Wesley dos Santos archived audio recordings of 16 stories in Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and Karipuna (Tupí-Guaraní; Brazil), based on fieldwork in 2017 and 2018. Three stories come with additional video recordings, like this one, "The Alligator Who Wanted to Eat a Monkey."
In collaboration with the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), we digitized a circa 1946 home film belonging to Mary R. Haas, founding member of our department and first director of the Survey. The film was recorded at 1435 Arch St., Berkeley, and in downtown, and includes Prof. Haas's husband Heng Subhanka. There's footage of tea, laundry-hanging, and flower-watering in the back yard, a meal in the dining room, dish-washing in the kitchen, a warm hearth, shots of downtown Berkeley at night, and an adorable cat!
Amalia Skilton's dissertation defense from March 22 is available to be listened to, with accompanying slides, video clip, and still image. We hope to record and make accessible more defenses in the future!
William Sturtevant's (BA 1949, Berkeley) 1951 recordings of Creek-Seminole (Muskogean; Oklahoma, Florida) have been made unrestricted.
Last weekend was a busy one for Berkeley linguists, with department members at conferences in Dwinelle Hall dedicated to Celtic and Amazonian languages as well as attending conferences in other locations!
Numerous Berkeley attendees at the Symposium on Amazonian Languages (SAL III)
This coming week in Helsinki, postdoc Bernat Bardagil Mas will present a talk titled Rethinking the documentation trilogy in endangered language research at a conference called Descriptive grammars and typology. Congrats, Bernat!
Nicholas Rolle (PhD 2018) archived 28 file bundles of sound recordings and field notes in two collections related to Izon and Kalabari (Ijaw; Nigeria), based on fieldwork in Port Harcourt in July and August 2017. A focus of these elicitation sessions is tone, especially grammatical tone. Now a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Program in Linguistics at Princeton University, Dr. Rolle's recent dissertation, Grammatical Tone: Typology and Theory, can be found here. An accomplished Africanist, NikRo is also a budding Amazonianist, having collaborated with Marine Vuillermet, a postdoc in this department in 2013 and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (Lyon), on the morphologically conditioned assignment of accent in Ese Ejja (Takanan; Peru, Bolivia).
William Sturtevant's (BA 1949, Berkeley) 1951 recordings of Mikasuki (Muskogean; Florida) have been made unrestricted.
The journal Language Documentation & Conservation has recently released a special publication entitled Reflections on Language Documentation: 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998, including three papers by faculty or alumni:
Over 60 hours of audio recordings and almost 600 pages of field notes of Romani (Indo-European), dating from 1964 to 1972 and originally produced by Guy Tyler in collaboration with 36 different consultants, were accessioned in 27 file bundles.
Julia Nee archived 2 file bundles of storybooks in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec (Otomanguean; Oaxaca): Beniit con xpejigan ("Benita and Her Balloons") and images of one based on Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
A text in Nez Perce (Sahaptian; Idaho), "Gusty Wind and Sunshine," from the papers of Hans Jørgen Uldall, affiliated with Berkeley in the early 1930s, was scanned and made public.
Tessa Scott archived 34 file bundles related to Ndengeleko (Bantu; Tanzania), from her fieldwork in 2017 and 2018. The audio recordings consist primarily of elicitation (accompanied by scanned and typed field notes), with four short texts and discussions with speakers of consent for the project.
George Kamau (BA 1962) was discovered to be the language consultant for Prof. William Shipley's winter-spring 1962 field methods course on Kikuyu (Bantu; Kenya), then listed as 220B "Linguistics Laboratory." His recordings are items 002-005 here. In 1959 Mr. Kamau was part of the first cohort of 81 Kenyans brought from Nairobi to various universities in the US as part of a series of airlifts sponsored by the African American Student Foundation. The goal was to educate a generation of young Kenyans for post-British rule. Barack Obama, Sr. was part of the same cohort.
Last week it was reported that Prof. Wallace Chafe, at Berkeley from 1962 to 1986, passed away on February 3. Recordings from the second field methods course he taught here, on Dakota (Siouan; US) in fall-winter 1963-4, are items 012 and 013 here.
