RNLD Twitter - Siraya grammar and lexicon

[Peter J Keegan]

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