Yan-nhaŋu on wikipedia

Rebekah Dimond, one of the students in my Australian languages class this semester, did a ripper job on a final project creating a Wikipedia page for Yan-nhaŋu. It’s up now. Enjoy!

Languages and ‘new words’

One of the recurring supposed arguments against the widespread use of Aboriginal languages in the curriculum is that “they don’t have a word for X” (an ironic twist on the exoticism argument that such languages also have Ywords for snow/trees/animals/etc).
There are three or four ways that languages get new words. One is by borrowing from [...]

NWAV 0: my paper

I went to NWAV this weekend and had a fabulous time. I have a few posts in progress so you’ll get the serialised highlights over the next few days.
Here are the slides from my paper on Arnhem Land clan variation. It’s a 3.8mb file with some embedded sound files.
Comments are welcome as always.

Yan-nhaŋu glottals and LaTeX

This post will probably be of interest only to the (rather small number of) people who use LaTeX to typeset Yolŋu Matha. Yolŋu Matha uses a symbol for the glottal stop which is basically an apostrophe ‘ without smart quotes turned on (it dates from the days before smart quotes). These days there is a [...]

Yet more from the archives

A final day of archival work. I got copies of the vocabularies that R H Mathews recorded (from various languages), as well as trying to sort out some more about Ngumbarl (the topic of a talk I gave at ANU last week). It’s pleasantly confusing. More on that in another post.
I spent the time with [...]

Aboriginal Languages Fortnight

Quite by chance I came across a book published at Milingimbi in 1986. It’s stories in Yolŋu Matha and English by 6 Batchelor college students. It’s incredibly cool for all sorts of reasons.

There’s sociolinguistic information about similarity and difference between Yolŋu varieties.
It’s produced entirely by Yolŋu adult language/literacy students.
It’s mostly in Yolŋu Matha. Where there’s [...]

Yolngu people are everywhere!

It’s handy to know Yolŋu Matha. BE was going fishing and the guy who picked her up found out I’d been in Arnhem Land. Turns out that he’s from Elcho Island originally, although he’s been here for about 20 years. He’s my dhuway and we had a bit of a chat. So much for trying [...]