Week 11 Flashcards
Why we revive a dead language:
- Reasons for reviving a dead language
- Ethical: what is right to do
- Aesthetic: It is beautiful
Utilitarian: People who claim their language feel empowered and better mental health
Ethical:
- The native would be sooner civilized if the language was extinct (linguicide). We claim them back as they were subject to linguicide which is the wrong thing to do. e.g. if language is lost and your never allowed to speak it
Feel that it is righting the wrong of the past e.g. indigenous, migrant languages
Aesthetic:
- World with linguistic diversity is more beautiful then just having one
Languages encode ways of imagination
Utilitarian
- People who reclaim language feel empowered and mental health improved
- People have lost self-value
- Connect with cultural autonomy and heritage
Sense of identity
A bicultural future for Leonora Aboriginal:
- Works on preservation of Aboriginal language and analysis
- Up to 14 languages in the region: 800 words in a database, 4 years work
- Go to particular places and rich natural speech comes out
- Language is more than words and is a carrier of culture
- Linguists hear a language being used and know where it is from
- Revitalize language
Linguistic Challenges in Kaurna language reclamation:
- 350 different language, 800 dialects
- Is an awakening language
- Ivaritji the last speaker died in 1929
- Last spoken on an everyday basis in 1860’s
- No sound recordings
- Little survived in the oral tradition prior to language revival
- Sustained Kaurna language revival movement since 1989
Place names have survived
Documentation of Kaurna
- Approx 20 primary sources, range from Gaimard recorder in 1826 to Black in 1920
- Main sources: Teichelmann and Schurmann (1840) (journal source)
- Vocabulary: 3000-3500 words
- Grammar: T and S sketch grammar
- Texts: 5 short texts written by Kaurna people: 6 Hymns, ten commandments, few song lines
Very little by the way of text
Primary sources:
- More than 20 primary sources but are very short which add little to knowledge
- Place names, plant names, insects, artifacts,
- Words collected by German ship doctor, Kalloongoo on Flinders island in Tasmania,
Most recent source is Ivaritiji
Linguistic challenges:
- No sound recordings so phonology is harder
- We can look at various ways observers recall them sounding like/what they thought they sounded like compared to other similar languages
- Stephen = Plagiarist, sneaky bitch, non-chalant?
Different observers have different spellings/sounds
Revised spelling (2010)
Revised spelling (2010)
- Created minor and major changes
- If evidence is presented they may change it
- Looked at all the cognates of neighboring languages
- been around for 14 years
- T and S spellings are sometimes the same
- Minor change: ‘e’ and ‘o’
Stress placement:
- Primary stress is always on the 1st syllable
- But many people stress the 2nd syllable especially in 3-syllable words
There is no er vowel in Kaurna
- The r following a vowel should be pronounced as an r in its own right
Or it is part of a digraph indicating retroflexion
Translation challenges:
- Wrong interpretation
- Corrupted forms and distorted meanings
- Certain suffixes go on noun/verbs
What is the Dresden Missionary society?
Began learning and documenting Kaurna on the Banks of the Torrens river
Linguistic challenges of Kaurna ?
No sound recordings
Three sounds missing: rd, r, rr (trill)
No distinction between n and ng sounds
unnecessarily wrote e’s and o’s leading to spelling mispronunciations, failed to distinguish long and short vowels, people stress 2nd, no er vowel in Kaurna
Kaurna Lexicon: How do we fill in words we have no recordings for
Echidna: English
Phonology of English and adapt it to Kaurna spelling
Borrow the term from a neighboring language
Many words are underdefined
What are neologisms?
New terms for introduced items and concepts
What sounds did Teichelmann and Schurmann miss?
Tap (tongue quickly touches alveolar ridge), Glide (j, w), Trill (rapid vibrating of the tongue) There is a distinction between interdental (dental fricative), alveolar and retroflex (backward curling of tongue) consonants, usually write rr for both glide and trill and r for tap
There are no voicing distinction in Kaurna so T and S unnecessarily wrote both p, b, t, d, k, g, failed to distinguish between short and long vowels
How do they write t tt or d?
How do they write N or nn
th, t, rt
nh, n, rn
What was included in the revised spelling?
Minor change to e and o, primary stress is on the 1st syllable, no ‘er’ vowel in Kaurna, the r after a vowel should be pronounced as an r in its own right
What are undefined terms?
Many words recorded in historical sources are under-specified e.g. yerndoko means a species of duck
What is aboriginal English?
Reflect cultural and social norms of the culture and community, the grammar, syntax, vocabulary and pronunication, semantics and pragmatics are different and are used to express identity and are used to educate
What is standard Australian English?
Pronunciation, grammar, vocab, spelling, cultural differences
What are the two possessive suffixes?
Ku, Rna
What is allative, perlative, Ergative and their symbols?
Movement towards: Ana, Kana
Move through: Arrra, tarra
Transitive verb: Requires a direct object to complete the phrases meaning: Rlue, dlu, urlu
