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):
]]> Nhukuramartuthu ngurrunyjarri julyumartu ngunha nhanyaartu {porcupinemanha == jiriparrinha} puniyanha. {porcupine == Jiriparri} ngunha jakuparlarrirarru. Ngurntirarri jakuparlarru parnajipithu ngunha warrirru nhanyapuka. Ngurrunyjarrilu yarnararnilaartu ngurntapuka ngunhapa jakuparla. Wangkirarringu. Yarnararrima nhurra. Yarnararrima nhurra. Ngatha {nhurranha murrurrpa manara nhurranha}. Yarnararrima. Ngatha {nhurranha murrurrpa manara nhurranha}. Yarnararrima. Ngatha murrurpa manara nhurranha. Kunyarnurru ngunha kumpanhu. {Porcupinemanha == Jiriparri} ngunha kurlkanyunthurru yarnararrira. When he Yarnararrirathu parnarru thangkalpuka wurungku wirntupinyangurru pirrurru yanararri thikaru.Editorial changes that Jack and I made are the following:
Wamut also mentions in his comment on Jane's post another possible way in which published texts can differ from recordings:
"I've heard other spoken texts vary from the published text because the field worker has interrupted the speaker for clarification etc."
There are also cases I know of where speakers "interrupt" themselves. My colleague David Nathan tells me that when he was working with Luise Hercus to produce a multimedia CD-ROM of Baagandji materials, he found Luise's audio recordings of stories also contained interpolations and explanations in English by the speaker which do not appear in the published texts.
I think descriptive linguists and language documenters could well take some guidance in this area from the work of epigraphers who have been developing a TEI/XML markup for epigraphy called EpiDoc. Some of the EpiDoc proposals are concerned with adaptation of the TEI guidelines to deal with a range of issues such as legibility of characters on stone, missing elements or partially represented signs, but in addition there are several issues that I think should equally be of concern to language documentation:
The EpiDoc guidelines contain explicit recommendations on how to encode these as markup annotations to the text. For work on endangered languages I think there are some additional aspects that should be encoded, especially because we need to typically distinguish at least three participants in the process of published text creation, namely the original speaker, the transcriber, and the linguist-editor. We should pay attention to:
To my mind, it will only be when linguists make available marked up documents encoding these aspects along with the published texts, and the original media recordings (ideally publically available through an archive or distributed on CD or DVD along with the published texts), that we can start truly talking about "falsifiability" of grammars and other analytical claims about languages. The "published texts" alone are often simply not enough.
Notes:
1. The ideas presented here have been fermenting since they were first publicly presented at an ELAP Workshop at SOAS in February 2005. At the Simposio Internacional: Contacto de Lenguas y Documentatión (International Symposium on Language Contact and Documentation) held in Buenos Aires last month, Ulrike Mosel presented a paper entitled "Putting oral narratives into writing – experiences from a language documentation project in Papua New Guinea" in which she explored the issue of editing recorded Teop texts for publication. She independently identified many of the same issues I outline here.
2. I have been unable to find any discussion of the importance of explicit encoding of transcriptional and analytical editing decisions among the list of "best practices" promoted, eg. by the E-MELD School of Best Practice, despite the fact that, to me at least, they play an important role in "practices which are intended to make digital language documentation optimally longlasting, accessible, and re-usable by other linguists and speakers".
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?
It also leads to the question of how much effort one should put into justifying categories, hypotheses and assumptions. One of the group had endured a referee's report saying his grammar was too argumentative. Just give us the conclusions and get on with it! Assuming that we DO need some justification - what should we justify - all categories? All points which previous authors have offered alternative accounts of? And where? Footnotes, marginalia, separate chapters, boxes in 10 point type.
And it leads to the question of how to represent variation in grammars - differences relating to time (earlier stages of the language), to geography (dialect), and to register (where does recipe syntax go?).
]]>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:
I guess we can but keep on trying by publishing things like a Top 10 list when the opportunity arises, as it did for me last month.
Post script: My colleague, David Hughes from the SOAS Music Department, is currently in Japan and wrote me as follows when he saw the Guardian posting:
"there have been two articles about young Ainu musicians in the paper in the past ten days or so. These musicians are trying hard to learn to sing in Ainu (while understanding the meaning, of course, not just mouthing the sounds). As in Okinawa in the south music is one important mechanism for encouraging language learning among the young, BUT only if that music is sufficiently popular or at least not scorned among the majority populace. Okinawan music is very popular and relatively prestigious; Ainu music, not yet, but the smallish popularity of performers like Oki (half-Ainu, didn't know it till he was an adult, had to learn the language), or the Ainu Rebels, will help young Ainu get interested.
For a sample of this new music take a look at the video of Toko Emi's haunting Ainu song "yay-sama" from her album Upopo.
The role of popular music in language revitalisation in Australia and elsewhere has been noted before.
]]>Time limitation in the graduate program and its implication for language documentation
Responding to community requests for revitalization during the graduate program
Fieldwork and language documentation for graduate students in L3 and issues for translation
Conflicts and compromises on research and goals between communities and researchers
Presentation format:
Papers will be allowed 20 minutes with 10 minutes of question time.
Abstract submission:
Abstracts must be first submitted directly to the session organizer, Hiroko Sato, at hirokosa AT hawaii.edu by September 20th 2008. Once the session has been organized, accepted abstracts will be submitted to the main conference website. Please note that we have obtained a deadline extension from the conference organizers for this themed session.
Maximum abstract length is 400 words. Please send your abstract as an
attachment to hirokosa@hawaii.edu.
Notification of Acceptance: by OCTOBER 17th, 2008
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.
]]> [Anna] Dybo has yet to hear from a library in Tskhinvali, which held a magisterial lexicon of the Ossetian language that was compiled over the course of many years. It's a single manuscript, never transferred to a computer. She is not sure, she said, but she thinks it burned up on Aug. 8."Who is to blame for the chaos that caused deaths, dispossession, the loss of much infrastructure, and, perhaps, the loss of a major dictionary?
Everyone, says a sad article in the Economist (A scripted war, pp. 22-24, 16th-22nd August). Russians, Georgians, Ossetians. But the Ossetians and Georgians are the big losers.
]]>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
And, thinking of invented terms, for next week, we're set to read Ulrike Mosel's article "Grammaticography: The art and craft of writing grammars" from Catching language. [2]
[1] I 'm mulling about the related language, but will probably take Sneddon's Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian. Others are taking Catharina Williams-van Klinken's Tetun Dili grammar, Stanley Newman's Zuni grammar, Martin Haspelmath's Lezgian grammar and many more (competition for Icelandic!).
[2] Catching Language: The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing, Edited by Felix K. Ameka, Alan Charles Dench, Alan Dench, Nicholas Evans. Mouton de Gruyter, 2006
]]>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:
]]>During the Indigenous languages course and the International Symposium (and associated social events) I had a chance to learn a lot about the indigenous languages situation in Argentina and to interact with some of the indigenous attendees (Mapuche, Wichi, Pilaga and Toba) about their languages and the work they are doing. Many were teachers, working on language support and revitalisation, in politically charged and difficult circumstances. There are a number of parallels between the situations of indigenous languages in Australia and Argentina (though the absolute numbers of some groups are much greater in Argentina, e.g. 60,000 Mapuche and 40,000 Wichi). There was a lot of interest in revitalisation of "sleeping languages" in Australia, such as Kaurna and Gamilaraay, and we plan to work on a Spanish translation of my public lecture for wider distribution. There was also quite a bit of discussion when I talked about Paul Keating's "Redfern speech" and Kevin Rudd's apology on behalf of the Australian parliament -- Argentina has a complicated and tragic recent non-indigenous history that has an impact on how relations between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples are worked out there in a way that is quite different from Australia.
It is impossible to get a proper understanding of the range of endangered and indigenous language issues in such a short visit, but I hope to be able to visit again, possibly next year, and ideally including trips to regions outside Buenos Aires.
]]>"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.
]]>
[1] Brian Butterworth, Robert Reeve, F. Reynolds and D. Lloyd. Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Published online Aug. 18, 2008
[2] E.g. on the Pirahã, by Michael Frank, Edward Gibson, Evelina Fedorenko, and Dan Everett, alluded to in an earlier post ).
]]>Anyway at the last Australian Linguistics Society (ALS) conference, there was a meeting on establishing the Australian National Corpus initiative. As a result, they're planning an HCSNet Workshop on Designing the Australian National Corpus to be held in Sydney (4-5 December 2008), as well as getting the National Audit of Language Data in Australia rolling. The call for papers for this workshop will be distributed very soon.
If you want to add your name to their statement of common purpose (attached below) and be on the mailing list, contact Michael Haugh [m.haugh (AT griffith.edu.au)] or Cliff Goddard [cgoddard (AT une.edu.au)]
We the undersigned agree to support the building of an Australian National Corpus.
We propose that this be a national online corpus of spoken and written data that includes both donations from existing language corpora, including English in Australia data (encompassing Australian English, Aboriginal Englishes, ethnic/migrant Englishes, intercultural/lingua franca Englishes), Aboriginal languages data, and migrant languages data, as well as providing a strong foundation for the principled gathering of further data.
We further propose that such a corpus should be freely accessible and useful to the maximum number of interested parties (to the extent that the level of consent gathered from participants allows), and that engagement in a particular theoretical framework need not hinder donations or access to the corpus. Indeed the aim of developing a freely available national corpus is that it can become an ongoing resource not only for linguists, but also historians, sociologists, social psychologists, and those working in cultural studies with an interest in Australian society or culture. We therefore see such a corpus as an important part of the development of research infrastructure for humanities researchers in Australia.
We also propose that the corpus include original audio or audiovisual recordings where possible, as well as written transcripts made of these recordings of spoken interaction when available, as current technological developments lead us to believe that there is potential for flexibility in terms of the online platform and meta-tagging chosen.
Australian Linguistics Society
4 July 2008
Signatories:
]]>The Australian government has millions of dollars that it will be spending on what it calls the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support new technologies in research in Australia.
"Through NCRIS, the Government is providing $542 million over 2005-2011 to provide researchers with major research facilities, supporting infrastructure and networks necessary for world-class research."
DEST released a paper outlining what it called 'capabilities' which it proposed to fund, and they were ALL in the sciences, including lots of shiny pointy instruments (synchrotron, new telescopes and so on) to do the whizzbang experiments that are so popular and capture the imagination of politicians. While the physical science community has amazing capacity to pull in big research dollars, there are not that many of them, and even fewer who actually want to use each of these very expensive instruments.
On the other hand, the Humanities, Arts and Social Science (HASS) community is huge, and also does the kind of work that, in the main, is immediately relevant to those who fund it (taxpayers). So, in the consultation that followed, the clamour of HASS proponents resulted in a new 'capability' being added to the 'roadmap', but without any funding (yet) associated with it. There will be an 'Innovation White Paper' announcement before the end of 2008, and the current roadmap leads to the White Paper.
All of this is important for us, as it is the bucket from which national infrastructure like a National Data Service may be funded, and where policies on standards for data repositories like PARADISEC will be set. It is where funding will come from for the national computer facility that houses the online version of the PARADISEC collection.
]]> The ARC is also following these developments, and it is likely that they will be increasingly interested in seeing funding applications that understand how to create reusable and interoperable data, safely housed and described in a suitable repository. HASS researchers do not always know that they need digital infrastructure, and don't understand what it could do to change their research practices. A few exemplary projects have taken centre stage, including PARADISEC, Austlit, the Australian Social Sciences Data Archive (ASSDA), iCinema, the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, the Archaeological Computing Laboratory, and AUSTEHC.A sensible approach by government could be to fund projects like these and to assist them to advocate among their peers. But this is not happening and many exemplary projects risk losing trained staff due to hiatuses in funding. A useful document about developments in what they call 'cyberinfrastructure' in HASS in the USA is the document 'Our Cultural Commonwealth'. It discusses the nature of HASS data as forming part of the public good, and details the distinctive needs and contributions that HASS researchers have for cyberinfrastructure.
Among which could be the Linguistics Society of America's draft statement on ethics. It contains some interesting ideas, links to codes of ethics in related disciplines, and, most helpfully, it's in a blog format, so people are commenting on pieces of the proposal. The comments are fascinating.
]]>I took a couple of weeks off recently for my summer holidays during which I started reading an "airport book" (picked up at W.H. Smith's in the new Heathrow Terminal 5 under one of those ubiquitous "buy one get one half price" deals also offered by Waterstones, Blackwells and Borders throughout the UK -- even my local Tesco supermarket offers 50% discount on trade paperbacks). It is called The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Penguin Books, 2007), and what attracted me to shell out my 6 pounds (sorry, readers in Australia) was the subtitle The Impact of the Highly Improbable and the blurb:
"This book is all about Black Swans: the random events that underlie our lives from bestsellers to world disasters. Their impact is huge: they're nearly impossible to predict; yet after they happen we always try to rationalise them."]]> Taleb is currently Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has a background in probability theory, the study of empiricism and randomness, and Wall Street trading. A nice break from linguistics and endangered languages I thought.
Taleb's main thesis is that there are certain discoveries ("Black Swans") which are entirely unexpected ("outliers") but which have a major impact on beliefs and theories of the world that require post-hoc revisions to accumulated wisdom, attempting to make the discovery explainable and predictable. His writing style is rather egotistical, repetitive and dressed up in pop jargon for my taste (and, as I found out when I had finished the book, for other reviewers), however he does make a number of interesting points. One of these is a contrast between two contexts, what he calls "Mediocristan" and "Extremistan", as set out in his Table 1 (page 36) which I partially reproduce here:
| Mediocristan | Extremistan |
| Nonscalable | Scalable |
| Mild randomness | Wild randomness |
| Most typical member is mediocre | Most "typical" is either giant or dwarf, ie. there is no typical member |
| Corresponds (generally) to physical quantities | Corresponds to abstract elements, eg. numbers |
| Total is not determined by a single instance or observation | Total can be determined by a small number of extreme events |
| Short-term observation identifies trends | Long-term observation required |
| Routine, obvious, predictable | Accidental, unseen, unpredictable |
| History crawls | History makes jumps |
| Events are distributed according to the "bell curve" or its variants | Events are either Mandelbrotian (tractable scientifically) or totally intractable |
The context of what Taleb calls "Mediocristan" includes such things as height, weight, calorie consumption, income for a dentist, or mortality rates. The context of "Extremistan" includes (ultimately socially constructed) values like wealth, number of book sales, number of references on Google, commodity prices, and populations of cities (page 35). To help understand the contrast, Taleb gives an example: if we take 1000 random people and calculate their weights, we can identify a range of values and a total -- addition of one further individual (even the heaviest person on the planet) will make little difference to the total or range. If we look at their wealth, on the other hand, addition of a single individual, eg. Bill Gates, can result in an unpredictable jump (as Taleb surmises, Bill Gates' wealth will represent 99.9% of the new total, with all the others representing "no more than a rounding error for his net worth, the variation of his personal portfolio over the past second" (page 33)). The same would be true for book sales, and the subsequent addition of J.K. Rowling to the group.
What about language? Taleb mentions number of speakers and token frequencies of vocabulary items as being in the domain of "Extremistan" -- speaker numbers vary wildly with extreme outliers (Chinese with 1,200 million, other languages with 1 or 2), and as well known from corpus linguistics, a small number of word forms in any language are highly frequent while others can be vanishingly rare.
It seems to me that if Taleb's thesis is correct (and I have not been able to do justice to all the complexities of his arguments here), it has a further application in the realm of endangered and under-documented languages. It could form the basis for an (attractive) epistemological argument to respond to the question (which I have been frequently asked by members of the general public, at least) "Why study under-documented and endangered languages?" This argument can stand beside, or instead of, the intangible cultural heritage arguments promoted by Unesco, among others (that have been criticised for their fundamental neo-Whorfianism). Under-documented languages are potentially the domain of Black Swans, discoveries that are outliers in terms of currently constructed typologies (formalised or not) of human language (one thinks of extremes of phoneme inventories seen in small languages like !Xóõ or Rotokas, for example). This argument would provide a potential philosophical underpinning for the famous quotation by Martin Joos that "[L]anguages can differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways." (Martin Joos (ed.)1957 Readings in linguistics: the development of descriptive linguistics in America since 1925. Washington: American Council of Learned Societies)
]]>Loathed the goose-stepping soldiers.
Loathed the mass synchronised movements.
Loathed the rhythmic grunts.
Bit worried about the cute young people in ethnic minority dress.
Hope that unity doesn't mean homogeneity.
Hope that harmony comes from welcoming difference.
Wish Crouching Tiger Roy and Hidden Dragon H.G. were doing the TV commentary.
]]>Nick listed several reasons for linguists being concerned about the history of linguistics, most of which were demonstrated by papers in the workshop that preceded the launch, the Inaugural Conference of the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific (SHLP), held at the Australian National University on Friday August 1.
]]> The first and perhaps most obvious reason is to increase the documentation of languages by discovering and examining old sources on them. That was demonstrated by Harold Koch's paper on George Augustus Robinson's elicitation of vocabularies in the region where Canberra now is. A locked door kept me from Chris Ballard and Nick Thieberger's paper, which considered a recently uncovered 1871 translation of St John's Gospel which may shed light on the questions as to whether the language of later Bible translations reflects a spoken lingua franca on Efaté, Vanuatu, or a ‘compromise literary dialect’.To this concern can be added the importance of seeking 'truth'. Linguists need to know how reliable an old source is. Two papers on Daisy Bates (Bill McGregor and David Nash) showed that, despite her romantic and self-serving inventions about her own life, the notes in her papers on Kimberley and south-western Australian languages are, allowing for phonetics, pretty reliable. Her 90-plus boxes of material are well overdue for assessment and selective publication.
In contrast with Bates, Peter Lanyon-Orgill's confabulations about his life were of a piece with his confections of vocabularies and the fictive persons who appeared in his works, as Ross Clark showed in a fascinating, devastating and very funny account of Lanyon-Orgill's life. Distressed wood in fake antiques was his analogy for the way that Lanyon-Orgill modified words from existing word-lists. Lanyon-Orgill even made up a fake Hawaiian word-list which contains words for birds such as swallows - introduced to Hawaii long after the word-list was supposed to have been collected.
Exposing such forgeries isn't just an antiquarian hobby - it saves other people time, labour and groundless enthusiasm. If historians had known of the linguist Paul Geraghty's 1983 exposure of Lanyon-Orgill's fake word-lists of Pacific languages [1], or of Peter Newton's scepticism [2], one poor scholar, Keith Vincent Smith, mightn't have got so enthusiastic, when he came across Lanyon-Orgill's fake word-lists of the Sydney language supposedly collected by people on the Endeavour. As Ross Clark pointed out, Smith took these word-lists at face-value. He used them to build up an account of relations between the visitors and the Eora [3], which was then taken up in an exhibition on the Eora (State Library of NSW exhibition on the Eora [.pdf]). And no doubt, if unchecked, others will add more storeys to this house of cards.
However, understanding relations between Indigenous people and sojourners/colonists/invaders/linguists is another reason for studying the history of linguistics. Hilary Carey gave a paper on Lancelot Threlkeld and his Awabakal teacher Biraban aka Johnny McGill, in which she discussed Evangelion ureni ta Jesu-umba Chris-ko-ba upatoara Louka-uemba [St Luke's Gospel, translated into the Hunter River language, aka Awabakal], an illuminated manuscript commissioned by George Grey. The only copy is in the Auckland City Library. This has portraits of both Biraban and Threlkeld, showing a recognition of the importance of both men in the translation.
Threlkeld's grammar and vocabulary was the first published grammar of an Australian language, and its influence can be seen in some later grammars and word-lists. We got into a bit of a discussion about how to compare the works of early recorders of languages in terms of accuracy of documentation and elegance of analysis. It needs doing; otherwise non-linguists are likely to misunderstand the significance and influence of the work and ideas of particular language documenters. For example, if a language documenter produces a sketch grammar of a few pages, accompanying a dictionary and set of sentences, a non-linguist may think that the grammar is insubstantial. But a linguist can look at the sentences, compare them with the grammar, and with the translations, and work out whether the author had a good understanding of the language.
Another reason is to learn from the history of ideas about language, how they change and develop, how they influence one another. Sylvia Mackie's paper (which I also unfortunately missed) of the workshop discussed this for recent history - looking at Ken Hale's notion of the adjoined relative clause, how it related to his generative grammarian contemporaries' focus on embedded relative clauses and how it prefigured later interest in adjoined relative clauses as a stage of grammaticalising relative clauses. Another example was provided in Paul Sidwell's paper on the classification of Austroasiatic - he demonstrated how classifications of genetic relations were published without the evidence behind them, and how this led to uncritical acceptance of the classifications.
An interesting example came from the effect of the introduction of ideas about phonology in the 1950s. This struck me when listening to David Moore's paper on the history of work on Alyawarr, and Anders Ahlkvist's paper on Nils Holmer's Celtic dialect work (Holmer also worked on several Queensland and New South Wales languages). Once people had been dazzled by the elegance of phonological analyses, they tended to criticise people such as T. G. H. Strehlow and Holmer, who gave a more phonetic rendition of languages. In fact you need both - the variations recorded by Strehlow probably represent genuine variation in pronunciations, the recording of which is as essential as a good phonological analysis for giving a coherent picture of the language.
All this has led to the coalescence of a group of people into the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific. Watch out for the Society's next conference next year.
[1] Geraghty, Paul. 1983. Review of Book: "Captain Cook's South Sea Island Vocabularies" by Peter A. Lanyon-Orgill. Journal of the Polynesian Society 92 (4):554-559.
[2] Newton, Peter John Frederick. 1987. More than one language, more than one culture : scholarly and popular ideas about Australian Aboriginal languages from early times until 1860. M.A. (Hons.). Macquarie University, North Ryde, N.S.W.
[3] from Selected Bibliography of Material on the Dharug/Daruk/Darug Language and People held in the AIATSIS Library [.pdf]
Local call number: p SMI
Personal Author: Smith, Keith, 1939-
Added Author: Lanyon-Orgill, Peter, 1924- Captain Cook's South Sea Island Vocabularies
Title: 1770 : the Endeavour lists : forgotten words from Botany Bay / by Keith Vincent Smith
Publication info: 2003
Physical descrip: p. 32-37
Annotation: Discusses a manuscript containing three short lists of words collected from Aboriginal people in the Botany Bay area in 1770 by crew members of The Endeavour; argues that these lists along with a words told to Benjamin Bowen Carter by Maroot the elder at La Perouse in 1798 and words collected by Robert Brown at Mill Creek, Georges River on 2 October 1803, confirm the dominance of a single language in the Sydney area; also argues that there were friendly meetings between Cook's crew and Indigenous people
Source: AQ : Journal of Contemporary Analysis, Vol. 75, issue 1 (Jan.-Feb. 2003)
Language/Group: Dharug / Daruk / Darug language (S64) (NSW SI56-5)
Indigenous languages a key to delivering better health and education
outcomes for indigenous Australians
Since colonisation Australia has suffered the greatest & most rapid
loss of languages in the world. Today, only 145 of 300 indigenous
languages are still spoken in Australia, of these110 are critically
endangered.
"Everyone needs to be able to understand and communicate with
governments in their own language as well as in English if education
and health programs and services are to be effective" said Alex Kelly,
Creative Producer of Big hART's Ngapartji Ngapartji project.
Non-Indigenous educators, police, youth workers and medical workers
are often hampered by not being trained in local languages or
culturally appropriate modes of communication.
Successive governments have ignored indigenous cultural norms,
knowledge and governance structures. Despite the millions of dollars
being spent it is clear that the existing policies are not overcoming
indigenous disadvantage at an acceptable rate.
"Closing the communications gap will help win the fight to close the
health and education gap between indigenous and non-indigenous
Australians" Kelly continued.
"The National Apology to the Stolen Generation was an important first
step in a long journey of healing that includes helping people revive
and maintain languages and culture.
"A national languages policy should be geared towards addressing the
displacement and loss of languages faced by Australia's indigenous
people or this is the next thing we will be apologising for" concluded Kelly.
Big hART's Ngapartji Ngapartji is a long-term intergenerational
language and arts project based in the Central Desert.
The team is today launching a paper on the need for a concerted
federal focus on indigenous languages.
The four page paper is available as a PDF to download via the website
http://www.ngapartji.org/content/view/19/79/
For more information or a copy of the paper contact Alex Kelly,
Creative Producer 0422777590, alex AT ngapartji.org