There’s a virtual exhibition! Enjoy.

The Dili Institute of Technology has put up a set of language learning materials for Tetun (one of the two national languages of Timor Leste). Here’s the page. Looks great!

Sorry I’ve temporarily abandoned you, dear reader. In the meantime, you can read about ethics codification while I work on the infrastructure for a whizz-bang project.

I’d somehow missed this before, so maybe others have too: the Linguistic Annotation Wiki. Enjoy!

We’ll miss you.

A while ago I posted a picture and some information about using google earthto display family tree hypotheses. I’ve been doing more things with google earth in the meantime.

One is a .kmz file for Australian languages. Justin Lo has been working on my Pama-Nyungan grant over the summer and he did a lot of the work of added centroid points. We now have a version of the file that can be downloaded. Some further information is available at the Pama-Nyungan grant blog. Let me reiterate that this is a work in progress, there will be new versions, and stuff is gonna change. It’s got mistakes in it, which we will correct as we find them. These are data points (that is, they don’t show the full geographical range of the language area). You can download this file and use it in your research but please ackonwledge the use of the file. Comments, corrections and notes on what you’ve used the data for can be sent to protopamanyungan@gmail.com or added as a comment here or at the other blog.

http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/thirdparty provides links to third party plugins for Elan, including CuPED.

[edited to remove comment that the CuPED site is down, since it's back up!]

Logging onto abc.net.au/news this morning resulted in three good news stories from Indigenous Australia, I’m happy to say:

• A story on Kaurna traditional bark canoes.
• Nyangumarta people won their Native Title claim!
• Stan Grant senior was awarded an OA in the Queen’s Birthday honours for his work on Wiradjuri language revitalisation.

Good show.

Back in February I was part of a panel at the Rice Linguistics Society meeting on linguistic theory and fieldwork and their relations. My talk was comparative in nature and focused on the contribution to the field of certain important figures; Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, and Gregory House. Over the next few weeks I will be serialising this talk and expanding it.

My point was that we can learn from comparing problem solving and theoretical approaches to shed light on how different people view theory and practice. Everyone who’s received a newsletter from LaTrobe’s Research Centre for Linguistic Typology has seen the quotation from Sherlock Holmes about how it is a capital mistake (Watson) to theorise beyond one’s facts. But there is more to Holmes’ view than this.

Today, though, I’ll start with a great figure in linguistic fieldwork (if not in linguistic theory): Indiana Jones. Indy knows a bunch of stuff, not just his field narrowly, but random other information that often comes in handy. We learn in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for example, that he picked up Quechua while being held for ransome. His problem-solving methods are highly focused and he is not detered by set-backs. However, it’s worth noting that his problem-solving strategies are only appropriate to a very narrow set of problems. How does Indy approach problems other than “getting the girl” and stopping the bad guys from getting the treasure first?

Indy’s theoretical orientation is not particularly nuanced, it must be admitted. His data are what they are; he never finds out that the object of his quest is something other than it appears, the bad guys are always bad (and so are half the good guys), and the girl is usually an irritatingly naive dipstick. Even more theoretically disturbing is the lack of uniformitarianism in the theoretical outlook; can’t solve the problem with the tools of this world? Never mind, there are always aliens.

There’s a new online database of structures being developed. This from the LinguistList:

Dear LinguistList Readers,

We are pleased to announce SSWL, an open-ended database of the syntactic
structures of the world’s languages:

http://sswl.railsplayground.net/

(alternatively, Google: sswl database)

Please feel free to go to the site and play around with it, doing searches
and browsing the languages and properties.

Ultimately, we hope to fill the database with thousands of grammatical
properties and thousands of languages all provided by members of the wider
linguistic community.

If you have any questions or comments, please send them to:
linguisticexplorer@gmail.com

Chris Collins
Department of Linguistics
NYU

I will have more to comment on this once I’ve played with it a bit more.