Archive for May, 2008

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

4-down, misappropriation of traditional knowledge

Over the weekend, David Nash drew my attention to a book that he found on Amazon, that purported to contain bilingual crosswords puzzles in English and Wageman1. I was a bit perlexed by this, since, well, Wagiman doesn’t have much in the way of practical applications such as second-language learning, that is, of course, beyond [...]

9 Comments » - Posted in Culture,Endangered Languages,Indigenous,Languages,Lexicography,Linguistics,Wagiman by jangari

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

More spam, or What I’ve been doing

I received this piece of concise, witty and rather insightful spam in the inbox of my work address this morning, and as it amused me I thought I’d share it. From: Monte CunninghamSubject: best your life is crap Mr Cunningham clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve been so busy between tutoring, compiling electronic [...]

3 Comments » - Posted in Indigenous,Kaurna,Lexicography,Linguistics by jangari

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Marn Grook and the History Wars

Last night’s 7:30 Report featured a report on the origins of AFL footfall, and specifically that it may have been inspired by a game played by the Aborigines of western Victoria called Marn Grook. The main proponent of this theory is Jim Poulter, a descendant of settlers who saw Marn Grook played at the goldfields [...]

6 Comments » - Posted in Culture,History,Indigenous,Sport by jangari

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Not friendly milk as such

…but here is an equally improbable sentence that my housemate uttered this morning1: I had the foresight to turn my phone off before I passed out, the wrong way around, on my sandwich. Gold. I refer to the ‘tricky linguistics‘ sketch from A bit of Fry and Laurie ↩

5 Comments » - Posted in Linguistics by jangari