More fun stuff with google earth

A while ago I posted a picture and some information about using google earthto display family tree hypotheses. I’ve been doing more things with google earth in the meantime.
One is a .kmz file for Australian languages. Justin Lo has been working on my Pama-Nyungan grant over the summer and he did a lot of the [...]

Fieldwork and the movies (1): Indiana Jones

Back in February I was part of a panel at the Rice Linguistics Society meeting on linguistic theory and fieldwork and their relations. My talk was comparative in nature and focused on the contribution to the field of certain important figures; Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, and Gregory House. Over the next few weeks I will [...]

Database of structures

There’s a new online database of structures being developed. This from the LinguistList:
Dear LinguistList Readers,
We are pleased to announce SSWL, an open-ended database of the syntactic
structures of the world’s languages:
http://sswl.railsplayground.net/
(alternatively, Google: sswl database)
Please feel free to go to the site and play around with it, doing searches
and browsing the languages and properties.
Ultimately, we hope to [...]

Austlang

AUSTLANG is now public. It’s an absolutely fabulous resource for Australian languages and there should be a huge round of applause for Kazuko Obata at AIATSIS who did most of the legwork.
So what is Austlang anyway? It’s a web database of information about Australian languages. It includes summaries of speaker estimates, genealogical classification in a [...]

“Rare” Languages at the State Library of NSW

I quite like the term “rare” languages. It’s much better than ‘exotic’ and it has the connotation of something valuable without necessarily harping on the ‘death’ aspect of language death.
The term ‘rare languages’ was used in a number of media reports on the State Library of New South Wales’ digitisation of early settler Aboriginal vocabularies. [...]

Annotated Texts

Peter Austin has a great post about text in grammars and how closely they correspond to what was actually said.
It strikes me that we are not being very explicit about genre, purpose of recording, and purpose of publication. If we were talking about a conversation, for example, there would be no question that *everything* would [...]