Language of the Week: DIY

This week’s language of the week is going to be a DIY effort. Add your favourite bit of your favourite language or languages (or you can make something up that you’d like to see in a language) in the comments.

DIY is technically Diuwe, where the sole comment is ‘below 100 meters’. Therefore let me start the ball rolling by claiming that DIY is the only language which supports the hypothesis that altitude affects air stream mechanisms. Its consonant inventory contains 3 stops, four fricatives, 5 laterals, six approximants and seven vowels.

hiatus

My last post included a brief summary of the plot of the first part of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in Bardi, which I felt was appropriate fieldwork preparation. Updates will be extremely patchy for the next week (my last week in Houston, which happens to involve 4 days out of Houston too) and then patchier still if I don’t have regular internet at One Arm Point.

Injiyana Janj

Boorda ngawanyjin warrgamngan Ardiyooloon: nganjalan Injiyana Janj agal jaaj jin doom. Barnanggarr biila milimili nganjalana. Garrma gilinim ngankama=jan baarla. Ngaanka ngangonboonjin Ardiyooloonngan, ngaanka nganamoogarna mayiidinngan Ardiyooloonngan.

Aeroplanenyarr bard ingirrjiidina Chinago. Dr Jonesnim booroongan jirr ambooriny darr inarn Indiyi: inarligal, ngangan ingarramanana Shiva jina jawal agal goolboo jin jawal. Ingarralana janambooro goolboo inamana rajanim. Barnmanjin goolbooninga. Aarli ilogo irrinkal, noorroo ingoorrooloorroonana, joondoorrngan ingirrina. baawa jirrirr inanggana barda. Ilibandnyarr roowil ingirrinya. door ingirrin irr iliband.

(Dictionary count: joondoorr [dust] and the light verb that ‘plan’ goes with)

preparing for fieldwork

I had a status on my facebook profile a little while ago that I wondered what others did to prepare for fieldwork. My current preparation has involved rather more Bardi preparation and less buying stuff than most previous trips, which is good for my Bardi but a little nerve-wracking. Someone on facebook suggested a stiff drink was a good start, but they work on Irish…

There are things I always take to the field and never use, but I’d think I wasn’t ready if I didn’t take them. One is a reflective space blanket. It’s in case I get lost in the bush. It’s a good idea for hiking in New Hampshire or the Snowies, but less useful in North Australia a) because it doesn’t get cold enough, and b) because I never seem to take it when we go bush, so its reflective purpose is nullified by its staying at the bottom of my pack. It’s been on all my fieldtrips. On the other hand, I have never yet brought too many pens. Another thing that always goes with me is a beaded lizard that lives in my tape bag. A friend gave it to me in Darwin in 2004 and it’s really cute.

So, how do you prepare for fieldwork, and do you have random stuff that always goes with you even if it’s useless?

Localisation of linguistic terminology: occagram

There’s a bit of a trend to localise web browsers, software, books and so on for local use. I can get google in Catalan, Kirghiz or Xhosa, and on my trip to Milingimbi last year we were translating parts of speech into Yolŋu Matha.

I reckon it’s time that Australian English was freed from the shackles of Latin grammar. I reckon we should get to use our own terms. Here is a preliminary proposal (which I will, of course, be submitting to the Australian Linguistic Society’s executive committee in due course). I’m on the lookout for coauthors for further advancement of this worthwhile localisation project.

Poncy Latin term	True Blue Occa Term
masculine	blokative
feminine	sheilative
eye-witness evidential	squizzative
vulgar infixation	sledgabloodytive
noun	thing
verb	verb-thing
anachronism	grannitive
malefactive	badative
prefix	pre-thing
super/suprasegmental	fly-spit on the paper(ative)
dubitative	who-knowsative

In the next installment, we will see how productive such a localisation strategy can be. In this case, it has led to the discovery of new grammatical categories!

Two unrelated questions

First, to my American audience: Is upstate New York part of the mid-west? Specifically, are Rochester and Buffalo midwestern towns? I ask because Rocastrians I have talked to say ‘yes, we’re on the border but Buffalo is echt Midwest’, but the Buffalonians I talked to today denied this hotly.

Secondly, to my Australianist audience: tell me about your sun and moon stories. Specifically, are the sun and moon married to each other? If not, who are they married to? Do they have kids?

[These questions are only related by the fact that they were both in my brain together, but special bonus points for anyone who can relate them more amusingly.]

Today’s Laves pick

More translation today. No great earth-shattering discoveries, but plenty of stuff done.

• 25 new words to the dictionary, some of which have glosses, even.
• 5 new place names.
• A nice list of booroo [clan estate] names. This was useful because I didn’t know for sure that all of them *are* clan estates, so that’s nice confirmation of their status. (Place name structure in Bardi is hierarchical but I only fully realised it about 18 months ago and the system is in decline, so for a fair number of names it’s not clear whether they are old estate names or big-name places.)
• A few more examples of rare morphology, including =rra.