Laves project web page

I’ve started a page for the Laves materials project. It’s still a draft at this stage but more material will go up as the project progresses. You can reach it here: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bowern/laves/laves.htm.

New Language!

Well, not really, but it was new to me, and it was a bit of a shock.
This post was originally going to be a bit of a rant about “people” who don’t catalogue their tapes, or record who’s speaking on the tape (or what the language is). I’ve been at AIATSIS for the past couple [...]

What do you want?

Here’s a gem from a tape I was listening to a few days ago. I’d better not say who the linguist was, and I don’t know who the speaker was. He was elderly in the mid 1960s.
Linguist: How do you say “what do you want”?
Speaker: Anggi liyan min.. I mean anggi liyan ngan .. no [...]

Goolarrabooloo

Some time ago I mentioned that I would blog about the name/term Goolarrabooloo. It’s a Yawuru/Jugun clan name, it seems.
First up, morphology. Goolarra means ‘west’, and -(a)booloo is a kind of collective denizen suffix; X-booloo translates as “people belonging to X”. X is most often a compass point, but it can also be an environment [...]

Two unusual articles

Notice anything about this article? or this one?

community problems

If anyone knows which community this story refers to, could you let me know?

Things we wish we hadn’t done

Bulanjdjan asks for field horror stories about things we’ve done in the field that we really wished we hadn’t done.
And in field linguistics and language revitalisation, the need to crticially evaluate our work and ask for help/advice is crucial. And while I do this on a personal, informal level, sharing this with a wider audience [...]