25.953, Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Nick Thieberger

linguist at linguistlist.org linguist at linguistlist.org
Tue Feb 25 19:04:38 UTC 2014


LINGUIST List: Vol-25-953. Tue Feb 25 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.953, Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Nick Thieberger

Moderators: Damir Cavar, Eastern Michigan U <damir at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin Madison
Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin Madison
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin Madison
Mateja Schuck, U of Wisconsin Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin Madison
       <reviews at linguistlist.org>

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Do you want to donate to LINGUIST without spending an extra penny? Bookmark
the Amazon link for your country below; then use it whenever you buy from
Amazon!

USA: http://www.amazon.com/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-20
Britain: http://www.amazon.co.uk/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-21
Germany: http://www.amazon.de/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistd-21
Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlist-22
Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistc-20
France: http://www.amazon.fr/?_encoding=UTF8&tag=linguistlistf-21

For more information on the LINGUIST Amazon store please visit our
FAQ at http://linguistlist.org/amazon-faq.cfm.

Editor for this issue: Sarah Fox <sarah at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  


Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 14:04:16
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Nick Thieberger

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=25-953.html&submissionid=27992684&topicid=121&msgnumber=1
 
As the Fund Drive moves on and we are now traveling to the Pacific region of
the World, we are proud to introduce the Featured Linguists from this region.
Please welcome Nick Thieberger, our Featured Linguist from the University of
Melbourn. Read below why he chose linguistics and where it led him in his life
way.

Biography by Nick Thieberger

I was brought up in a multilingual setting, with parents who between them
spoke Italian (Standard and Veneto and Triestin), German, Friulian, Polish,
Russian, and Uzbek, so I developed an ability and interest in languages that I
just followed when I began my studies. My first linguistics degree in the late
1970s was based entirely on Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and at
first I enjoyed the calculus of phrase structure grammar and transformations.
However, I was also interested in Australian languages and could see a
mismatch between theoretical constructs based on ideal examples and the use of
language by speakers.

My first experience of working with Aboriginal people came when I was a
volunteer at Friends of the Earth and we organised a demonstration against a
uranium mine site near Broken Hill in South Australia. I got to know some
Paakanji Aboriginal people from Wilcannia who were the traditional custodians
of the country there and then in the early 1980s went up there to see what use
a new linguist could be. I ended up writing some introductory materials in the
language based on Luise Hercus's grammar and recorded speakers to use in an
audio guide to the language.

I tutored in linguistics at La Trobe University and after my honours year I
got a short contract to teach at the University of Western Australia. My next
job was at the School of Australian Linguistics, an institute set up (partly
by Ken Hale) to train indigenous Australians in language work. Having that
experience encouraged me to apply for a job to prepare a survey of Aboriginal
languages of Western Australia that led to writing a handbook of those
languages, and, in 1988, to setting up a language center in Port Hedland
(Wangka Maya). This involved a long process of consultation with local
Aboriginal people who formed the management committee of the Centre. A trained
teacher and Banjima/Yinhawangka woman, Lorraine Injie, started work with me as
we recorded local speakers, prepared new material, and set up a resource
center for the 25 or so local languages. I made friends with a family of
Warnman speakers and spent some time with them, recording the language from
the Great Sandy Desert.

The task of preparing new materials based on older materials taught me the
value of regular expressions and text conversion in those early days of
personal computers. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies advertised
for someone with these kinds of skills to build an archive of texts related to
Aboriginal languages and I moved to Canberra to set up this collection. I had
two children in the early 1990s and we wanted to go somewhere where they would
be immersed in another language and culture, so we went to live in Vanuatu as
Australian Volunteers Abroad (like Peace Corps) where I worked at the National
Museum. I got to know the local language (South Efate) which then became the
topic of my PhD dissertation. It was of concern to me that, in the course of
doing a PhD at a university linguistics department, I got no training in the
methods for recording, transcribing, or using new tools for analysing the
materials in the language, and that there were no tools available for
accessing recordings via text, nor for citation of primary recordings in the
analysis. In those (pre-Elan) days I wrote some software (Audiamus) to allow
me to create a text/media corpus and then to link examples and texts in my
grammar of South Efate to the media so that they could be verified by readers.
The corpus continues to be extremely useful in my ongoing work with South
Efate.

This all drove home to me the value of making good records, and coincided with
the development of language documentation as a stream within linguistics. With
Linda Barwick I established the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital
Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), in order to look after field
recordings, and we located a number of collections of tape recordings that we
digitised, created a catalog for, and made accessible for ongoing research.
PARADISEC has been going for ten years and we have digitised nearly 4,000
hours of recordings that would otherwise have been lost. In order to support
sharing expertise on new methods I (with Margaret Florey) set up the Resource
Network for Linguistic Diversity (rnld.org) as a mailing list and website.

I was an assistant professor in the department of linguistics at the
University of Hawai'i at Mānoa from 2008-2010 and taught in the language
documentation stream there. That program attracts great students and, under
the leadership of Ken Rehg, we started the journal Language Documentation &
Conservation (LD&C) and hold the first international conference on LD&C. I now
have an Australian Research Council grant to work at the University of
Melbourne and this lets me continue to develop PARADISEC, and to work on South
Efate and Warnman.

Language documentation allows us to be scholarly researchers and, at the same
time, to create records for the people we record. I have been lucky that my
interest in this work has coincided with the realisation within linguistics
that field-based research and resulting corpus-creation are valuable
activities that are necessary for the scientific foundation of linguistics.






------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This Year the LINGUIST List hopes to raise $75,000. This money will go to help keep the List running by supporting all of our Student Editors for the coming year.

See below for donation instructions, and don't forget to check out Fund Drive 2014 site!

http://linguistlist.org/fund-drive/2014/

There are many ways to donate to LINGUIST!

You can donate right now using our secure credit card form at https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Alternatively you can also pledge right now and pay later. To do so, go to: https://linguistlist.org/donation/pledge/pledge1.cfm

For all information on donating and pledging, including information on how to donate by check, money order, PayPal or wire transfer, please visit: http://linguistlist.org/donation/

The LINGUIST List is under the umbrella of Eastern Michigan University and as such can receive donations through the EMU Foundation, which is a registered 501(c) Non Profit organization. Our Federal Tax number is 38-6005986. These donations can be offset against your federal and sometimes your state tax return (U.S. tax payers only). For more information visit the IRS Web-Site, or contact your financial advisor.

Many companies also offer a gift matching program, such that they will match any gift you make to a non-profit organization. Normally this entails your contacting your human resources department and sending us a form that the EMU Foundation fills in and returns to your employer. This is generally a simple administrative procedure that doubles the value of your gift to LINGUIST, without costing you an extra penny. Please take a moment to check if your company operates such a program.

Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-25-953	
----------------------------------------------------------



More information about the LINGUIST mailing list