This is the first edition and it has a pretty basic set of chapters which are geared primarily towards the Canadian learner. It also looks useful for people trying to self-teach linguistics because it’s freely available online and all the chapters are designed to work together, which is so often an issue when trying to cobble together various online resources.
Since it’s open access, hopefully it will continue expanding to provide intro chapters for more subfields and with more international options. Even if that ends up creating a book that’s too comprehensive to be used in full by any single intro course, it’s always great to have more options!
“Why do Greek, Czech, Hungarian, and Swedish, with their 8 to 13 million speakers, have Google Translate support and robust Wikipedia presences, while languages the same size or larger, like Bhojpuri (51 million), Fula (24 million), Sylheti (11 million), Quechua (9 million), and Kirundi (9 million) languish in technological obscurity? Swedish, Greek, Hungarian, and Czech have a wealth of language resources, created one human at a time over centuries. They’re the languages of entire nation-states, with national TV and radio recordings that can be used as the foundation for text-to-speech models. Their speakers have the kind of disposable income that makes media companies translate popular novels and subtitle foreign movies and TV shows. They’re found in countries that tech companies imagine their customers might be living in or might at least visit on holiday, meaning it’s worth localizing interfaces and adding them as translation options. They have regularized spelling systems and dictionaries that can be rolled into spellcheckers and predictive text models. They have highly literate speakers with internet access who can contribute to projects like Wikipedia. (Speakers who can even, in the case of Swedish, create a bot to automatically make basic Wikipedia articles for rivers, mountains, and other natural features.) Language resources don’t just appear. People have to decide to create them, and those people need to be fed and watered and educated and housed and supported, whether that’s by governments or by companies or by the kind of personal wealth that lets individuals take on time-consuming intellectual hobbies. Creating parallel corpora and other language resources takes years, if it happens at all, and cost tens of millions of dollars per language.”
A popular expression in Nepal is a fatalistically resigned ke garne? ‘what to do?’ The government office is closed, ke garne? The bus is running late, ke garne? When people say this, they also bring their palms up and rotate them inwards, with their thumb and index finger extended and the other fingers bunched in.
This gesture doesn’t just occur with this phrase, it turns up in all kinds of question-asking contexts, across the wider region of India-Nepal-Pakistan and beyond. This has been noted anecdotally before, and in this new paper for the journal Gesture, I look at the gesture and its use in detail for the first time. I’m very excited about this publication because it’s my first publication on gesture in Syuba, and my first publication in Gesture (if the name alone doesn’t give it away, it’s the journal in this field!).
(GIF from SUY-141022-03, Sangbu Syuba gesturing while he says ‘what do we say?’)
The data are archived with Paradisec, and I made the clips specifically with the rotated palms tokens available through FigShare.
You can view the abstract on the journal website, and download the full text if you have institutional access. If you don’t, but you’d like to read the article, you can contact me for a pre-publication copy.
I’m also very excited that the paper has been included in a major review paper Kensy Cooperrider by Natasha Abner and Susan
Goldin-Meadow on ‘the palm up puzzle’.
Abstract
In this paper I examine the use of
the ‘rotated palms’ gesture family among speakers of Syuba (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal),
as recorded in a video corpus
documenting this language. In this family of gestures one or both forearms are rotated to a supine
(‘palm up’) position, each hand with thumb and forefinger extended and the
other fingers, in varying degrees, flexed toward the palm. When used
independently of speech this gesture tends to be performed in a relatively
consistent manner, and is recognised as an interrogative gesture throughout
India and Nepal. In this use it can be considered an emblem. When used with
speech it shows more variation, but can still be used to indicate the interrogative
nature of what is said, even when the speech may not indicate interrogativity
in its linguistic construction. I analyse the form and function of this
gesture in Syuba and argue that there are a number distinct functions relating
to interrogativity. This can therefore be considered as a family of gestures.
This research lays the groundwork for better understand of this common family
of gestures across the South Asian area, and beyond.
Reference
Gawne, Lauren. 2018. Contexts of use of a rotated palms gesture among Syuba (Kagate) speakers in Nepal. Gesture 17(1): 37–64. [Abstract]
Cooperrider, Kensy, Natasha Abner & Susan
Goldin-Meadow. 2018. The palm-up puzzle: Meanings and origins of a
widespread form in gesture and sign. Frontiers in Communication 3: 23.
doi: 10.3389/fcomm.
Many small linguistic communities are located on islands and coastlines vulnerable to hurricanes and a rise in sea levels. Other communities are settled on lands where increases in temperature and fluctuations in precipitation can threaten traditional farming and fishing practices.
These changes will force communities to relocate, creating climate change refugees. The resultant dispersal of people will lead to the splintering of linguistic communities and increased contact with other languages. These changes will place additional pressures on languages that are already struggling to survive.
