A new morpheme came up today! It’s great. I have absolutely no idea what it does or what its distribution is, and I’ve never seen anything like it in other Yolŋu languages.
Hmm, well, it’s not quite true that I know nothing about it, although what I do know doesn’t help. I know that it has [...]
Some questions from the last few years have been solved, more or less. This is a relief, since I was initially really worried about having enough time to do enough here, especially since other commitments meant that I hadn’t done a whole lot in the way of detailed question preparation. That’s mostly what I’ve been [...]
I found a link to this list of Yolŋu Laws (through the Yolŋu entry in Wikipedia). It’s fascinating. I’m trying to work out how you get text to be that mangled. I reckon typing on a local computer, then rescanning using OCR. Any other way?
10% of my time here has already gone. Wuy!
Another potentially disastrous session that turned out all right. Kids everywhere, TV really loud, building going on next door, and I was working with one of the ladies who doesn’t speak English and who speaks very softly. Most of my urgent work is morphology, such as checking [...]
I’ve had a chance to see some of the intervention and its short-term results first hand this week.
So far things have been fairly positive. There’s a school holiday program for the kids which is popular (for me too, since it keeps the school-age kids away from the microphone!) The missions people are fascinating, as always. [...]
Today went better. I was working with the old lady, which was a bit daunting because I’m still very rusty at actaully speaking Yan-nhaŋu and can’t remember sizable vocab chunks.
I tried video today, and it worked well! It’s a new mp4 SD-card recorder, on a little tripod. Quite forgettable, and the picture quality and contrast [...]
I’ve been writing posts for the last month but haven’t been able to post any of them. What I’ve decided to do, therefore, is just ‘pretend’ that I”m still on fieldwork, and release them a month late. You can have all the fun of seeing the story unfold, the tension of whether I get kicked [...]
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