RNLD Twitter - Siraya grammar and lexicon

[Huang,Chun]

Maku-alilid, thank you, Dr. Adelaar, who will present his book in 
Taiwan next April and give the Siraya community two free copies!

I just heard about this news (that Adelaar is coming to visit) from my 
friends Uma and Edgar in Taiwan. They, and others who study Siraya with 
us, are all very excited.


Jimmy



On Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:38:25 +0000, Sander Adelaar wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I agree that this was an interesting discussion raising many
> important issues. We are on the same page on the principle that
> linguistic data should be available to the members of the language
> community in question, and that they should be affordable.
>
> However, let me also clarify a few things about Siraya, which are not
> immediately apparent from the outside.
>
> 1. Siraya data that I used (the Gospel of St. Matthew) has been
> around and published ever since 1661. It has been re-published in
> 1888, and again (this time as a Taiwanese edition) in 1996. So, as 
> far
> as accessibility of raw materials is concerned, they have more or 
> less
> always been available to a wider public.
>
> 2. The real problem with this and other materials (a Catechism
> published in 1662) was rather that one could make head nor tail of
> them unless one sat down and tried to analyze and re-interpret the
> whole thing. Through my training as an Austronesianist and
> historical/descriptive linguist + my Dutch background I was
> well-positioned to make that analysis.
>
> This is of course a crucial point, and I'm glad that the participants
> in this discussion acknowledge it as a general principle: the data
> could not be used at all without someone making a rigorous and very
> time-consuming analysis of it at a reasonably abstract level before 
> it
> could be passed on to others (linguists as well as language 
> learners).
> It was a necessary stage, and the nature of the work was 
> fundamentally
> different from the next step, which is packaging the results  in a 
> way
> that others can use it too. In the Siraya case the problem was
> actually not that they required a particularly sophisticated and
> clever analysis but more that it took forever to get to the bottom of
> things. Simply staring at the bloody text, going back and forth
> between passages and waiting for divine enlightenment was definitely
> part of the exercise. This is because the spelling is all over the
> place (some words are spelled in five different ways), the grammar is
> not transparent at all, various authors have manipulated the text,
> etc.
>
> 3. The method I used was definitely not based on fieldwork:  it was
> more a combination of old-fashioned textual interpretation (philology
> in the European sense of the word) and descriptive linguistics, but
> then without the assistance of first-language speakers.
>
> 4. Making the analysed data available to the Siraya people themselves
> involves knowledge of Mandarin and Hokkien (in fact Hokkien is
> currently the first language of the Siraya, which is by all accounts
> more difficult and inaccessible than Mandarin). Siraya language, of
> course, had no speakers until some focused and enterprising Siraya
> people began to revive it in the last two decades.
> I know neither Mandarin nor Hokkien, and frankly, late at evening or
> when I'm not at my best, even my English (not my first language) 
> isn't
> that great.
>
> 5. Right now there is a team of very enthusiastic and committed
> language activists working hard to make Siraya available to local
> language learners, and they are well-trained in linguistics. They do
> know Mandarin and Hokkien, and they are applying my research results
> for language teaching in a much more practical and effective way than
> I could ever have done.
>
> 6. My book is expensive. I do regret that, but there are also xerox
> machines (and Taiwan has many of them), and yes, there are PDF
> versions.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Sander Adelaar
>
> ________________________________________
> From: r-n-l-d at unimelb.edu.au [r-n-l-d at unimelb.edu.au] on behalf of
> Peter J Keegan [pjkeeganwh at xtra.co.nz]
> Sent: Thursday, 22 December 2011 10:51 AM
> To: r-n-l-d at unimelb.edu.au
> Subject: Re: RNLD Twitter - Siraya grammar and lexicon
>
> Thanks for Chun for the update on efforts to advance Siraya, it is
> encouraging to learn that
> a lot is being done.
>
> Thanks also to the others who replied to my comments. A number of 
> people
> replied
> to me off-list detailing excellent efforts to make resources 
> accessible
> and useful for
> indigenous communities.
>
> I think that there are major differences between 
> producing/disseminating
> dictionaries/lexical
> resources and producing linguistic descriptions, e.g., grammars of
> (endangered) languages.
>
> I suspect that if language is taught widely and over many years 
> teachers
> will eventually
> produce/contribute to reference/pedagogical grammars that are useful 
> for
> those who haven't
> had a lot of linguistic training.
>
> I am reasonably confident that as eBooks become more common and
> reasonably priced that
> more academics etc. will take a stand and boycott publishing houses 
> that
> sell books at exorbitant
> prices.
>
> It seems to me (I might be wrong here) that there is both little
> rigorous evaluation and a lack of
> evaluative capacity for ensuring that language resources produced for
> indigenous groups are
> in fact useful and used appropriately.
>
> regards,
>
> Peter J Keegan