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COOL9 and the Workshop on Identifying Codes for Languages

(February 2013) SIL linguists will be among those presenting research at two February events hosted by the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, at the Newcastle Museum.

9th Conference On Oceanic Linguistics

Scholars from around the world will explore the richness of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family during the 9th Conference on Oceanic Linguistics (COOL9), 4-8 February. The conference is being hosted by the Faculty of Education and Arts and the Endangered Languages Documentation, Theory and Application Research Group of the University of Newcastle.

More than five hundred languages belong to the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family. According to conference organizers, “These languages show a high degree of linguistic diversity and are of considerable scientific significance, and many are highly endangered. The COOL conference series is dedicated to research on Oceanic languages, and their multifaceted linguistic, social, cultural and historical contexts.”

SIL presentations include:

  • Karen Ashley: “Semantic control of the short transitive suffix -i in Sa'a” and “Unmasking the Sa'a Thematic Consonants” (co-authored with James Ashley)
  • Dr. Brenda H. Boerger: “A pesky particle in Natügu: How many (–/=)ngö(-/=) particles are there?"
  • Joanna Frampton: "Maisin medial verbs revisited”
  • Robert Petterson: "The discourse functions of the four particles ma, na, da, and bo in Ghayavi written narrative"
  • Kevin Salisbury and Mary Salisbury: “Lexical evidence for contact between Micronesia and Pukapuka”
  • Mary Salisbury: “Pukapukan, East Polynesian and the Outliers: A response to Pila Wilson’s Whence the East Polynesians?”

Workshop on Identifying Codes for Languages

Following COOL9 will be an event focused on an important issue in global language research: the Workshop on Identifying Codes for Languages. SIL is the current Registration Authority for ISO 639-3, a code that aims to define three-letter identifiers for all known human languages. Dr. Gary Simons, SIL’s Chief Research Officer, will be a keynote speaker. His presentation is entitled, “ISO 639-3: Where we are and how we got there.” Boerger will present another paper at the workshop entitled “Code splitting in ISO 639.”1

 

 

1This presentation is based on an article which was recently published in the journal Language and Linguistics in Melanesia, co-authored by Boerger and her former student Gabrielle Zimmerman, a 2009 linguistics graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington.

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