Woohoo!
I finished my honours application today, after being slightly scared but mostly enthused by a meeting with John Bradley about working on the Yanyuwa language for honours next year. I’ll still be working with Simon Musgrave as my supervisor, but John will be helping me by providing his data and personal insights, so it’s a team effort!
The question isn’t set in concrete (and most likely won’t be for a long while yet) but the outline is that I’ll be looking at the kinship system of the language, and looking at what is lost as the language becomes more extremely endangered. In the case of Yanyuwa, the majority of the speakers have unfortunately been lost within the past 12 months, and the language is almost certainly going to have no fluent native speakers within the next decade. I’ll be working with John Bradley and the various resources he has available on the language including other work done by a missionary linguist Jean Kirton from the 60s onwards. The long and short of all this is that there is a lot of information on the langauge, and plenty to be written on. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the kinship system in Yanyuwa is insanely complicated, even for an Australian indigenous language. What it also means is reading. Lots of reading. Actually I should probably be doing some of that now…
On top of the fun of getting honours stuff happening (I’m told there’s many-a-PhD-thesis to be had from the data in John’s collection, too!) I also got my semester results back tonight. It’s all happening today!
Anyway, HDs all ’round this semester, so no complaints there. That certainly won’t hurt my chances of getting into honours next year (not that that was ever going to be a problem, from what I’ve heard they pretty much don’t knock anybody who has grades above the cut-off point – 70% average – back).
Anyway, now that this post has made me sound lovely and egocentric, I’m going to leave it there.
Oh. And I need to make a layout for this thing. Remind me.