Cultural Survival

Cultural Survival has a number of publications of interest to those working on Australian languages.

Garma Festival of Traditional Culture

I’m a bit late, Garma was last weekend, but here’s their web site.

Expanding Southwest Pacific Mitochondrial Haplogroups P and Q — Friedlaender et al. 22 (6): 1506 — Molecular Biology and Evolution

Link goes to abstract; discussion of population genetics in Australia and New Zealand and lack of shared mtDNA.

Symposium on Complex Verbs

Call for papers

[Apologies for cross-posting]

Intertheoretical approaches to complex verb constructions

Eleventh Rice Biennial Symposium

Date: March 16th-18th, 2006

Rice University's Linguistics Department will be hosting its Eleventh
Linguistic Symposium in March 2006. The aim of the symposium is to draw
together different theoretical approaches to the various types of
complex predicates found in the languages of the world. Emphasis is on
drawing together work on different language families and in different
linguistic frameworks.

The current confirmed speakers are:

Andrew Garrett (UC Berkeley)
T Givon (Oregon)
Alice Harris (SUNY Stony Brook)
Martin Hilpert and Christian Koops (Rice)
Simin Karimi (U Arizona)
Andrew Pawley (Australian National University)
Kingkarn Thepkanjana (Chulalongkorn University)
Keren Rice (U Toronto)
Eva Schultze-Berndt (Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz)
Masayoshi Shibatani (Rice)

We would like to invite expressions of interest for additional papers
directed towards the symposium theme; we anticipate having space for
approximately three more speakers. Talks will be 45 minutes, with 15
minutes for questions. While there will be no formal position paper,
speakers will be asked to keep in mind a general set of questions which
will form the main issues for discussion at the symposium. It is
anticipated that a collection of papers from the volume will be
published following the symposium.

If you are interested in presenting a paper, please send an article you
have written on this general topic, along with a brief biographical
statement, by email to

Anne-Marie Hartenstein (anneh at rice dt edu)
or
Claire Bowern (bowern at rice dt edu)

or by snail mail to

Rice University Linguistics Symposium
Attn: Claire Bowern
Department of Linguistics, MS-23
PO Box 1892
Houston, TX, 77251-1892.

by 1st October, 2005.

If you wish to be kept up to date on announcements for the workshop,
please go to http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lingsymp/ and fill out the online
web form.

AIATSIS – Language Bibliographies Alphabetical Title List

a propos the previous entry, here’s a link to all the language bibliographies at AIATSIS.

Mbara Bibliography

Selected Bibliography f the Mbara language and people held in the AIATSIS Library, compiled by Veronica Falko, April 2005.

Linguistic Typology 9/1

The most recent issue of Linguistic Typology has an obituary of Terry Crowley, by Nicholas Evans.

Oceanic Linguistics, Volume 44, 2005

The latest issue of Oceanic Linguistics has two items of interest to Australianists: John Lynch’s obituary of Terry Crowley and Nicholas Evans’ review article of Dixon’s Australian Languages. Link goes to the table of contents and abstracts; subscription required for full article.

Language centre talks up jobs scheme

[via Nick Theiberger on the Australian Languages list]

The Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre says it has achieved outstanding results from an employment program allowing Aborigines to work in their own languages.

The Community Development Employment Program is unique to the Pilbara region and is believed to be the first of its kind which relates specifically to maintaining a language.

Wangka Maya’s manager, Fran Haintz, says since the program began 12 months ago, more than 25 people have been employed as Aboriginal language workers.

Ms Haintz says the languages of the region are now being used and recorded properly.

“We have somebody analysing the differences between two Aboriginal languages of the northern part of the Pilbara and that helps people to understand language better and then therefore it’ll be a lot stronger because understanding it has been more intellectualised than ever before,” she said.