The Language of Bardi (BCJ) Precontact Narratives

直到20世纪60年代，对澳大利亚土著语言的详细语言学实地调查才真正开始。为数不多的早期资料来源之一是格哈特·拉维斯（Gerhardt Laves）的手稿集，这位美国人于1928年前往澳大利亚，花了大约18个月的时间对六种语言进行语言学研究。其中一种语言，巴迪语，现在在澳大利亚西北部大约有25位老年人使用。拉维斯的巴迪记录是非凡的。它们是在欧洲人定居的全面影响导致澳大利亚西北部语言大量流失之前写的，记录了一种语言和文化，自那以后发生了重大变化。虽然文本清晰可辨，语言表达准确，但如果没有出色的视力和对巴迪的良好了解，这些材料很难阅读。这个由美国国家科学基金会资助的项目将汇集语言学家和巴迪语社区成员组成的团队，在克莱尔·鲍恩博士的指导下，对文本进行研究，制作一个注释版。语言学家将把这些文本数字化，进行文字处理，并根据Laves的笔记和Bowern博士的语言知识提供粗略的翻译。然后，他们将与说巴迪语的人一起完善翻译，讨论巴迪语的语法，并找出故事的背景。结果将是一本包含翻译、注释和讨论的教科书。这是一个重要的项目，在语言学和文化上，对巴迪人，语言学家，更广泛的科学。从语言学上讲，《古兰经》的文本代表了巴迪最早准确记录的材料，初步工作表明，在过去的一百年里，语言发生了微妙而又无数的变化。我们对像这样的小型语言社区的变化和变化知之甚少，而在澳大利亚，巴迪的材料提供了一个难得的机会，可以获得关于语言变化的准确纵向信息。这反过来又允许研究具有非常复杂的屈折变化的语言的变化，这在语言学中既没有得到充分的研究，又具有广泛的相关性。在文化上，文本是非常重要的。它们提供了有关接触前的传统法律、神话和日常社会交往的信息，是一种不再实践的生活方式的非常详细的记录。这些知识大部分仍由巴尔迪社区最年长的人掌握，但没有被写下来，在描述和解释拉维斯材料中的事件是研究接触前文化的绝佳机会。最后，这些文本本身是巴迪人自身重要的语言学习和文化资源，这些材料的归还是非常重要的。这些材料可能会在未来的语言复兴项目中占据重要地位。由于世界上如此多的语言遗产处于危险之中，该项目为如何利用早期材料造福当地社区和科学提供了一个模型。

Detailed linguistic fieldwork on the Indigenous languages of Australia did not begin in earnest until the 1960s. One of the few earlier sources is the manuscript collection of Gerhardt Laves, an American who went to Australia in 1928 and spent approximately 18 months doing linguistic research on six languages. One of them, Bardi, is now spoken by approximately 25 elderly people in northwestern Australia. Laves' Bardi records are extraordinary. They were written at a time before the full impact of European settlement had caused extensive language loss in Australia's North-West and record a language and culture which has since changed significantly. Although the texts are legible and the language accurately represented, the materials are very difficult to read without excellent eyesight and a good knowledge of Bardi. This NSF-funded project will bring together a team of linguists and Bardi community members to work on the texts to produce an annotated edition, under the direction of Dr Claire Bowern. The linguists will digitize the texts, word process them, and provide rough translations on the basis of Laves' notes and the Dr Bowern's knowledge of the language. They will then work with Bardi speakers to refine the translations, discuss the grammar of the Bardi language, and work out the context of the stories. The result will be a book of the texts, with translations, annotations, and discussion.This is an important project, linguistically and culturally, for Bardi people, linguists, and for science more generally. Linguistically, the Laves texts represent the earliest accurately recorded materials for Bardi, and preliminary work indicates that there have been subtle but numerous changes in the language over the last hundred years. We know little about variation and change in small linguistic communities like this, and within Australia the Bardi materials provide a rare opportunity to get accurate longitudinal information about language change. This in turn allows the study of change in languages with very complex inflection, which is both understudied and of wide relevance in linguistics. Culturally, the texts are very important. They provide information about pre-contact traditional law, mythology and everyday social interaction, and are a very detailed record of a way of life no longer practiced. Most of this knowledge is still held by the oldest people in the Bardi community but has not been written down, and work on describing and explicating the events in the Laves materials is a wonderful opportunity to study pre-contact culture. Finally, the texts themselves are an important language learning and cultural resource for Bardi people themselves, and repatriation of these materials is very important. The materials will likely figure prominently in future language revitalization programs. With so much of the world's linguistic heritage in danger, this project provides a model of how early materials may be used to benefit both local communities and science.