Archive for March, 2007
Saturday, March 31st, 2007
For the last time…
It seems that name changes are currently in vogue. So what better time than now to change mine. The bloviator is no more and we shall never speak of him again. From now on, this blog will be called matjjin-nehen. I swear it’s the last time.
No Comments » - Posted in Nothing in particular by jangari
Sunday, March 25th, 2007
Spatial Relations
It’s well-known in the literature that languages can have various methods for the categorisation of space. The system that uses left, right and so on is the Egocentric system and the one that uses North, South, East and West is the Absolute system. Some cultures use only the absolute system (like a lot of Papua [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Linguistics,Nothing in particular by jangari
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
Mamin matjjin-nehen
I’m not a happy pappy. I had to wait until a conference on Australian Languages to hear that I’ve picked a pretty bad title for my blog. I’m not going to name names, but D. Nash – no wait, that’s a little too obvious, let’s just say… David N., – pointed out to me at [...]
10 Comments » - Posted in Linguistics,Nothing in particular by jangari
Monday, March 19th, 2007
Traditional Weather
I was doing a little bit of random google searching this morning and happened to stumble across the Bureau of Meteorology‘s Indigenous Weather Knowledge project. This project is only in its initial stages (last updated January 19) and only has four languages represented – Wardaman, Jawoyn, Yanyuwan and Walabunnba. Each season name links to a [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Indigenous,Linguistics by jangari
Monday, March 12th, 2007
All our clitics
I watched School of Rock last night and came to a profound realisation: Jack Black is an annoying person. But I also noticed something in a line that threw my grammaticality nerve a bit. The scene involved the principal of the school informing the multiple sets of parents that all the children in the class [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Linguistics by jangari
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007
Ma-ya-min Jorro-ma
It looks as though I’ll be heading back out to the field in about three months for a couple more months of fieldwork in the middle of bolwo-gin, the windy season (literally, ‘wind’-genitive), which is almost the best time to be there, second only to the wet. This time though, I won’t have the ever-looming [...]
8 Comments » - Posted in Linguistics by jangari
Monday, March 5th, 2007
The “Bloviator”
I’ll admit that it isn’t exactly a very nice phonological word, in fact it sounds horrible. But after reading it in Mike Carlton’s regular Saturday column over the weekend, I decided to make at least some use of it. Carlton’s column was about the furore within the media that former ABC (Australia’s publicly owned broadcaster) [...]
