3 more days to go
With 3 works days or so to go before I leave, I haven’t had much time for posting recently. This is partly because a few days ago we decided to translate all 714-odd Yan-nhangu sentences in the dictionary into Dhuwal, the local lingua franca. We finished it. I can’t believe we finished it (partly because some of the examples are repeated, so 714 is really only about 600… but still!) From the outside, this is not a particularly sensible thing to do with 3 days to spare. I dont speak Dhuwal very well, although I understand a fair bit and know enough to be able to tell if the example seems an accurate translation of the Yan-nhangu. However, I’ll need to transcribe most of these examples on my own. It’ll make the dictionary more usable for its main constituency, though. It’s also very useful for my comparative Yolngu project, and I speak a heap more Dhuwal than I did three days ago!
[Update: It's a pity we didn't have time to do the encyclopaedic information too, but that would have been too much. However, this was useful for a heap of other reasons too. We've got a bit of a parallel 'corpus' which'll help with senses in the dictionary, and it'll make the Dhuwal-Yan-nhaŋu part of the dictionary much more useful.]
