I’m at LAX on my way to Australia. I’ve just had a blast of a weekend at AZANLI. We were magnificently taken care of, wellhoused and wellfed, and there were lots of interesting talks. Off the top of my head (and apologies to the other talks I enjoyed but which aren’t coming to mind now), I learnt about Blackfoot lullabies and Moroccan hiphop, saw some excellent ethnographic films (final projects in an anthropology class) about Yaqui Easter celebrations, a Tucson drag club and Paiute weavers, heard a couple of different historical talks, including Jane Hill’s plenary on Uto-Aztecan and Andy Wedel’s simulation of divergence and convergence, and Chris Potts’ talk on exclamatives, which has given me a bunch of things to think about and test for Bardi. I believe that podcasts of the plenaries and talk handouts will be on the conference website soon.

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 the ball rolling by claiming that DIY is the only language which supports the hypothesis that altitude affects air stream mechanisms. Its consonant inventory contains 3 stops, four fricatives, 5 laterals, six approximants and seven vowels.

My last post included a brief summary of the plot of the first part of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in Bardi, which I felt was appropriate fieldwork preparation. Updates will be extremely patchy for the next week (my last week in Houston, which happens to involve 4 days out of Houston too) and then patchier still if I don’t have regular internet at One Arm Point.

Boorda ngawanyjin warrgamngan Ardiyooloon: nganjalan Injiyana Janj agal jaaj jin doom. Barnanggarr biila milimili nganjalana. Garrma gilinim ngankama=jan baarla. Ngaanka ngangonboonjin Ardiyooloonngan, ngaanka nganamoogarna mayiidinngan Ardiyooloonngan.

Aeroplanenyarr bard ingirrjiidina Chinago. Dr Jonesnim booroongan jirr ambooriny darr inarn Indiyi: inarligal, ngangan ingarramanana Shiva jina jawal agal goolboo jin jawal. Ingarralana janambooro goolboo inamana rajanim. Barnmanjin goolbooninga. Aarli ilogo irrinkal, noorroo ingoorrooloorroonana, joondoorrngan ingirrina. baawa jirrirr inanggana barda. Ilibandnyarr roowil ingirrinya. door ingirrin irr iliband.

(Dictionary count: joondoorr [dust] and the light verb that ‘plan’ goes with)

I had a status on my facebook profile a little while ago that I wondered what others did to prepare for fieldwork. My current preparation has involved rather more Bardi preparation and less buying stuff than most previous trips, which is good for my Bardi but a little nerve-wracking. Someone on facebook suggested a stiff drink was a good start, but they work on Irish…

There are things I always take to the field and never use, but I’d think I wasn’t ready if I didn’t take them. One is a reflective space blanket. It’s in case I get lost in the bush. It’s a good idea for hiking in New Hampshire or the Snowies, but less useful in North Australia a) because it doesn’t get cold enough, and b) because I never seem to take it when we go bush, so its reflective purpose is nullified by its staying at the bottom of my pack. It’s been on all my fieldtrips. On the other hand, I have never yet brought too many pens. Another thing that always goes with me is a beaded lizard that lives in my tape bag. A friend gave it to me in Darwin in 2004 and it’s really cute.

So, how do you prepare for fieldwork, and do you have random stuff that always goes with you even if it’s useless?

There’s a bit of a trend to localise web browsers, software, books and so on for local use. I can get google in Catalan, Kirghiz or Xhosa, and on my trip to Milingimbi last year we were translating parts of speech into Yolŋu Matha.

I reckon it’s time that Australian English was freed from the shackles of Latin grammar. I reckon we should get to use our own terms. Here is a preliminary proposal (which I will, of course, be submitting to the Australian Linguistic Society’s executive committee in due course). I’m on the lookout for coauthors for further advancement of this worthwhile localisation project.

In the next installment, we will see how productive such a localisation strategy can be. In this case, it has led to the discovery of new grammatical categories!

First, to my American audience: Is upstate New York part of the mid-west? Specifically, are Rochester and Buffalo midwestern towns? I ask because Rocastrians I have talked to say ‘yes, we’re on the border but Buffalo is echt Midwest’, but the Buffalonians I talked to today denied this hotly.

Secondly, to my Australianist audience: tell me about your sun and moon stories. Specifically, are the sun and moon married to each other? If not, who are they married to? Do they have kids?

[These questions are only related by the fact that they were both in my brain together, but special bonus points for anyone who can relate them more amusingly.]

More translation today. No great earth-shattering discoveries, but plenty of stuff done.

• 25 new words to the dictionary, some of which have glosses, even.
• 5 new place names.
• A nice list of booroo [clan estate] names. This was useful because I didn’t know for sure that all of them *are* clan estates, so that’s nice confirmation of their status. (Place name structure in Bardi is hierarchical but I only fully realised it about 18 months ago and the system is in decline, so for a fair number of names it’s not clear whether they are old estate names or big-name places.)
• A few more examples of rare morphology, including =rra.

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 traditional country is the tip of the Dampier Peninsula, Western Australia, and surrounding islands. It’s a Nyulnyulan language. It’s non-Pama-Nyungan, and there are about 7 other languages in the family.

Bardi is so cool in so many ways I don’t know where to start (let’s just say that the draft reference grammar is 500 pages and growing with no end in sight).

Phonologywise: There are 7 vowels (a, aː, i, iː, u, uː and o). Yes, if you haven’t seen an inventory like that before, that’s because you haven’t seen Bardi. The consonants are standard average Australian, though.

Morphologywise: well, it’s both head and dependent marking in most areas, so there’s both case marking and extensive agreement, and possessive pronouns are marked for both the possessor and possessum. There’s not a whole lot of derivational morphology but there are a bunch of isolated forms, which makes me think either that they’re borrowed words or that that morphology used to be much more productive (or both, depending on the form).

Syntactically, Bardi is nonconfigurational. Now, T. Givón (pers comm, March 2008 ) informs me that he decided in 1979 that nonconfigurationality was a fiction, but I beg to differ, although I agree that some languages which has been called nonconfigurational probably don’t deserve that label. I have systematically failed to find any evidence for constituency beyond a few areas: complex predicates, and “second position”. That is, it’s possible to define the left edge of a phrase and a clause, but just about everything else is up for grabs.

Intonation in Bardi is really interesting. Joyce McDonough and I are starting work on a description based on my previous field recordings, so I can’t tell you anything yet, but stay tuned.

There’s not a whole lot available on Bardi apart from Metcalfe’s 1975 dissertation, an article by Edith Nicolas in AJL 2000, and my papers on my web page.

I suspect that my upcoming trip will be the last I do on Bardi. That’s not certain, of course, but I have a suspicion about it.

That puts the pressure on to make sure I ask all the questions I need to. I have a list of things I don’t understand, don’t know and need to clarify, including the deixis system. Also, I’ve never done frog stories with Bardi people.

So, my question to you all: what do you want to know about Bardi? What sorts of things are you irritated about when you look up a grammar and find they aren’t there?