Archive for the 'language of the week' Category

Language of the Week: DIY

May 6, 2008

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 [...]

Language of the week: Bardi

April 22, 2008

This is cheating, of course, but since it’s Bardi appreciation week, in my brain at least, and since we’re up to B this time around in the language of the week…
Bardi’s a Nyulnyulan language, spoken right through by about 25 people at One Arm Point and surrounding areas. There are about 1,000 Bardi people. Bardi [...]

Language of the week: Anindilyakwa

April 9, 2008

Anindilyakwa is this week’s language of the week, one of my favourite languages and language names. Anindilyakwa is sort of the Pira hã of Australian languages; it’s a bit of an enigma, although it’s sometimes classified as a Gunwinyguan language. There are about 1,200 speakers, most of whom live on Groote Eylandt (aka [gɹɪɯt']) in [...]

Language of the week: Zyphe

March 27, 2008

We’re up to z in the language of the week and I chose the last language in ethnologue’s list. However, Zyphe turns out to have been a bad choice for blogging about, since there’s very little information that I can find. A search under the alternate name Zophar on google scholar turns up 9 hits.
In [...]

Language of the Week: Yaqui

January 31, 2008

This week’s language is another American language. Yaqui is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Sonora (Mexico) and Arizona.

Pascua Yaqui Tribe official web site
Yaqui wikipedia page
Native-Languages.org page, including lesson links and vocabularies.
Lots of work on Yaqui grammar (google scholar search)
Yaqui complex sentences (Liliane Guerrerro, UB 2004 dissertation).
Sonoran Yaqui language structures; link to Amazon.
Tribal approach to language [...]

Language of the Week: Wichita

January 24, 2008

This article in the Dallas Morning News (via via the Lexicography List) decided me on this week’s language of the week.
Wichita is a Caddoan language, spoken by about 10 people and with a little over 2000 heritage owners. Wichita has my kind of phoneme inventory, with 10 consonants, r and n in complementary distribution, no [...]

Language of the week: Volscian

January 7, 2008

It’s not often that the Language of the Week(TM) discusses a language where the entire extant corpus fits in a blog post, but Volscian is a good example. What we know of Volscian is the following 4 lines:
deue declune statom. sepis atahus, pis uelestromfaçia esaristrom se bim asif, uesclis uinu arpatitusepis toticu couehriu sepu, ferom [...]