A woman delivers a lecture in a fancy room. Endless boxes and reel-to-reel tapes are depicted on a screen.
Elsie Marie T. Or “Legacy Materials in the Ernesto Constantino Collection”: an introduction to ta massive collection of legacy materials last held by Ernesto Constantino, one of the pillars of linguistics in the Philippines. It’s a massive undertaking in need of humanpower and resources! #DiLegMa3
A man in front of a window gestures at a screen while delivering a presentation.
Arne Rubehn”Digital Scholarly Editions of Austronesian Legacy Materials”. Rubehn presents a model for producing interoperable wordlists from legacy hard copy format to a standardized format, including records of all representational choices. #DiLegMa3
A woman gives an academic talk while standing in front of a window.
Shobhana Chelliah “Creating Access to Edward Hillard’s Mizo materials through keywords from a controlled vocabulary.” Chelliah works with CoRSAL, an archive of South Asian/adjacent languages. It’s a struggle to create a controlled vocabulary with sufficient but not excessive granularity! #DiLegMa3
Biographical research on one amateur contributor led them to an 1867 newspaper travelogue about an encounter between the contributor and Yuwaalaraay people—a record of Yuwaalaraay culture predating academic publications by a decade! #DiLegMa3 (3/3)
The database of the resulting herbarium includes lots of supplemental information about the specimens, including many indigenous plant names. It’s a closed catalog, but Austin has been able to collaborate with a team to produce a botanically sophisticated plant name database. #DiLegMa3 (2/3)
A man delivers a presentation in front of a fancy window.
Peter K. Austin “planting linguistic legacy materials: some cross-disciplinary possibilities” in the mid-19th century, Ferdinand von Mueller solicited and curated a massive collection of plant specimens gathered by amateur naturalists. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)
@samueljbeer.bsky.social showed us the problems that even a single 107-word wordlist can bring , how to contextualize it, and how to recontextualize it. It’s worth it to halt and break your head for a while over a small detail like a punctuation mark.
#dilegma3
“You cannot wait until you’re 75 to get these things out of your head” (Shobhana Chelliah on how valuable it is for senior scholars to assist in fleshing out glosses and metadata that largely exist in the head of the researcher. We need young scholars to work on this too! #DiLegMa3 (4/4)
The obstacles can’t be overcome by just a person or two! The team has relied on recruiting a network of people, many of whose commitments to the materials are social rather than professional. As a matter of personal horntooting, Beer (2021) theorizes this a bit in an African context. #DiLegMa3 (3/4)
The team has encountered loads of the typical challenges preparing the materials for reuse (idiosyncratic transcriptions, obsolete file types, inadequate glossing, etc.) #DiLegMa3 (2/4)
Shobhana Chelliah and Søren Borch present for coauthors Jose Benavides and Mary Burke Borch points at a screen while Chelliah manages the computer.
Chelliah and Borch (see alt) “Challenges and network building in the creation and use of the Akha legacy collection”. Inga-Lill Hanson is a Swedish anthropologist who collected loads of recordings and notes from Akha in Southeast Asia. #DiLegMa3 (1/4)
The morphological analyses of 18th century sources provide motivation for reconsidering existing reconstruction schema for the Zamucoan languages—a variety once thought to be a descendent of the attested 18th century must better be thought of as a sister language. #DiLegMa3 (4/4)
One trend that emerges is that data inconsistently occurs in argument (free) form or in predicative form. So for example, if the historical researchers asked how to say dog (by pointing at a dog?), they would alternately be told “dog” or “it is a dog”. #DiLegMa3 (3/4)
Additionally, there are ~250 item wordlists from the mid 19th century for a variety of Zamucoan lects. These have been analyzed comparatively, but not morphological. Ciucci provides a morphological analysis informed by contemporary Zamucoan descriptions. #DiLegMa3 (2/3)
A man gestures at a screen while giving a talk.
Luca Ciucci: “A morphological analysis of 19th century Zamucoan varieties.” Zamucoan is a small language family spoken on the border of Paraguay and Bolivia. Two languages persist today, but there are 18th century Jesuit-produced records of a third Zamucoan language. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)
Dolinska describes a database she has assembled that brings together these disparate sources, enriched with consistent metadata and grammatical annotation. #DiLegMa3 (2/2)
A woman gestures at a screen while giving a talk in a room with big fancy windows.
Joanna Dolinska: “Dagur language - the history of documentation of the easternmost Mongolic language”. Dagur lacks a standard orthography, but has variously been represented with Manchu, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts #DiLegMa3 (1/2)
This leads Hancock to posit that Skiri Pawnee, South Band Pawnee, and Arikara should be treated as dispersing simultaneously, with Skiri and South Band’s evident similarity resultant from contact in the historical era. #DiLegMa3 (3/3)
Close analysis of 19th century sources lets Hancock date several crucial sound changes—two specifically must have happened between 1860 and 1900, a period when Skiri and South Band were forcibly relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma and shared parallel innovations through contact. #DiLegMa3 2/3
A man gestures enthusiastic toy while giving an academic talk in front of fancy windows.
J Drew Hancock: “Legacy Materials and the Reconstruction of Cáhniks”. Oral history, archaeology, and existing historical linguistic publications give different accounts of Cáhniks (Caddoan) origins. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)
So per Mayeux, Taensa is a “pastiche of 19th century grammars”. This offers a segue for Mayeux to reflect on another pastiche-manufacturer—gen AI. What incentives drive pastiche-fabrication? How can we ensure accountability to communities for how languages are represented? #DiLegMa3 (3/3)
Mayeux offers a close rereading of Parisot’s Taensa in the context of sources on other languages, particularly Chateaubriand (1835), finding evidence that Parisot relied heavily on reappropriation/plagiarism of Chateaubriand. #DiLegMa3 (2/3)
A man gives a talk in front of big red drapes
Oliver Mayeux “a When is a legacy material not a legacy material? Reflections on hoax grammars”. In the 1880s, Jean Parisot published a series of analyses of the “Taensa” language in Louisiana. It was subsequently declared a fraud by Brinton, and years of controversy ensued. #DiLegMa3 (1/3)
We’re being iconic about expressives in Paris. #DiLegMa3 🐦🐦
I always try to wear my most ideophonic shirt when presenting about ideophones.
By the way #DiLegMa3 is a great conference! Can’t wait what today brings but check out @samueljbeer.bsky.social ‘s overview for what the first day was all about.
In subsequent fieldwork, he determined which ideophones are no longer in use, broken out by semantic domain. His results showed that more iconic ideophones (following the hierarchy in @dingemansemark.bsky ‘s 2012 article) were more diachronically stable. #DiLegMa3 (2/2)
A man presents a talk in front of some red drapes and a window.
Kaijun Sheng “Legacy materials in Shanghainese and their contribution to the study of ideophones” The first substantial lexical documentation of Shanghainese was published in 1894/6 by Paul Rabouin. Kaijun Sheng collected ideophones from Rabouin’s dictionary as older Shanghainese #DiLegMa3 (1/2)
and wide. This project focuses on their work making a a sustainable, integrated, interactive archive for the materials—a fraught and invaluable enterprise! #DiLegMa3 (2/2)
A man and a woman present a talk in a fancy room. On a screen is an image of a woman with a video camera.
Aynur Kadir and @markturin.bsky.social : “Designing an archive at a distance” on stewardship and mobilization of multi-script Uyghur collections. Presents a cultural archive orbiting around imprisoned scholar Rahile Dawut’s cultural documentation. #DiLegMa3 (1/2)
