the web

5 February 201111 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

An RSS feed is forever.. that’s what I forgot in the Technorati post (now deleted) – in my desire to avoid Technorati’s quick blog registration (which requires sending a valuable password into the Technorati ether, perhaps forever…). Sorry all! (And boy have we paid for it with streams of junk comments from strip poker sites!).

How do we know what they see? Field linguists and the appearance of things

5 February 201110 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

Vivid pink plum trees, white cherry trees, soft masses of yellow wattle, japonica hedges with pink flowers leaping out of new green leaves, white cockatoos browsing on the ground. That was Canberra during the Rematerialising colour conference at ANU’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. How does the outsider linguist find out if speakers of another language have colour terms? This important question for field linguists and lexicographers was raised in two papers on the Australian language Warlpiri by David Nash and Anna Wierzbicka.

PhD scholarships at the University of Sydney

5 February 20119 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

if you want to spend three years thinking and writing about languages and cultures of Australia and the Asia-Pacific region …
Nod to Ethics committee: HEALTH WARNING: and you’re not ESPECIALLY worried about whether you’ll find a interesting job afterwards….
… applications for the 2007 APA/UPA scholarships at the University of Sydney are now open. Information and an application can be downloaded from:
http://www.usyd.edu.au/ro/training/postgraduate_awards.shtml

Plant species, shrub

5 February 20117 September 2006 by admin

In the field last year I meticulously gathered photos with audio recordings of many plants in the area I was working in PNG. I certainly don’t like creating lexicon entries all with a gloss of “tree/plant species” and I figured in this digital age, including a picture and audio recording of each plant was one way of increasing the identifiability of each plant (and animal… but they’re not so photogenic). Pictures are a much more salient identifier for speakers of the language than anything else. Never-the-less, scientific name are a good universal identifier for a plant, but they’re hard to get if you don’t have a botanist with you.
So earlier this year I sat down with Barry Conn at the National Herbarium of New South Wales to discuss interdisciplinary work between linguists and botanists. One of my questions was “what does a linguist need to do in the field to get a plant identified?”.
Here are some of my notes from the meeting, with some comments from Barry:

Solar Power in the Field (part 3)

5 February 20116 September 2006 by admin

In the last post in this series we figured out how much power we’d need. Now the really important part – we choose our panel and battery and stick it all together.