Archive for April, 2007
Saturday, April 28th, 2007
Un linguista sin una lengua
Ever wanted to read this blog in Spanish? Well, Now you can! Presenting, ¡Matjjin-nehen en Español! Unfortunately it attempts to translate everything, so nganing-gin becomes nganing-ginebra, but simple translators can be forgiven. In fact if you speak/read Spanish, let me know how accurate how full of glaring errors it is (you can navigate the entire [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Nothing in particular by jangari
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
‘Coal’ is a four letter word?
Comments now disabled for this post due to spam. I smell a new euphemism wafting out of Canberra. A report came out this morning in which it was argued that a 25% renewable energy target for 2020 would in fact financially harm consumers less than business as usual, and would create jobs, contrary to popular [...]
25 Comments » - Posted in Environment,Linguistics,Politics by jangari
Saturday, April 21st, 2007
Yurrampi Yilpinji
I went second-hand book shopping today, at some local Saturday markets. I usually don’t find anything worthwhile – perhaps some Penguin 20th Century Classic going for 8 bucks a pop – but today I found a rare treat. It looked like an old, 1970s collection of psuedigenous stories, of the sort that claims to be [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by jangari
Saturday, April 21st, 2007
Wollemi, Burrup and Woodside
Apparently a site of great cultural significance has been found in Wollemi National Park in the Blue Mountains. It’s a 100m x 50m sandstone slab covered in shallow engravings that are invisible for most of the day, emerging only in the angular light of dawn and dusk. From the substance of the engravings it is [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in Environment,Indigenous,Politics by jangari
Friday, April 20th, 2007
Chaney argues against centralisation
Fred Chaney, who this week retired from the national Native Title Tribunal, spoke to Kerry O’Brian last night on the 7:30 Report about the problem with native title, in that only a quarter of the agreements actually deliver real benefits to communities. You can still watch the entire interview from the 7:30 Report’s front page, [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Indigenous by jangari
Monday, April 16th, 2007
Tails wagging or wagging tails?
Factors appear to be combining to obfuscate what should be some straightforward syntactic analysis. Wagiman has inalienable body parts, in that they may occur as adjuncts, specifying where an action took place on someone’s body. For instance, to say “my arm hurts” you could say mangh-nga ga-yu lari nganing-gin, which is literally ‘my arm (in [...]
21 Comments » - Posted in Linguistics by jangari
Saturday, April 14th, 2007
Chinese Niggaz
Mark Liberman has a post on the use of the word ‘nigger’ to describe shades of colours, most frequently brown. Obviously the term has ceased to be used on account of its clear offensiveness, but pervades in Chinese use of English. It reminded me of the case of the mandarin ‘um’. Since learning (from Laurie [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Linguistics by jangari
Friday, April 13th, 2007
Wagimanification
I hope you’ve all noticed that I’ve ‘Wagimanified’ my blog as much as possible. All of my sidebar widgets now have Wagiman names, except obviously, the words for which there are no clear equivalents, like ‘blog’, ‘Email’ or ‘post’. Just for clarification, Wagiman hasn’t really got anything for ‘recent’ as far as I know. So, [...]
15 Comments » - Posted in Linguistics,Nothing in particular by jangari
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
Earth Hour
Last weekend, Sydney was urged to switch off the lights on Saturday night between 7:30 and 8:30 pm, for what was dubbed ‘Earth Hour’. I went with some friends to Milson’s point to have a small picnic and watch the city lights go off. We were underwhelmed. At 7:30 the lights on the arches and [...]
13 Comments » - Posted in Environment,Nothing in particular by jangari
Monday, April 9th, 2007
A miraculous Easter?
I just heard on ABC news that “Police are worried that the road toll will remian high”. “Remain”? Are they hoping for a few timely Easter resurrections, perhaps?
