3 hours in the office

It’s 3 hours into the first day back at the office. It’s actually kind of nice to be back here, getting on with work. The 5 days away in Madang were good though. I mainly stayed in the guesthouse, read, and watched cricket: South Africa v. Australia. It was really nice to watch live sport, something I haven't done for a long time, especially as the underdogs won.

But, back to work. Because Wycliffe’s work is linguistically based, we’re encouraged to publish as much as possible. We have access to lots and lots of linguistic data, from surveys like the ones I do and from Bible translation work, and it’s good to get the information “out there” for other interested parties. This morning I’ve submitted a paper to a linguistic journal. I submitted it a while back and the editor (rightly) asked for it to be reworked. A linguist who works in an office opposite mine helped a lot with reshaping it and we got it finished this morning. We’ll see what the editor says this time. The paper is basically about how we try to consider the people's view of language boundaries and language names rather than imposing western "outsider" categories. Here’s the abstract:

This article is a response to the criticisms made by Mühlhäusler (2006) of the methods used by linguists in assigning language names and boundaries. Referring especially to Papua New Guinea, he claims that, “the names and boundaries of languages reflect expatriate practices, not local knowledge” because “linguists have largely ignored indigenous metalinguistic views.” However Mühlhäusler’s assertions do not reflect current realities on the field. By focusing on an analysis of data collected during the surveys of the Sos Kundi (2007) and Ambakich (2003) languages, this paper summarizes how the “indigenous metalinguistic view” has been, and is still, a key part of language surveys and other linguistic work in Papua New Guinea.

For the rest of the day I’m going to edit survey reports for publication on the internet, on Wycliffe’s own website. I do enjoy doing that. Oh, and I need to do a bit of preparation for a survey we’re doing to finish off later on this month – the Benabena survey that didn’t get finished because of Bonnie’s infected leg. We have a new surveyor here: Sara Van Cott! She's been here for a few weeks, is from the States, and that’ll be her first survey. I’m sure she’ll be glad to get out of the office and out to the villages.

Well, hope your Christmas and New Year were good. By the way, the lack of photos is because my camera died. A replacement should be coming soon.