By I briefly mentioned in a past posting about my father’s village language which is called Arapesh. My village is called Wautogik and it was in 1999 that an American lady by the name of Lise Dobrin came to live in my village to study our language. She’s of course a linguist and after living with us for about a year, she has since returned to the U.S. Below is a picture of her back then with my Uncle Mathew Rahiria (a school teacher by profession).
You can read up a bit more about her observations here and here, but most encouraging for me is that after all that work of recording and learning Arapesh, in 2005 she secured another grant of US$225,000.00 from a joint initiative between NEH and the National Science Foundation called “Documenting Endangered Languages,” which encourages researchers to incorporate media and technology in efforts to save dying languages from extinction. Her grant application is here in pdf and it outlines a planned working timeline to stretch into 2008.
Obviously my key interest here is the Digital Language Archive that is to be created for my langauage. The plan is to produce a multimedia digital archive of the language to serve the needs of language preservation and research. This will consist of a grammatical database and a collection of digitized, marked-up texts associated with audio, linked by a software layer enabling searches across both parts of the archive. A modest public-facing website demonstrating selected Arapesh grammatical features will also be constructed, providing an accessible educational resource on the language. By presenting website text in Arapesh and Tok Pisin as well as in English, and by presenting Arapesh in audio as well as visual form, the website will benefit PNG people, harnessing the web’s prestige to lend value to Arapesh and multilingualism. The archive and grammar will lay the foundation for pedagogical materials to be created later for use by Arapesh children in local schools, such as a reverse nominal dictionary in phonemic orthography that graphically illustrates the logic of the noun classification system that has now begun to disintegrate because it is opaque to young people (such as myself) who do not fully command the phonology. The project is a collaborative one in which linguists will work together with technical experts in web-based language preservation, database construction, text encoding, and humanities computing.
It is an exciting project for me, because like many Papua New Guineans (except perhaps the Highlands and the New Guinea islands), my generation has no knowledge and usage of our traditional languages. I remember Lise explaining to me that although we would not use the language today knowing the language in itself opens the door to a richer historical and environmental knowledge of my village environment. It in itself is a historical tool which can tell me how things were done, why and by whom etc.
I hope Lise comes across this posting and I would very much like to see the benefits of her work and to use her work to learn my own history and maybe along the way I may actually learn abit more about who I am and my place in PNG culture.
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Update 21/04/07
Speaking of a Digital Archive for languages, RiceBag sent me this link about Bob Geldof looking at doing it for the whole word. See the article below:
Emily Dunn
April 19, 2007
THE Live Aid founder Bob Geldof has revealed his latest ambitious project: to record every human society on the planet.
At an international television conference in Cannes yesterday, Geldof and the BBC announced a collaboration on The Dictionary of Man, a website and digital catalogue of human existence to be complemented by an eight-part series produced by the BBC.
Film crews will travel the world documenting the 900 ethnic and cultural groups that anthropologists have defined. Some experts say there may be as many as 27,000 variations alongside the core groups.
The Dictionary of Man site will also be the largest digital catalogue of DVDs, books, films, photographs and art covering the economies, languages, philosophies and personal stories of the planet’s citizens.
“This will be an A to Z of mankind which will catalogue the world we live in now, the people who share this planet, the way we live and the way we adapt to face common and different challenges,” Geldof said.
He said the idea for the project came to him on a trip to Africa 20 years ago, when a regional governor spoke of the loss of 300 languages. “Even though I never heard those languages, I already miss them,” the singer and campaigner said. “In these ways the lights of human genius wink out.”
From then on, he said, he was determined to record “all those sounds, voices and jokes so they never disappear again”.
Unlike most anthropological projects where a cultural group was profiled by an outsider, Geldof said his site would be “two-way”, with groups able to edit their own entries and the site overseen by a team of editors.
The site will use social networking technologies such as YouTube and MySpace to allow people to trace and reconnect with far-flung and ancient versions of their family and culture.
“I suppose in some ways we’re also building the world’s family photo album,” Geldof said. “Mankind is the world’s most extraordinary animal. In an age of globalisation and increasing connection, we face the growing homogenisation of cultures and the disappearance of extraordinary and diverse mechanisms that man has invented in order to survive in whichever environment he has found himself.”
6 comments
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April 2, 2007 at 11:38 pm
Carolyn
Hey there, I hope your birthday bash went well!
It’s lovely to see you calling it “My Language”, even though you don’t know it. That’s nice positive pride, and good to see. Hooray for preserving it, I hope this can be done with many more languages.
April 3, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Emmanuel
Hey! Thanks the Party went well..but had so much fun I didn’t take any pics. Will post pics once I gather them all from friends.
Yes I’m quite lucky that Lise came to my village, but I know that not all languages maybe so lucky.
May 9, 2007 at 3:41 am
Jude
Emmanuel - you may be interested to know that digital archiveing and cataloging is currently being done and has been underway for a couple of months at the NBC. There is an pletitude of information and history that is gracing the many walls of the Provincial radio stations around PNG.
Sadly, much of our history, though old songs, languages and events that occurred and were recorded are being taped over as the national broadcaster has unfortunately had to use old tapes to records new events. Or just hadn’t been able to catalogue the richness that lay at it’s very feet.
So archieving and cataloguing was a priority activty. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation in partnership with the NBC is currently doing this through support from the Australian Aid program.
It’s a start and I for one am so very relieved that this is happening.
The Digital Language Archieve sounds fascinating. Imagine if we could preserve the richness of our country and its uniqueness by having many many of our dialects recorded and preserved.
May 9, 2007 at 5:12 am
Emmanuel
Thanks Jude, that’s probably the best thing I’ve heard all day! Thank God for that.
So once all the cataloging is done, do you know how the public can browse through the catalogue? Would we be able to pay a fee and go in for a listen or could we listen from the net maybe?
Definitely archiving all our languages would be a great step forward in preserving what’s left of our languages. It would be a mammoth task but maybe the ABC could help there too??
You know I was pretty amazed that ABC even has news in tok pisin too:
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/tokpisin/
May 9, 2007 at 8:03 am
Andrew
Hello Manu,
Wosik ah? Trust you are all fine and well. Thank you for making this posting about our Araphesh Language in your blog. Lise Dobrin, or Swagien as she is known in the village, will be very pleased to read of her work here. I just alerted her on email about this when I browsed through your blog this morning.
I was with Lise and Ira at the University of Virginia in February recently and spent some time with Lise going through some of her linguistic material that she collected in the village when she was there. I listened to some of the stories our older men in the village told her, read through some that she recorded in writing and then recited some of those stories which she then recorded and transferred onto the computer. She wanted to have an Araphesh voice over those stories so my visit to Virginia for a conference was a good opportunity she could not have missed. It was fun after I tried to deciper the notations that linguists employ in their recording.
The sad thing is that she has the recorded voices of our relatives some of whom have now passed away, and they are gone with their knowledge of our language. It was very sad listening to the voices of these men who are now gone. But beyond this emotional encounter is the looming question over our dying language that comes from more and more people like you and me speaking English and Tok Pisin.
As an aside I thought you might want to know that Cambridge based archaeologists have now unearthed genetic material that confirms that Melanesians and Australian Aboriginals have an African origin. This is a theory that has been in the hypothetical air for some time but now it seems, genetics has come to confirm their hypothesis. But the thing is that there is a complete archaeological or historical amnesia about this. Obviously science has different views about where Melanesians came from. You can see the full story on the following link: http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2007050801
Anyway, I will run off for now and hopefully we will hear from your end sometimes.
With all best wishes,
Andrew
Cambridge, England
May 9, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Emmanuel
Andrew, thank you for that news nah yes aik nape wosik! Yeah I had emailed Lise/Swagien about it and she was a bit busy with some work but she said she would make a comment sometime soon.
But great to see that you’ve been in touch with her. I was in Waut last week for a couple of days and I was talking to Seregen and Ignas about the situation with our language, even the young in the village cannot speak it fluently as detailed conversations have already escaped them.
I’m hoping that the computerised form will help us in learning the language, but we need to create and environment where we can use the language so some application is necessary to make it applicable in some way and thus keeping it alive.
Hope you are all well and keep safe!