Every so often I sift through the spam that Askimet catches to make sure there’s nothing legitimate in there, and there usually isn’t. But occasionally there’ll be an interesting little one-liner, buried among all the ads for drugs I’ve never heard of, that puts a smile on my dial.

Apart from the glaring ungrammatical double modal verb, this was one of the better spams I’ve received:

The normal fellow would might think that spending the time to gain intelligence on this matter is a waste of time.

Says you, mate. I wish all spam was like that; innocuous and witty. Much like this sort of spam:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=XZ6N5m8FpVg]

Tomorrow is the first of October, which means two things.

Firstly, it means that the little green box with the date next to the title of my posts will be correctly formatted again, as it appears not to enjoy the length of the word ‘September’ (something I plan to fix when I go self-hosted), but secondly, and perhaps less trivially, the Earth will, at some point throughout the day, return to the same position, with respect to the position of the Sun, as it was when I published my first post.

Things didn’t really get underway for a couple of weeks in the beginning, most notably because I still had my honours thesis to write at that point. And even then, it takes a fledgling blog a while to gain any sort of audience. After a year I’m very chuffed with where things are. So a general thanks to you all for insightful comments, discussion and kind words, both off-blog and off-line, you’ve made blogging a very enjoyable experience for me.

I started off with some small-fish idea of writing about linguistic curios and the like, with the occasional perspective from the far-North of the country, originally intended to coincide with my occasional being in the far-North of the country. However, as the year’s events regarding indigenous people in this country (and abroad) have unfolded, I’ve moved further and further into territory that’s a little less benign and has the capacity to generate some heated debate.

Then came one of the most important challenges of social engineering that aboriginal people in this country have ever faced¹ (after English occupation and possibly equal-pay). I’m referring obviously, to the Intervention. It’s been such a huge part of this blog since mid-June that I’ve given it its own category. I was even lucky enough – though it’s hard to think in terms of ‘luck’ – to have been in the field for two very crucial months while the Intervention was going gangbusters.

So given all that has happened in this pivotal year, it’s hardly surprising that the focus of this blog shifted away from being primarily about linguistics to being about something immensely more important: indigenous issues. But I still like to dabble in the wonders of natural language every now and then.

Anyway, here are some stats:

After a year of activity, I’ve had a little less than 10,000 visitors (as counted by WordPress, which I understand counts hits different from other sites) and around about 500 comments, which, given some 100 posts, is an encouraging 5 (well, 4.95) comments per post². As an aside, I also had two changes of name, in quick succession.

Askimet has kindly prevented a modest 1,710 spam comments from appearing, though that unfortunately includes a few legitimate ones captured and summarily deleted erroneously. I think the number of spam is way below what other bloggers experience, which is apparently due to the fact that my tags include such erudite subjects as syntax, ethnotoponymy and language revitalisation rather than more popular ones like sport(s), cars or film. At least that’s how it was explained to me.

Anyway, thanks again for reading, and stick around for another year at least!

~

¹This is a paraphrase of something that Jane Simpson said during her excellent plenary talk on Thursday morning at the Indigenous Languages Conference in Tandanya (Adelaide).

²I’m relying on this post to push me over the 500 comment mark before tomorrow!

I haven’t written anything that could be categorised as a metapost before, because I assume most people don’t care. But I’ll write one today, since I have three quite separate pieces of news, and lo and behold, they tie together surprisingly well.

1. I have been asked to write an article for a Sydney-based, left-wing, federal-election-motivated, free, street-press newspaper, sort of designed to rival mX, which:

…is distinctly low-brow with a much greater focus on entertainment than news than broadsheet newspapers, or even other tabloids. (wikipedia)

The previous editions have received lots of support in Sydney’s west, where commuters yearn for something intelligent to read, rather than what Kylie Minogue was wearing today. Instead, News Corporation treats them like Neanderthals and gives them nothing but trash. They want me to write about the NT intervention, but I’m not certain exactly what angle I’m going to take. But:

2. This calls into question my attempted pseudonymity. I originally intended to write the article as ‘Jangari’ and have it mention this blog, for the sake of generating more local traffic, but political opinion pieces written under pseudonyms tend to be viewed with a bit of cynicism. So I really should go ‘nonymous’. 

Besides, my pseudonymity hasn’t been entirely successful, partly because other wordpress.com bloggers who get comments from me already know my first name, owing to my naively registering my work email with my wordpress profile. Speaking of email:

3. I have a new one, which I’ve attached to my wordpress profile, as well as my gravatar. The email is jangari [at] matjjin-nehen.com, which I am able to have thanks to the fact that I just bought that domain name, it was dirt cheap. Eventually I’ll set it up as a domain for this blog, which, I understand, will turn everything in the address bar that is currently aidhoss.wordpress.com into matjjin-nehen.com but I believe I have to set up the DNS servers first, or something like that. I suspect I’d also have to pay something like ten bucks per year to wordpress for the privilege, which is a bit steep given that it’s even more than I pay for the domain in the first place. In any case, I’m told that setting up a domain for a wordpress.com blog is a bit like magic in that it works by misdirection. Or was it redirection?

Anyway, that’s what’s been happening around here at matjjin-nehen.

To anyone who subscribes via an RSS feed reader, I profoundly apologise for the multiple publishing of the last entry, which I think got posted about 7 or 8 times. I thought I’d deleted them all, but they still managed to make it through to my feed reader.

For what it’s worth, you can blame Microsoft, as I use their dedicated blog writing program, Microsoft Live Writer, for offline composition. It returned an error message when I tried to post, but they clearly went through unhindered.

If anyone knows of a good offline blog writer, preferably open source, and bearing in mind that I’ve already tried Scribefire, please let me know.

I was talking to a friend today about the difference between standard language and internet language, and he brought up the issue of francophone chatrooms and the various acronyms they use.

Certainly a lot of people know the various English internet acronyms, like lol for laugh out loud¹, and rofl ‘rolling on the floor laughing’ and so on, but do monolingual French speakers use the same?

Well, yes, as it turns out. But they also use French acronyms, though not as commonly, and probably only by those people who identify strongly as a French speaker and therefore avoid the English terms. Apart from the expected alterations on standard French, such as K for Q, they use acronyms like:

JRF – Je ris fort – I laugh loud

MDR – Mort de rire – Laughing to death

PTDR – Pété de rire – Explode from laughing

EDR – Écroulé de rire – Collapse from laughing

I want to know if there are chatroom/internet conventions of acronyms for other languages, because it’d certainly be boring if everyone used the same, uninspired English expressions online.

~

Sorry about such a trivial topic, but after the polemics of last week, which, by the way, continued at another blog, I needed a break from profundity.

~

¹I suggest that this should really be lqtm ‘laughing quiety to myself’.

I read in the Herald today that archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered chicken bones in South America, in territory occupied by the Mapuche people, which predate Columbus by at least 70 years. The chicken bones are important historically, because obviously, chickens aren’t native to the Americas. DNA evidence places the ancestry of these chickens in the South-East Pacific and carbon-dating places them between 1304 and 1424. In short, the chickens were imported by the Polynesian seafarers.

How brilliant! For hundreds of years, Italians had as a source of national and ethnic pride that one of their own ‘discovered’ the New World. This shows that some of the world’s indigenous populations were also excellent seafarers and were able to navigate across the treacherous south-Pacific using nothing but traditional technology.

A while back there was a historian, I think, who professed that the Americas were first visited (after being initially colonised, of course, and not including the Vikings who decided that Scotland, Iceland and Scandinavia were much nicer) by the Chinese in traditional junks. It turned out that there was very little good evidence for his theory and, although he steadfastly holds to it, it has since been conclusively debunked.

~

Why do I care about 15th Century Polynesians reaching South America?

Well, about 6 months ago I wrote about Microsoft using the Mapudungun language in their latest Word release without the consent of the Mapuche indigenous people who claim ownership of the language. As a result of that post, I have at least two ‘orphan’ tags, ‘Mapudungun’ and ‘Mapuche’, in my list of ‘categories’. This irks me.

I can now write another post, publish it under ‘Mapuche’ and successfully give an otherwise lone tag another instantiation. Ironically though, in doing so, I have added new tags, such as ‘Archaeology’ and ‘Historical Osteology’ (okay, the last one was made up). I have also set a precedent whereby I must start finding posts to fill other orphan tags.

Anyone know a good story about Highland Scottish Gaelic?

Taken directly from Column 8 today (15/5):

“Sir,” writes Timothy Sparks, of Cudal, which is always a promising start, “I grew up in Talgarra Place, Beacon Hill, and when the street sign was replaced with a nice new one, reading ‘Talgara Pl’, a neighbour reported this spelling error to Warringah Shire Council, only to be informed that ‘that was the way the Aborigines spelt it’.”

One wonders what they were thinking, but one can’t help giggling, can one?

In yesterday’s cryptic crossword, I managed to finish off all but one clue. I subsequently cheated by looking at today’s paper, but I’m still a bit quite confused as to how the compiler came up with it. Which is where you, dear reader, come in.

The clue was Measure nothing in Frank’s woodland plants (8). I’m not going to make the solution obvious to you – in case you want to have a crack – but if you hold your mouse here it should pop up.

If you have any idea how that solution works, please leave a comment. It’s really beginning to annoy me.

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 site, I believe).

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, for ‘recent posts’ I used nganing-gin posts, which is ‘My posts’ and for ‘recent comments’ I’ve instead used gordo-gin comments, which means ‘your comments’ (you here being plural). But given the context of each widget, it shouldn’t at all be difficult to figure out which is which.

As far as the blogroll goes, the first lot, blog-giwu matjjin-gu is ‘blogs on language’, and the other is a bit of a truncation, wuji matjjin-gu meaning ‘not on language’.

I’ve also removed the text on the banner and replaced it with photoshopped text inside the banner, I think it looks a lot better.

I think I just need to practise using a bit more Wagiman in preparation for my coming field trip, in late June. I don’t wanna spend the first 2 weeks getting used to the language again.