matjjin-nehen

The End of Anonymity

2008-10-09T21:58:18Z

As I promised last week, I’ve managed to find a copy of the SBS World News report in which I appeared, that mentions and demonstrates the mobile phone dictionary - thanks to Jeremy who recorded it - and so I’ve put it up here.

Just bear in mind that I had no idea that I was going to be interviewed, which is why I’m unshaven and wearing - ahem - a Transformers T-shirt (Decepticons, no less).

I suppose this destroys for good any semblance of internet anonymity that I had feigned.

<UPDATE>
As Michael noticed, I think the large video file was causing some strife for the company that generously hosts this site, Affernet, so I’ve YouTubed it instead.
</UPDATE>

Not-very-Smart Cars, or Code Switching

2008-10-05T03:45:02Z

This morning’s post at Language Log on code switching reminded me that I intended to write about an instance of code switching by a friend of mine that I was fortunate enough to witness.

This friend is South African and her first language is Afrikaans, although she has been speaking Australian English for long enough that she only occasionally appears to have a twang of an accent. She still speaks Afrikaans with members of her family, as all live in Australia and speak often.

I was doing a favour for said friend which basically entailed my sitting in the passenger seat as she drove from her house to the RTA in her “Smart” Car. I put ’smart’ in double quotes for good reasons, which shall become clear below.

While we were en route, we had the misfortune of running over a nail, which caused one of the rear tyres to deflate, which we noticed only after it was too late; the tubeless tyre was shredded, and would need replacing. My friend’s driving test is minutes away.

“No worries,” I said, “I’ll put the spare on.”

“There’s no spare.” was my friend’s reply. “Smart cars don’t come with a spare,” ironically.

With no other option, we limped into a service station and asked whether they could fit a new tyre. The reply was that Smart Cars, being so terribly smart, use a slightly different sized tyre than any other car; their wheel size is absolutely unique and, owing to the minority of the Smart Car market in Australia, tyre suppliers don’t generally keep them in stock. I hope you can see now why I put ’smart’ in quotes.

To cut a long and largely irrelevant story short, my friend had no way of taking the test that day, so we set off back to her house. On the way, she phoned her brother to tell him, in Afrikaans, what had happened. Now, my Afrikaans is about as good as my Walmajarri, so I won’t try and transcribe it here, but when she related to her brother the cost of a new tyre, she did so while code switching into English.

As her Australian English accent is so good, she’d normally have no issue saying “a hundred and eighty five dollars” as [əˈhʌndɹədnˌeɪɾifaɪv.ˈdɔləz], exept that it came out as a particularly stereotypical Afrikaaner [əˈhʌndɹətəˌnaɪtifɒf.ˈdɔləs]¹.

This is interesting to me because I’ve barely done any psycholinguistics or bilingualism in my undergrad studies, so I enjoy it when I come across cool little bits of evidence that allow me to make broad generalisations about the mind and the language faculty, such as the following.

This implies to me that my friend, and bilingual speakers in general, have an L1 bit² of their brain and an L2 bit. Each bit contains a lexicon; the vocabulary of each language, and each bit contains a phonology. So, what happens during code switching? From this I’d take a naive guess that code switching is the act of moving out of the Lx bit, and taking a word from the lexicon of Ly (in this case she moved out of her L1 to select a word from her L2’s lexicon).

A question emerges here; where does a word’s phonetic representation come from? I would have previously thought (again, naively) that the mental lexicon contains the phonetic representation, much as a dictionary entry contains an IPA transcription. But here, the borrowed words are fed into the phonology of the borrowing language, so the words don’t bring their phonology with them.

My broad and uneducated conclusion then, is that within one’s L1 or L2 is contained separate modules of language: a lexicon, a phonology, a syntax and all the rest of it, and when speaking using L1, you use all the modules in that language, diverging from them as little as possible. So code switching allows words to go between L1 and L2 or vice versa, but the phonology being used is still that of the language you’re speaking.

If you were fluent in two languages and code switched from one to the other, I believe it would take a conscious effort to use those borrowed words with their ‘normal’ pronunciation, by which I mean, the pronunciation they usually take in the language they belong to. Conversely, if you’re a learner of a language, you haven’t yet formed a distinct and independent L2, so the pronunciation of the new language is all a conscious act, in which case, when code switching back to their L1, they’d still use their L1 phonology.

The more I think about this, the more it appears to be commonsense, so I apologise if, for instance, your an expert in bilingualism and either a) you’re wondering why anyone would other writing a thousand words on something so natural, or b) I’m completely wrong.

My apologies if you can’t read IPA; just trust me that the way she said it was almost what I’d expect of a satire.
For want of a better term. I realise that there’s no single bit, but I’m talking abstractly.

Seeing with your tongue

2008-10-02T02:30:30Z

Many of my friends, and possibly people I’ve met and conversed with, will have memories of me telling them that a blind person was once taught to see with their tongue. Needless to say, most of these people thought I was insane, and I could never find the paper that I read it from to back up my claims.

So imagine my surprise when just the other day on the Conversation Hour on ABC 702 radio, the topic of conversation was neuroplasticity, which is the phenomenon whereby the brain can compensate for deficiencies in certain regions, by re-allocating neurons to perform the affected function.

Just in case your interested, I managed by chance to stream the entire conversation hour¹ to an mp3 file, which you can listen to below.

[See post to listen to audio]

The bit that talks about blindness begins at about 13 minutes in, but the entire conversation is fascinating.

It’s actually only 52 minutes, but they couldn’t very well call it ‘The Conversation 52 Minutes’, could they?

Note to self

2008-10-02T01:20:55Z

When collecting field recordings, always, always begin each audio file with a little blurb mentioning the date, the location, who’s present, and what language is being researched. It’ll cost you about 10 seconds of each recording and you’ll sound like a bit of a tool repeating yourself, but you’ll save yourself hours of work years later when you (finally) get around to archiving your recordings and you need to find all this information from other sources, like airline booking confirmation emails.

Oh, and transcribe your recordings while they’re fresh in your head, lest you find yourself devoting countless hours of unpaid work to do so when you have a brazillion¹ other things to do.

I’m alluding to a George W. Bush joke here:
One of the president’s advisers rushes into the oval office and tells the president that there’s been a terrorist attack in Rio and that 2 Brazilians have been killed.
“Oh my God!” Screams the president, to the astonishment of the advisor, who didn’t think the death of a mere 2 people would have fazed the president so much. “How many are in a brazillion?”

Catch me on World News

2008-09-26T05:02:16Z

If you’re in Australia, tune in to SBS World News tonight either tomorrow or Sunday night [I just got a call from them; they've bumped it back to the weekend] at 6:30pm. I have a feeling that there’ll be an interesting report on indigenous languages in Australia, and the use of modern technology (such as electronic dictionaries and mobile phones) in their revitalisation.

Or such was the impression I got when I gave them the interview.

Australex

2008-09-25T02:04:59Z

A few weeks ago I mentioned that a bunch of us at Sydney Uni had submitted an abstract for a conference presentation of the Kaurna electronic dictionary.

Just recently, we received the news that our abstract has been accepted. So, if you’re planning on coming along to Australex ‘08 at the Victoria University of Wellington in November and you’d like to see the public unveiling of our Kirrkirr and mobile phone dictionaries, then by all means look out for us - by which I mean me.

Conferences, Seminars and Dictionaries

2008-09-02T07:03:59Z

As it’s been about a month since my last post, it’s probably about time I posted something at least to ensure that this site doesn’t get referred to as a ‘dead blog’. To make matters worse, not only have I not been posting, I’ve also been neglecting my reciprocal blogger duties of reading other people’s work, which I hope is a good indicator of how busy I’ve been. Reading through the myriad of blogs in my feed reader is normally one of my most favoured activities.

So what is my excuse then?

The same old story really — work. But this time the various jobs are a little different. Besides my regular duties as audio engineer at Paradisec and my unrelenting duties as tutor of first-year linguistics, I have been preparing a grant application with a colleague to continue our work developing electronic dictionaries of minority languages, including dictionaries available as java applications on your mobile phone¹.

We have also been preparing several papers, conference talks, seminars and so on to detail our project and our process of producing visually-rich multimedia electronic dictionaries from basic wordlists. There are a couple of conferences later in the year that this sort of thing would be perfect for, but we also plan to get a paper sent off to some prestigious lexicography journal somewhere.

As a teaser, here’s an abstract that we sent off to one such conference earlier this month:

Kaurna is the indigenous Australian language of Adelaide and the Adelaide Plains. It has not been actively used since 1929, when the last native speaker died. More recently, efforts have been undertaken to restore Kaurna to a state of community use. One recent project involved the creation of an electronic Kaurna dictionary carried out by a team at the University of Sydney during the first half of 2008. As this was a community-driven project, it had certain requirements, such as the need to archivally preserve the two main documentary sources of Kaurna: a book published in 1840, and a hand-written manuscript from 1857.

In an effort to maximise flexibility, portability and transparency, the Kaurna dictionary project opted for an XML formatted master dictionary that could then be converted to other formats, such as an HTML web-page, or even a printed dictionary. The current means of presentation is through Kirrkirr, a multimedia-rich dictionary visualisation tool.

In this project we also developed software for presenting the dictionary on mobile phones. Mobile phones are almost ubiquitous today and most modern mobile phones have the memory capacity and features necessary for storing and presenting the dictionary content. They therefore present an excellent opportunity for learners of minority languages to have access to a dictionary. The mobile phone dictionary software is currently in its early stages, but we hope to improve it with further work and make it available to people compiling electronic dictionaries for other languages.

I’ll let you know how it all goes.

You can read all about this project, which began with Kaurna, at a post of mine here, and at James’ post here. James’ post also includes example software for download, in case you want to try any of this out.

R-lessness

2008-08-01T14:26:05Z

Something was said tonight that piqued my linguistic interest and, as I’ve been pretty light on linguistic content of late, I thought I’d share it.

We (my housemate, a few friends and I) were at the pub tonight, when we met an Irishman, from Clare county. My housemate is named after a capital city of a country just north of Australia, which is a non-typical Anglo-Australian name. When he introduced himself to said Irishman, he said his name was ['mo:sbi]. Upon hearing this, the Irishman repeated it back, to make sure he understood correctly, and said ['moɹsbi], with a clear rhotic segment. I am sure he didn’t know the name beforehand, just to mitigate against any possible priming effects.

What interested me was the fact that the Irishman, who speaks with a rhotic accent (that is, with post-vocalic ‘r’) managed to extrapolate the correct phonemic form of my housemate’s name, including the ‘r’, even though the way it was presented to him was entirely r-less.

Is it the case then, that some long vowels in r-less Englishes are assumed by r-full speakers as being a short vowel followed by an /r/?

This is an area of linguistics that I know very little about; how speakers of different dialects and accents of English manage to overcome the accentual differences between the ways in which they speak and deduce the right form. The same goes for the North-American pronunciation of my nickname; I pronounce it [hɔs], yet North-Americans have no trouble at all converting that directly to [ha:s].

On the other had, it may be a neutralisation effect; if I were to hear the name [ha:s] in a typical rhotic North-American accent, I may permissibly take it to translate into my accent as either Hoss, my nickname, or Haas, as in Mary Haas, for instance.

</stream of consciousness>

Honorifics

2008-07-29T23:40:55Z

A letter arrived at the Sydney University Linguistics department just the other day from Japan, and the way the addressee was worded impressed me immensely, as It’s the first time I’ve experienced real-life honorifics.

Curiously, a day later, I found the unopened letter in the bin, as though no one in the building thought of themselves as honorable or responsible.

Diabolical

2008-07-13T04:03:26Z

To continue the saga of the stolen wordlists (see my own posts on this here and here, or Peter Austin’s posts here and here for background) I’ve decided that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

It is with that in mind that I give you (over the fold) the Murrinh-Patha crossword puzzle, my own creative work, using Philip M. Parker’s online dictionary of the Murrinh-Patha language.

See how long it takes you to complete it.