Anggi ngajoogal barnanggarr?

Ngayoo… moodigang bard arr nganjoogal Katy-ngan, moodigangab jina woobijal mayalan. Niimana ambooriny. Ginyinggon garra garra garra I-10-nyarr  bard arr nganjoon … goolngan. Aarlimay nganarligal, milimili nganjal, nganngan nganganka … milimili nganamboona biggestmob. Warrgam nganmankal… warrgam warrgam… Roowil ngannyanggalirr libraryngan milimili, agal nyalab jan baarlingan. Gaari nganibin arinyji.

[What I did today - had to look up two words and neither were in the dictionary. oops. One was how to say 'car' in Bardi; I'm pretty sure it's /mutika/ but moodiga looks really really wrong. The other was 'hospital', which is 'wupthal' in Yan-nhaŋu and isn't in there either.)

practising Bardi

Bard arr ngankiya Ardiyooloonngan laamba, agal liyan nganman barnngan mayoon Baarding ngaanka. Ginyinggamba Baarding ngayoo milimil ngonkowa Yan-nhaŋunharraŋu! Arragorror joonim nyimoonggoon mayimbaran milimil jarri, anjilngangay! Ngalamanka ooloomanjin ngaanka, jawal, agal ngangalgan. Ngayarginjan ngayanyja anggarda ngayilnga.

Milimil ngaankang nganjalagal: 5

[Rationale/sort of translation: I'm going to One Arm Point before too long so need to get back into the habit of speaking Bardi. But I keep getting Yan-nhaŋu interference. Therefore the odd post will be in Bardi.]

Directional listening

I’ve been translating and annotating Bardi in preparation for my upcoming trip and something occurred to me this morning. In several texts the hero is creeping through the scrub and making sure he’s not being followed (or about to be attacked), or he’s tracking someone. At each point, the hero is described as doing something like the following:

Barnimin biligiji nilamarra inamana jarr ingalamankana jirrm injoona.
on.all.sides really ear he.put this he.heard sing he.did

Barnambooroo ingalamankana.
in.all.directions he.listened

Nyoonoo ingalamankana gardi.
here he.listened still

That is, the same array of directional terms that are used for visual ‘looking out’ (e.g. barnimin ‘in all directions’) are used for auditory ‘hearing out’ too. But they sounds weird to me in English:

?He listened this way and that.
??He listened in all directions.
??He listened that way.

It’s not that English doesn’t talk about the directions of sounds (e.g. where’s the sound coming from), it’s that we seem to talk about the variable directional source of the sound, not the perceptual differentiation of direction. innaresting.

Rice Annual Powwow

Rice’s annual powwow will be held tomorrow. Details are available from the Native American Students’ Association’s site.

Language of the week: Anindilyakwa

Anindilyakwa is this week’s language of the week, one of my favourite languages and language names. Anindilyakwa is sort of the Pira hã of Australian languages; it’s a bit of an enigma, although it’s sometimes classified as a Gunwinyguan language. There are about 1,200 speakers, most of whom live on Groote Eylandt (aka [gɹɪɯt']) in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

• Wikipedia entry for Anindilyakwa
• Language information from WALS: Anindilyakwa
• Anindilyakwa Art
• Velma Leeding’s thesis on Anindilyakwa phonology and morphology
• Link to information on the draft Anindilyakwa dictionary.

Classification models

I’ve been at a workshop on historical linguistics and reconstruction this weekend, at the University of Michigan. The slides for the paper I gave are available here. This conference is always fun and this year’s was no exception. This paper (when I write it up) will supersede the other things I have put up on these methods for Karnic languages. This one demonstrates different NNet networks for stable and borrowable vocabulary and parts of speech. It doesn’t talk about morphological data.

(Before anyone comments, I know that NNet is not a cladistic method; I changed my mind about how much I wanted to talk about and what I wanted to demonstrate between submitting the title and compiling the slides.)

Clarification: I should have added something about this before (at the risk of digging myself further into an embarrassing hole). In the first or second slide I mention my view that some of the linguistic computational work is (in my opinion) ‘bizarre’. I want to make it clear (as I did in the talk, but not on the slides) that that rather ill-chosen epithet only applies to a subset of what’s there. Particularly, it applies to Forster and Toth’s method, to the Australian data in McMahon and McMahon, and to some of the character choices and coding in some of the Ringe, Warnow and Taylor work. Forster and Toth is not at all accepted in linguistics, I’ve written about the Australian data problems in McMahon, and the potential circularity of the character choices in some of the IE data for RWT has come up at workshops. I should have made that clear in the text and I apologise about the implications of that slide.

Skype localisation

I found out quite by accident today that it’s possible to create local language customisations for skype. Go to tools… choose language .. and at the bottom you can edit the language file. My skype now says manymak instead of OK, for example, and riŋimap instead of ‘call’.