The value of historical resources in Language Documentation | SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2022-12-09

Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change.

SOAS Linguistics Seminar
The value of historical resources in Language Documentation and Description: Case Studies from the Enggano Project

Charlotte Hemmings
University of Oxford

Abstract: This seminar discusses the value and limitations of historical resources in the context of Language Documentation and Description using case studies from the Enggano Project, an ongoing project to document the Enggano language, spoken on Enggano Island, off the south coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Perhaps unusually for an endangered, minority language, Enggano has a rich history of documentation, with wordlists and texts going back to the 19th century (e.g. Helfrich 1916) as well as a systematic documentation conducted in the 1930s by Hans Kähler that comprises a grammar sketch (Kähler 1940), a text collection (Kähler 1955, 1957, 1958, 1960a, b, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1975) and a dictionary (Kähler 1987). In this seminar, I present examples of how these historical materials have helped in the description of contemporary Enggano morphosyntax, as well as facilitating analysis of both language-internal and contact induced change. Consequently, despite the limitations of historical materials, I will argue that they can be of great value to language documentation projects, and in this way contribute to linguistic theory and typology as well.

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7417874