This elicitation tool is based on the GCLR statement on understanding and defending language rights. It is intended for use by documentary linguists, but could also be used by sociolinguists and other...

It’s not very often that I get to use the words ‘library’ and 'thrilling’ in the same sentence; but last week I had a thrilling time at the archives in the library at of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS) in London. The Library, apart from having a generally excellent collection of books, also houses the archive of Professor Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1909-1995). As well as having an excellently Germanic name (he was Austrian) von Fürer-Haimendorf (vFH) was an anthropologist who spent many years working in India and Nepal. He was the first Westerner to be granted permission to work in Nepal and spent a lot of time with the Sherpas who live near Mount Everest, although he worked in numerous places around the country. In the archives are diaries and fieldnotes, as well as photographs and drafts of articles. I was there to see some of the original notes that vFH made during his time in Nepal. It’s such a massive collection that I only got to skim the surface, but it was fascinating. It was tough going reading scrawled hand-notes that he’d really never intended to be used by anyone else. It was worth it though. I loved reading about Kathmandu as it was before I was born, of how he took 350kg of gear (I take around 30), the price of yaks in the 1960s (around rs. 300, or 3.75AUD today) and finding pages where clearly accidents had happened: Or opening a notebook to find a scrap of paper with a note, or a letter, or some other paraphernalia: I was very excited to find some fieldnotes from 1957, when vFH made a trip up to an area near where I work. It turned out that he visited a village only a district over from where I stay, and the Yolmo speakers get a passing reference! Four days of reading for a passing reference may not sound like much of a success, but there is so little evidence to substantiate the migration of Yolmo speakers to this part of Lamjung, and there’s something amazing about holding a historical record in your hand. A big thanks to the team at the SOAS archives for being so helpful!

The village of Akazu’yw lies in the rainforest, a day’s drive from the state capital of Belém, deep in the Brazilian Amazon. Last week I went to Akazu’yw, carrying a dozen Android phones with a specialised…

Zoom have announced the H6, a new recorder to follow up from the H4n.  I love the H4n, having used it on fieldwork for the last 4 years. I felt like I lost a friend when I had to return it to the department. Zooms are designed mostly for musicians have attracted many people interested in language documentation because the audio is so much better than a standard dictaphone. Nobody creates tools specifically for us, but this is as close to useful for our needs as we get.  I’m excited by the interchangeable mics, battery life and massive SD card capacity (128gb). Not sure about the colour screen, and there are more dials and buttons, but I hope someone I know gets one so I can play with it!

My slides from my recent class on language documentation are now available.

ma-project source code. Contribute to polleninteractive/ma development by creating an account on GitHub.

This is a questionnaire prepared by Nick Thieberger for the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. It aims to provide background information for the development of tools to improve fieldwork. Results may be quoted in summary reports. Please contact him (thien [at] unimelb.edu.au) with any queries (Thanks to Jeff Good for the idea).

Last week I posted about an easy way to find IPA characters using this handy website. But often you find yourself coming back to the same characters. If you’re on a Mac there is an easy way to create keyboard shortcuts using a program called Ukelele. As you can see from the images above - I started with a regular Australian English keyboard map, and then added the characters I wanted on the keys  I wanted them associated with. Each of those red keys triggers a different set of options - one set is in the second picture. I have symbols for retroflexed consonants, alveo-palatal fricatives, the aspiration superscript h and high tone vowels, all of which I use when writing Yolmo. Even if you don’t use IPA, but you want to tweak your keyboard to let you add some diacritics for German then it ca be helpful. The keyboard can be set to appear with the other keyboard options - you can even create different keyboards depending on your needs. It’s definitely the fastest way of working with unique characters, and it’s great to be able to tailor it to your own needs. It’s not too difficult to use, although I always seem to forget how it works and have to figure it out again when I want to tweak something. If you want to use IPA characters you don’t need to even figure out how to use Ukelele. Wuglife has kindly produced an IPA keyboard using Ukelele, and is kindly sharing it.