Author Archive
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
Maloo and Bathurst
Last night on SBS was the season final of Top Gear, one of my favourite shows. Ordinarily Top Gear and linguistics don’t mix particularly well, but last night’s installment had no less than two linguistically interesting bits, both in the same segment. The segment in question was the review of a couple of cars, both [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Indigenous,Languages by jangari
Monday, October 12th, 2009
The Wagiman Electronic Dictionary
Cross-posted at pfed.info. Last week, I undertook a brief fieldtrip to Pine Creek and Kybrook Farm, Northern Territory, to present the completed Wagiman Electronic Dictionary to the Wagiman community. It has been a long time coming as several of us have been working on this dictionary in our spare time for the last six months, [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Endangered Languages,Indigenous,Languages,Lexicography,Linguistics,Technology,Wagiman by jangari
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
The Outback in Sydney
This was what what Sydney looked like yesterday morning. A combination of severe drought in South Australia and strong westerly winds brought fine, iron-rich dust right to the coast. The air quality was 17 times worse (whatever that means) than usual, and several hundred people called for ambulances for respiratory problems. There’s also concern that [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Nothing in particular by jangari
Monday, September 14th, 2009
Bilingual education on Four Corners
In the last few weeks, the topic of bilingual education in Australia has been receiving a fair amount of coverage in the mainstream media. Last week, I happened upon an article in the Herald, echoing earlier reports in voicing the widespread opposition from educators and academics towards the Northern Territory government’s policy of English-only education [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Bilingualism,Education,Endangered Languages,Indigenous,Languages,Linguistics,Media,Wagiman by jangari
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Dr Jangari
Nothing is official as yet, but I’m fairly confident that I can informally announce to the world that I will be commencing a Ph.D. next year. My topic will be Classical Tiwi, an Australian language that seems to have escaped the radar for serious documentary research of late. This is especially odd, given that Tiwi1 [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in Endangered Languages,Indigenous,Languages,Linguistics,Syntax,Tiwi,University by jangari
Monday, June 29th, 2009
Bilingual education back in spotlight
As Jane announced last week at Elac, a Research Symposium on Bilingual Education was held on Friday at AIATSIS, at which their 24th discussion paper was launched by Mick Dodson. Ordinarily, such an event wouldn’t even enter the consciousness of the population, and would soon slip into the æther. This symposium, however, and the discussion [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Bilingualism,Culture,Education,English,Indigenous,Languages,Linguistics,Politics by jangari
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
Irony
I just can’t resist pointing out the irony of China accusing Australia of not protecting Chinese students, especially on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
No Comments » - Posted in Politics by jangari
Friday, April 10th, 2009
Could use verbing
My brother this morning uttered a sentence that I think deserves a bit of syntactic analysis. The context, if you can’t recover it from the sentence itself, was essentially my brother swapping a telephone cable, which resulted in the new cable sagging a bit with the slack. There is, however, a hook whose purpose is [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Conversational Implicature,English,Euphemism,Linguistics,Semantics,Speech Acts,Syntax by jangari
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Lectures and Book Chapters
I’ve had a busy and eventful week, and right now appears to be about the only spare time I’ve had. I attended the Australian Languages Workshop last weekend at Kioloa on the NSW south coast, an outpost of ANU. I didn’t present anything, but I managed to discuss the mobile phone dictionary with a number [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Endangered Languages,Languages,Lexicography,Linguistics,Technology,Writing by jangari
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Folk Lexicography: Snusted
A situation came up during the week in which I used a word that I know from high school, and it appears that no one else is even aware of this word’s existence, let alone its meaning. The word is snusted as you might guess from the title of this post, and it means ‘caught [...]
