http://www.arts.adelaide.edu.au/humanities/people/linguistics/ramery.html accessed on 06/27/07
Dr Rob Amery Lecturer
Room Napier Building, Room 910 Phone 8303 3924
Email robert.amery@adelaide.edu.au
Dr Rob Amery Marni ninna budni! (Welcome!)
This is Rob Amery's homepage at the University of Adelaide. My main research focus is Australian Indigenous languages, their maintenance and revival. I began working in Aboriginal communities in 1980 in health, first as a nurse and then as an Aboriginal Health Worker Educator. I became involved in education issues when I went to Yirrkala, North East Arnhemland in 1985 where I researched Dhuwaya, a new koine variety of Yolngu Matha spoken by the younger generation, and implications for the Gumatj-English bilingual education program in operation within the school.
In 1993 - 1994 I served as Project Officer for the innovative Australian Indigenous Languages Framework (AILF) project which introduced Indigenous languages into senior secondary studies in accredited programs for the first time in Australia's history. Go to
http://www.ssabsa.sa.edu.au/language/subjects.htm and
http://www.ssabsa.sa.edu.au/support/language/aulg/aulg-menu.htm
Over the last two decades I have been working with the Indigenous languages of Adelaide and surrounds, especially Kaurna, the language of the Adelaide Plains. The language is being re-learnt on the basis of 19th century materials and is beginning to be used again for a range of purposes. I have worked closely with the Kaurna community, the Department of Education and Children's Services (DECS), Kaurna Plains School and other institutions to implement Kaurna language programs. I completed my PhD on the reclamation of Kaurna in June 1998
Dorothea Hoffmann Page 131 of 164 (see publications). In 2002 we established Kaurna Warra Pintyandi (KWP) to monitor and further the development of the Kaurna language. Go to http://www.adelaide.edu.au/kwp.
Awards
In 2007, Dr Rob Amery was awarded a UNESCO Certificate of Achievement for his work in Linguistics. Specifically, his award was in recognition of "the documentation both of the Kaurna language and aspects of the traditions of the Kaurna Plains people and the development of language revival resources".
Research Interests
Kaurna Language and Linguistics (Kaurna is the original language of Adelaide and the Adelaide Plains.
Language Reclamation and the Formulaic Method.
Indigenous Languages in Schools.
Language Planning and Language Revival.
Language Modernisation and Development.
Linguistic Vitality.
Endangered Languages.
Linguistics and Health (communicating Western health concepts in Indigenous languages).
Teaching
I teach the following courses:
LING 2009/3009 Kaurna Language &
Language Ecology LING 1101 Foundations of Linguistics
LING 2007/3007 Australian Indigenous Languages
LING 1102 Language & the Ethnography of Communication
LING 2030/3030 Language &
Communication Planning
LING 2012/3012 Phonology (new course in S1 2007)
conference Kaurna Warra Pintyandi (KWP)
Senior Secondary Assessment Board of
South Australia Kaurna Plains School
School of Languages (host the Kaurna
program, Warriparinga) Warriparinga
Publications
A list of recent publications and other details of my work.
Dorothea Hoffmann Page 132 of 164 XI.2. Internet Source Number 2
http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/elac/2007/02/diyari_spoken_and_written_lang_1.html accessed 27/08/07
Diyari spoken and written language: Guest blogger Peter Austin by Jane Simpson
7 February, 2007
In a previous posting “Modern Grammar from nineteenth century mission materials” Jane Simpson refers to the 2005 University of Adelaide doctoral dissertation, The language of the chosen view: the first phase of graphization of Dieri by Hermannsburg Missionaries, Lake Killalpaninna 1867-80 by Heidi Kneebone who, she says “takes linguists to task for NOT looking at early grammars of the languages they're working on”.
Now I don‟t have a copy of this dissertation and only had a few hours in Canberra recently to skim through a copy lent to me by Luise Hercus. I was impressed by the historical work Kneebone had done with Lutheran sources (some written in an old German handwriting that is incredibly difficult to read, at least for me) and how she turned up materials written in Diyari by native speakers that I had not seen before. But since the thesis makes claims about my own research on Diyari, spoken in northern South Australia, and appears to suggest that the language I recorded thirty years ago from the last generation of fluent speakers was in part a missionary creation, I would like to take this opportunity to make a couple of points.
Firstly, I did look at many of the Lutheran missionary documents, including all the Killalpaninna mission publications, and gave an assessment of them in a chapter in my thesis which was completed in 1978 (it is not referenced in Kneebone‟s dissertation, and the relevant chapter was not included for reasons of space in my 1981 published grammar that she did look at). Secondly, there is no reason to believe that spoken Diyari used by the people I studied with in 1974-78 was created by the German missionaries (a view incidentally also promulgated in the 19th century by Trooper Samuel Gason, who spent years at Mirra Mitta and studied Diyari, publishing some quite detailed materials in the Curr 1886 collection).
Gavan Breen and I have worked on Ngamini, spoken next door to Diyari and closely related to it – this language shows highly similar grammatical structures to Diyari (including the complex switch-reference system of cross-clausal reference – if the Lutherans invented that then I am truly impressed!). Reuther recorded vocabulary in Ngamini (along with several other eastern Lake Eyre languages) but surely no-one would claim that the missionaries
“invented Ngamini”. It follows then that they didn‟t invent spoken Diyari.
The written genre of Diyari is a different kettle of fish – clearly here the missionaries did have a role in creating the orthography and written style, especially as represented in letters and postcards that were written by Diyari native speakers even as late as the 1950‟s (as evidenced by letters that ended up in the possession of the late Ronald Berndt which he gave me access to in 1978). I have published a little on this topic [1], though there is more to be said. In addition to the extensive work of Reuther that Jane suggests should be taken into account, there is a bulky manuscript translation of the Old Testament into Diyari dating from
© 2007 The University of Adelaide Last Modified 14/08/2007 M&SC CRICOS Provider Number 00123M
Dorothea Hoffmann Page 133 of 164 around 1915 that deserves careful study. It shows some interesting and consistent differences in transcription and structure from the earlier missionary materials that Kneebone used.
On the general issue of modern linguists using older sources, the late Terry Crowley and I discussed in print (in Nick Thieberger‟s edited collection Paper and Talk) how careful use of older materials can be helpful in reconstituting data that can be compared to and/or supplement materials from contemporary speakers or semi-speakers. John Giacon has done this rather successfully with the Gamilaraay language programme.
The issues Jane raises at the end of her post about research and publication methods for pre-modern sources are indeed important ones. Bill McGregor has adopted a particular solution in the monumental editing job he did on Nekes and Worms' Australian Languages recently published by Mouton de Gruyter. As Bill says (on pages 33-34):
"Revisions to the text of Australian Languages are primarily in style and format rather than content. I have refrained as far as possible from interfering with the content except in the caser of obvious inadvertent errors … It is not my editorial duty to check every factual claim, to modernise the terminology, or correct the spellings of words in Aboriginal languages;
however in cases where I believe the authors to have erred, an explanatory endnote is appended. Doubtless there are places where the transcriptions of words and sentences are wrong (although they are on the whole reasonable accurate). I have not attempted to retranscribe the words in modern practical orthographies accepted by speakers, communities, or schools. On the other hand, I have adopted the policy of using, wherever possible, the currently accepted spellings of the language names”
Bill also mentions that he reorganised lists and paradigms into more readable tables, corrected the authors‟ non-native English, and made other cosmetic changes to increase the readability of the resulting text. However, he is concerned to note (on page 35) that:
“These editorial decisions are of course subjective, and at times I may have over-stepped the bounds of interference laid out above, in the interests of producing a comprehensible piece of writing.”
This trade off between faithfulness to the original and comprehensibility is an interesting issue to explore in more depth.