ethics and linguistics

I have mentioned this before, but I’d like to encourage everyone to  head over to the Linguistic Society of America’s ethics blog for some discussion. We have just started posting regularly and would like to hear feedback, comments, and discussion on the topics raised.

Romani online database

via the LingTyp list, I just got a notice about The Romani Morpho-Syntax database.

“Featuring:
* Comprehensive documentation of over 150 varieties of the language
* Phrase exemplification of all data in sound, transcription, and translation
* Browse, search, and query facilities
* Dynamic map-generating function that plots the distribution of features
* Extensive Help menu
* Link to Romani Linguistics Page with
** background information on the Romani language
** bibliographical database of Romani linguistics
** downloadable DVD presentation in 17 languages on the historical development of Romani ”

Cool!

Austlang

AUSTLANG is now public. It’s an absolutely fabulous resource for Australian languages and there should be a huge round of applause for Kazuko Obata at AIATSIS who did most of the legwork.

So what is Austlang anyway? It’s a web database of information about Australian languages. It includes summaries of speaker estimates, genealogical classification in a variety of publications, an estimate of degree of document, and there’s a nice interface with google maps.

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!

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.

John Doe, Joe Bloggs and Bruce the Battler

I happened to find this list and since it’s vaguely amusing, you can all read it while I continue to be puzzled by Yolŋu glottalisation (not part of my NWAV paper in theory but puzzling because I need to decide how to code glottalised vowels). You’ll be hearing all about glottalisation before too long.

Here is a list of the equivalent of ‘Joe Bloggs’ in various languages.

Link time

Some links from the RNLD list and elsewhere:

• James Crippen posted a link to these squishy bowls. Very cool. From the same site, this plasma glass would make a good stimulus prompt.
• Daryn McKenny posted about some updates to Miromaa. It’s now possible to import from other data sources! Good stuff.
• Wamut posted a story which speaks for itself. Linguists, be helpful!
• Eugenie Collyer posted a link to the Traditional Knowledge Revival Pathways. Well worth exploring.