Doctoral Dissertation Research: Documentation of Mehek (NUX)

博士论文研究：Mehek 文档 (NUX)

• 批准号: 1263554
• 负责人: Matthew Dryer
• 金额: $ 1.31万
• 依托单位: SUNY at Buffalo
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-07-01 至 2014-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1263554&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Documentation; Mehek

The primary goal of the project involves linguistic field work on Mehek (nux), an endangered language in the Tama branch of the Sepik family. It is spoken in several villages, the primary of which is Nuku, in Sandaun Province in northwest Papua New Guinea. Adam Hatfield will collect data primarily via direct note-taking and transcription of recorded stories from consultant speech as well as making corrections to data which has already been collected. The project goal is to produce a grammar and dictionary of the language. The latter will, in particular, be utilized directly by the community members in both teaching children and as a reference for adults. In addition to providing a dictionary, community members have requested that many of their traditional stories be written and translated into both English and Tok Pisin (the national language of Papua New Guinea). Many linguists estimate that more than half the languages currently spoken in the world will be extinct by the end of this century. New Guinea is a unique linguistic area in that one fifth of the languages of the world (approximately 1200 out of about 6000, a more conservative estimate than is often cited) are spoken there. But in many areas of Papua New Guinea, the creole Tok Pisin is rapidly replacing the original vernacular languages. For Mehek, the youngest children no longer speak the vernacular language. And since the reasons why Tok Pisin is taking over so rapidly in this part of Papua New Guinea apply equally well to most areas of the country, it may well be the case that there are many languages in the country that are no longer spoken by young children, hence the need to document, at least to some extent, as many languages of New Guinea as possible as soon as possible.

该项目的主要目标包括对Mehek （nux）的语言实地工作，Mehek是Sepik家族Tama分支的一种濒危语言。它在巴布亚新几内亚西北部桑顿省的几个村庄中使用，其中最主要的是努库。Adam Hatfield将主要通过直接记笔记和抄录顾问演讲中的记录故事来收集数据，并对已经收集到的数据进行更正。该项目的目标是生成该语言的语法和字典。特别是后者将被社区成员直接用于教育儿童和作为成年人的参考。除了提供字典外，社区成员还要求将他们的许多传统故事写下来，并翻译成英语和托克比辛语（巴布亚新几内亚的国语）。许多语言学家估计，到本世纪末，世界上目前使用的语言中有一半以上将灭绝。新几内亚是一个独特的语言地区，因为世界上五分之一的语言（大约6000种语言中大约1200种，这是一个比经常引用的更保守的估计）在那里使用。但在巴布亚新几内亚的许多地区，克里奥尔语正在迅速取代原来的当地语言。对于Mehek来说，最小的孩子不再说当地的语言。由于托克皮辛语在巴布亚新几内亚这一地区如此迅速流行的原因同样适用于该国的大多数地区，因此很可能是该国有许多语言不再被幼儿使用，因此有必要尽可能多地记录新几内亚的语言，至少在某种程度上。