Survey updates

September 5, 2019

Zach O'Hagan sends the following report from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages:

If you have questions about the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages and its digital catalog the California Language Archive (CLA), don't hesitate to email us at scoil-ling@berkeley.edu, or talk to Andrew Garrett (Director), Ronald Sprouse (IT), or Zachary O'Hagan (GSR). We collect analog and digital materials on languages of the Americas, as well as from all Berkeley-affiliated researchers, irrespective of region of the world. Our holdings include over 450 collections, with approximately 19,000 items and 32,500 digital files, consisting of paper materials (field notes, file slips, etc.), audio and video recordings, photographs, a stuffed American goldfinch, and more! Much of it is born-digital or has been digitized. You can take the initiative with your own archiving, using our pre-archive interface. Here are some other news items since we last reported in April.

  • The Survey/CLA is now on Instagram! Follow us @surveycla. Our account profiles the speakers of indigenous languages represented in our collections. (You can also follow us on Facebook at Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, where announce new collections and other pertinent news.)
  • We hosted visits to the archive from people representing Karuk, Nez Perce, Northern Paiute, Pomo, Salinan, and Washo language groups.
  • We rescued from a book giveaway a reel-to-reel tape from the graduate linguistic field methods course on Mongolian taught in 1967-1968 by Karl Zimmer (1927-2019). The recording was produced in what is now the Berkeley Language Center Recording Studio. If you can help us identify the speaker of Mongolian heard on the recording, please email us at scoil-ling@berkeley.edu.
  • We made public three short recordings of Newari (Tibeto-Burman; Nepal) from Mary Haas's 1961-1962 field methods course with speaker Sushila Joshi.
  • Emily Clem (PhD 2019) archived audio recordings and slides from her dissertation defense from May 2019, available here.
  • We accessioned the collection Time-aligned Annotations of Bodega Miwok Sound Recordings (Miwokan; CA). These annotations, transcription with glossing, were made in ELAN by Andrew Cowell (CU Boulder) based on Catherine Callaghan's (PhD 1963) recordings of the language with speaker Sarah Ballard (1881-1978) in 1960.
  • We accessioned a collection of sound recordings and field notes from the LSA Linguistic Institute's field methods course on Kashaya (Pomoan; CA), taught by Pamela Munro (UCLA) at Berkeley 10 years ago. The language consultant was Anita Silva.
  • We accessioned a collection of four recordings (with transcription) of lexical elicitation of Bodega Miwok, made by Richard Applegate (PhD 1972) with Sarah Ballard in 1974.
  • We digitized and made public new materials related to Nez Perce (Sahaptian; northwest US). Most are digital images of Series 2 and Series 4 of the Haruo Aoki Papers on the Nez Perce Language, consisting of the original transcriptions, translations, and annotations of the stories that feature in Aoki and Walker's (1989) "Nez Perce Oral Narratives." Also available are Marcus Ware's (1959) recordings with speaker Corbett Lawyer, which include lists of words, phrases, and sentences.
  • Kelsey Neely (PhD 2019) archived audio and video recordings and slides from her dissertation defense from October 2018, available here. She also added 50 ELAN annotation files (transcription with Spanish translation) to her collection Materials of the Yaminawa Documentation Project.