I’ve had a busy and eventful week, and right now appears to be about the only spare time I’ve had.
I attended the Australian Languages Workshop last weekend at Kioloa on the NSW south coast, an outpost of ANU. I didn’t present anything, but I managed to discuss the mobile phone dictionary with a number of interested people and got a fair amount of positive feedback.
I then spent the week writing a chapter for a forthcoming volume on language revitalisation. It’s been sent off to the editors now, after a very tightly packed Friday of drafting and proofreading and editing1. The chapter doesn’t go into many details with respect to specific dictionary projects, but instead discusses the future possibilities of integrated teaching resources for endangered languages, that is, using electronic dictionaries in the classroom, which will usually be equipped with a computer or two, and installing mobile phone dictionaries on the students’ phones so they can access a smaller version of the dictionary whenever they like. Here’s the abstract:
Owing to the disproportionately high level of illiteracy in remote indigenous communities, especially in indigenous languages, printed books are perhaps not the most appropriate form of delivery of language learning materials such as dictionaries. Electronic versions based on computers may be more useful. However, the availability of computers, and consequently computer literacy, in remote Australian communities is still very low. By contrast, mobile phones are almost ubiquitous. Unfortunately, mobile phones generally only allow small applications, meaning that most content expected in a reasonable language learner’s dictionary must be jettisoned. We propose, and document, a method of dictionary delivery that takes advantage of the flexibility and usability of computer-based dictionaries, as well as the portability of mobile phones. This process entails maintaining a single dictionary file that can be exported to dictionary visualisation programs, to applications that can be installed on a mobile phone, as well as a number of other formats in various media. Computer based resources may contain as much information as is necessary, in a format that can be navigated easily, while a mobile phone based version will contain only a reduced version of the original content, although it will be available to the user without the need of a computer.
It was also an exciting week on the teaching front; I gave my first lecture on Wednesday, it was on phonemics for an introductory linguistics course, so I got to do all those problems like Fijian prenasalised stops, Tojolabal aspirants and Spanish lenition. By all reports, I did fairly well.
- Thanks, by the way, to Mic, my brilliant editor.