RNLD Twitter - Siraya grammar and lexicon

[Sander Adelaar]

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