Interview

Documenting fishing records and wet placenames around Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, South Australia

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A definition of history I heard recently is that it is the discipline concerned with the writing of the science of change in past events and human affairs. Born in South Australia, I am surrounded by documentable change and evidence of previous happenings.

This article considers the fishing ground names — wet placenames — located offshore to the north from Penneshaw and American River as local Kangaroo Island ephemera and historical capital of parochial importance.

I chose Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, in 2009 as a comparative island case study for my toponymic research toward my PhD in linguistics at the University of Adelaide. Dudley Peninsula has a colourful and varied placenaming history. My brief was simple: compare the placename data … ↪

Forced “yes” or “no” response as an interview format

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Many interviewers may pursue a “clear response” in political interviews by trying to enforce an interviewee to respond with either yes or no. Such yes-no-rounds are well established in Danish political interviews, and already on the first day of the current election, the second yes-no-round took place (as the prime minister had been interviewed with one the day before).

Yes-no-rounds build on the idea that politicians have difficulty providing a “clear” answer to questions, and that a response token like yes or no (Danish: ja and nej) is a “clear” answer. The actual worth is slightly more complex however, and both the interviewer and interviewee uses a number of resources to establish and circumvent the requirements of a … ↪

Revolution in Yiddish teaching: The New Yiddish Textbook In eynem

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It was nothing less than a revolution that hit the world of Yiddish teaching this summer, when the multimedia Yiddish textbook In eynem (White Goat Press, 2020) was published. For many years, Yiddish students have been studying the language with Uriel Weinreich’s College Yiddish from 1949, or with Selva Zucker’s Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature and Culture from 1995.

Now, Yiddish students and teachers have a more up-to-date alternative. In eynem is a monumental textbook, counting 800 pages (split up in two volumes), with beautifully illustrated dialogues, word explanations, exercises and texts about Jewish culture. It features a goldmine of material for the first two years of Yiddish studies. A dedicated website offers even more teaching material, e.g. … ↪

The funeral of a language: The burial of Tevfik Esenç and the Ubykh language

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In June 2018, I (Peter Bakker) interviewed Ole Stig Andersen about the day he attended the funeral of Tevfik Esenç, the last man to allegedly speak the Ubykh language. It was October 7, 1992, 26 years earlier, that the funeral had taken place. In fact, Ole Stig Andersen had wanted to write himself about this funeral of a man and his language for Lingoblog.dk, and he wanted a text in at least three languages: Danish, English, Turkish. The text would have to be published together with the unique pictures he took of the funeral, and that have never been published or shown before.

He wanted to write no fewer than four articles in this connection: about Caucasian languages, about Caucasian … ↪

Reviving an indigenous language: an interview with Daniel Huircapán

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In August this year I read an article in the Argentinian newspaper Página 12 about the National Conference of Indigenous Languages held in Argentina. Unfortunately, the article was quite lacking in information about the Conference itself and about the linguistic work done by Daniel Huircapán, who was mentioned in the article. I thought this was too bad, because his work sounded very interesting – so I decided to contact him myself by email. On the 3rd of September 2019 I did a Skype interview with Daniel Huircapán who is a member of the Günün a Küna indigenous community in Argentina. He is one among a small group of people (mostly natives) who since 2007 have immersed themselves in the … ↪