Archive for the 'Yan-nhaŋu' Category

girri’

February 8, 2008

[Continuing my clean-out of partial posts in my livewriter folder...]
Girri’ means ‘clothes’ in Yan-nhaŋu; it also means ’stuff’, as I found out yesterday when we were looking for general terms for the thesaurus. It’s interesting, though, that I’d never come across the context for the more general (and perhaps more focal meaning) during elicitation and [...]

Djamap

December 24, 2007

My field posts have now ended, so it’s probably appropriate to sum up what I’ve done in the month or so since I’ve been back. I gave a talk in Darwin and hung out with some friends, and got to see the Telstra Art Award finalists. That was great! I knew four of the artists, [...]

Balanda

December 19, 2007

I had a very enjoyable few days in Darwin at the end of my field trip, including a profitable [for them!] time at Charles Darwin University’s bookshop. I got some readers in Nyoongar and a few other languages, a rather nice Garrwa ethnobotany book, Coersive Reconciliation, and Marry Ellen Jordan’s Balanda: My Year in Arnhem [...]

PDAs and fieldwork

December 18, 2007

I used mine for data entry with speakers for the first time this most recent field trip, so I thought I would post something about it.
Pros:

It allowed relatively fast data entry, and saved a lot of rewriting.
It obviated my need for a printer.
Speakers adjusted to the replacement orthography very easily (my PDA cannot display Unicode or [...]

Last day

November 26, 2007

It’s my last full day here today. I’m leaving on the afternoon plane tomorrow. I’m exhausted (see previous post about the 714 sentences!). I’m having a break from doing the slides for my talk at CDU on Friday, and I’ve caved and put on the air conditioner for the first time this trip. I did [...]

3 more days to go

November 25, 2007

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 [...]

Safety

November 21, 2007

Twice in the last few days someone has tried to reassure me about my safety here. It’s getting a bit annoying, especially since in a community like this there are really only two main safety issues: (drunk) white men and things that bite, like snakes and crocodiles. The former are rare since there was a [...]