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46-576: The Navajo Language Academy grow out of workshops by Kenneth L. Hale in the 1970 and was proposed as a result of the Second Navajo Orthography Conference in 1978. It consists of Navajo linguists and other interested people. It supports scientific research on the Navajo language and on teaching Navajo people, especially language teachers, how to carry out linguistic research and to use existing reference materials. This focus

92-545: A bull in the 1952 Tucson Rodeo was used as stock footage and is included in the film Arena . He was a student at the University of Arizona from 1952 and obtained his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington in 1959 (thesis A Papago grammar ). He taught at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1961-63 and at the University of Arizona, Tucson in 1963-66. From 1967 he held a sequence of appointments at

138-687: A consonant inventory nearly identical to those of Warndarrang and Alawa. There are two additional phonemes: the interdental / n̪ / and / l̪ / which occur only in a few flora-fauna terms, and are likely loanwords from either Nunggubuyu or Yanyuwa , both of which languages use these phonemes frequently. With the interdentals excepted, the Marra consonants consist of a stop and a nasal in each of five places of articulation with two laterals , two rhotics , and two semivowels . A standard orthography has been developed over several years of work with Diwurruwurru-Jaru Aboriginal Corporation (also known as

184-488: A hundred million native speakers or only ten, is equally likely to yield linguistic insight. Hale was also known as a champion of the speakers of minority languages, and not just of their languages, for which his MIT colleague Noam Chomsky called him "a voice for the voiceless". In 1994, Hale served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America . At the society's annual meeting in 1995, Hale delivered

230-484: A liquid, a noncoronal, and any other consonant. Examples of this include gurralgmaninja , " kookaburra ", and bulnggan , "extinguished fire". Many double-consonant clusters can occur. In segments that are repeated in a word – either by reduplication or by chance morphology – the second stop is often lenited into a semivowel or lost altogether. /j/ and /ʈ/ will become /y/, /b/ will become /w/, and /g/ will either become /w/ or Ø. This lenition can optionally occur at

276-706: A nominative and non-nominative form. They are generally formed by the prefixes ni- MSG , ngi- FSG , n-gi- NEUT , wirr- or warra- DU , and wil- or wila- PL for the nominative or na- MSG , ya- FSG , nya- NEUT , wirri- DU , and wili- PL for the non-nominative and the suffixes -nya (non-predicative proximate), -n-garra (predicative proximate), -ya (unlocalized immediate), -yarra (localized immediate), -nanya or -ninya (distant), and -nangga or -ningga (anaphoric), though there are irregular forms for some combinations. From these, one can form demonstrative adverbs, in

322-608: A particular point in what is known as the "emphatic" case. Personal pronouns have paradigms in seven cases – nominative , emphatic, genitive , ablative , oblique stem , allative / locative , and purposive – for each of first person (singular, exclusive dual , inclusive dual , exclusive plural , and inclusive plural ), second person (singular, dual, and plural), and third person (masculine singular, feminine singular, neuter singular, dual, and plural). There are five categories for demonstrative pronouns: proximate, localized immediate, unlocalized immediate, distant, and anaphoric. With

368-678: A presidential address on universal grammar and the necessity of linguistic diversity. Hale was also appointed to the LSA's Edward Sapir Professorship in 1995. In May 2003, after Hale's death, the LSA's executive committee established a professorship in field methods in his name for the biennial Linguistic Institutes. The Ken Hale Professorship was established to address the need for documenting and preserving endangered languages, and to make courses available that prepare linguistics students to investigate poorly documented endangered languages that may not be offered in their home institutions. In October 2016,

414-424: A process known as reduplication , where some or all of a stem is repeated. With human nouns, reduplication takes the meaning of three or more of that noun, such as jawu-yawulba , "three or more old people" from jawulba , "old person", and a few topographic nouns can be reduplicated to mean the collective plural, as in lurlga-lurlga , "islands". With both human and non-human nouns, reduplication along with

460-745: A short text from one of the few remaining native speakers of the Diyari language (spoken in northern South Australia) was the first research by a professional linguist into that language. Hale took care to educate native speakers in linguistics so they could participate in the study of their languages. Among his students are the Tohono O'odham linguist Ofelia Zepeda , the Hopi linguist LaVerne Masayesva Jeanne , Navajo linguists Paul Platero , MaryAnn Willie , and Ellavina Tsosie Perkins , and Wampanoag linguist Jessie Little Doe Baird . Hale taught every summer in

506-463: A slight intonation difference. There is no tag for these statements (an equivalent to the English "right?" or "aren ' t you?"), though the local English-based creole ' s question marker ngi occasionally appears in modern Marra speech. Other types of interrogative clauses involve words that can also take an indefinite form, as in ngani , which can mean "who?", "someone", or "anyone". If

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552-399: A vowel, with the exception of a handful of stems beginning with /a/. Vowels clusters do not occur; all but one of adjacent underlying vowels are deleted. The only permitted word-initial consonant clusters are homorganic (involving the same place of articulation) nasal + stop combinations, particularly mb or ngg . The nominative prefix n- , when added to a stem beginning with a cluster,

598-647: Is a difference from related organizations as the Navajo Nation Division of Diné Education , Diné College , and the Navajo Language Teachers Association . The NLA organizes efforts of linguists and language instructors to train teachers of Navajo. Summer workshops on the Navajo language, applied linguistics , and general linguistics have been offered every summer since 1998. Undergraduate -level courses are offered for college credit. The Board of Directors of

644-596: Is an Australian Aboriginal language , traditionally spoken on an area of the Gulf of Carpentaria coast in the Northern Territory around the Roper , Towns and Limmen Bight Rivers . Marra is now an endangered language . The most recent survey was in 1991; at that time, there were only 15 speakers, all elderly. Most Marra people now speak Kriol as their main language. The remaining elderly Marra speakers live in

690-450: Is found in exactly two words, renburr , "paper wasp", and reywuy , "sandfly", and the vowel / o / in one word, yo! , a common interjection meaning "yes!" found throughout the area, including in the local English-based creole. There is no contrast in Marra vowel length , though the first vowel of a two-syllable word is often lengthened, as are the word-final vowels in a particular style of story-telling. Words cannot begin with

736-592: Is in honor of Hale's extensive work on preserving endangered languages. At the age of 14 Hale met his future wife Sara (known as Sally) Whitaker on his parents' ranch in Canelo, Arizona , and they both attended the Verde Valley School together for a year. They later became reacquainted at the University of Arizona. They had 4 children: Whitaker, Ian (adopted), and the twins Caleb and Ezra. Marra language Marra , sometimes formerly spelt Mara ,

782-569: Is no clear grammatical distinction between nouns , adjectives , and adverbs ; they are all treated the same morphologically. Personal and demonstrative pronouns, however, each form a distinctive word class, and all can be clearly distinguished from verb complexes. Noun phrases typically consist of an article, a noun, and the possibilities for adjuncts , which often but not always follow the main noun. Nouns are usually preceded by an article, which marks case, gender, and number. The nominative articles, for instance, are as follows: In additional to

828-453: Is used to mark the subject of a transitive verb (the usual meaning of "ergative") or to mark the object used to complete the action of the verb (the usual meaning of "instrumental"). This case, along with a genitive pronoun, is also used to mark possession (see below). The allative/locative case ( -yurr ) signals the idea of direction of motion ("to X"), static location ("in/on/at X"), or motional location ("by/through X"). Though this meaning

874-435: Is usually pronounced with the preceding syllable, and the n- with combined with /r/ or /n/ results in the addition of the meaningless particle –nga- between the prefix and the stem. Word-final consonant clusters can only take the form liquid (lateral or rhotic) plus noncoronal (labial, laminoalveolar, or velar) stop or nasal. Within a word, triple clusters are limited to a liquid and a homorganic nasal + stop cluster or to

920-495: Is within the domain of the pergressive case in many related languages, the Marra pergressive ( -ya , "through" or "along") is restricted to body-part or topographic terms. The ablative case is used to specify the origin of motion. It takes the form –yani for most nouns but -yana for place names. Lastly, the purposive –ni indicates the goal of the verb, as in the sentence bu-ngarlini na-yija-ni , "I set fires for game" (i.e., in order to hunt or obtain game), where

966-495: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 1999. Hale was known as a polyglot who retained the ability to learn new languages with extraordinary rapidity and perfection throughout his life. As a child, in addition to English he learned both Spanish and the native American language Tohono O'odham. He learned Jemez and Hopi from his high school roommates and Navajo from his roommate at

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1012-556: The Navajo Language Academy summer school, even in 2001 during his final illness. In 1990 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . Hale championed the importance of under-studied minority languages in linguistic study, stating that a variety of linguistic phenomena would never have been discovered if only the major world languages had been studied. He argued that any language, whether it has

1058-469: The Aboriginal communities of Ngukurr , Numbulwar , Borroloola and Minyerri . Marra is a prefixing language with three noun classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and a singular-plural-dual distinction. It is characterized by an intricate aspectual system, elaborate kin terms , no definite structure for relative clause construction , and a complex demonstrative system . Unlike many languages in

1104-507: The Katherine Regional Aboriginal Language Centre). The standard orthography is used throughout this article, but the table below also gives the equivalent IPA symbols in brackets where appropriate. The interdental sounds have not been included in the table as they are only found in loanwords. It is not clear if the vibrant is a trill or a tap. Marra has three main vowels: The vowel / e /

1150-635: The LSA launched a fellowship in honor of Hale to be awarded to a graduate student attendee of the Linguistic Institute pursuing a course of study in endangered language documentation. The first Ken Hale student fellowship was awarded at the 2017 Linguistic Institute to Ivan Kapitonov of the University of Melbourne. The LSA also has a Kenneth L. Hale Award , which has been presented occasionally since 2002 to those nominated scholars who have made substantial contributions to documenting endangered or extinct languages or family of languages. The award

1196-487: The NLA includes Navajo linguist Ellavina Perkins . The NLA maintains a comprehensive bibliography on Navajo linguistics, available on its web site, and holds the archive of the Navajo material of linguist Ken Hale . This article about an education organization is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Kenneth L. Hale Kenneth Locke Hale (August 15, 1934 – October 8, 2001), also known as Ken Hale ,

1242-695: The University of Arizona. Hale managed in just one week to write up 750 pages of fieldwork notes on the Marra language alone in 1959. He became so fluent in Warlpiri that he raised his sons Ezra and Caleb to speak Warlpiri after his return from Australia to the United States. Ezra delivered his eulogy for his father in Warlpiri. Among his major contributions to linguistic theory was the hypothesis that certain languages were non-configurational , lacking

1288-532: The area, it has little avoidance language and no difference in the speech of male and female speakers. Marra is a member of the Arnhem family, the second-largest Australian language family after Pama–Nyungan . The Marra people refer to themselves as Marranbala or Marra , and their language as Marra . In addition to Warndarrang, which was spoken to the north of Marra along the Roper River , Marra

1334-436: The articles, each noun is marked with a prefix containing information about case ( nominative or non-nominative), gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter), and number (singular, plural, dual ), as follows: Almost all non-human singular nouns are marked as masculine, though some specifically-female marsupial terms can be marked as feminine. The neuter case is reserved for body parts, topographic terms, abstract conceptions, and

1380-440: The beginning of a small number of nouns when the stem is preceded by a prefix ending in a vowel. There are also several instances of word-initial lenition of /g/ or /b/ to /w/, in cardinal directions, kin terms, and a few other isolated examples. At the beginning of verb stems, the underlying combination rrn will have the surface form of n, whereas an n followed by the phonemes l, rl, rr, r, n, or ny in any other context results in

1426-399: The deletion of the initial n. Stops are frequently nasalized (pronounced as the nasal at the stop 's place of articulation) when followed by a nasal or any other non-stop. Examples of this include the reduplicated man-mad "to mix a lot" from mad "to mix" or the noun + case ending of nga-lurlbam-nyu from lurlbab " juvenile euro (Macropus robustus) ". In Marra, there

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1472-579: The first serious fieldwork was being done on Marra, the mambali clan was extinct, though a family with the surname Riley of the burdal clan and a man by the name of Anday of the murrungun clan were able to provide the linguist Jeffrey Heath with cultural and linguistic information. The three clans, together with the Warndarrang-speaking guyal group, made up a set of four patrilineal semimoieties , each of which had their own set of songs, myths, and rituals. Each semimoiety

1518-476: The location, whereas the unlocalized immediate, which is rarer, is more general. The distant category refers to anything outside of the immediate, either visible to the speaker or invisible. The anaphoric category is anything within the distant category that has previously been referred to, indicating that the location is not new to the discourse. These pronouns have separate forms for masculine singular, feminine singular, neuter, dual, and plural, each of which has

1564-453: The locative or allative cases. These have the same spatial meaning as the corresponding demonstrative pronouns, but they refer to a general location rather than the location of a specific noun. The allative forms are summarized in the following table: To make the locative forms, the gi-/ga- in the table above is replaced by the prefix wi-/nya- (proximate), warri-/nyarri- (immediate), or wani-/nyani- (distant or anaphoric), and

1610-410: The pergressive case suffix can create the meaning "having X" or "having lots of X", as in girri-girriya-ya , "having a woman" (being a married man) from girriya , "woman". A few verb stems also display partial reduplication to indicate a repeated action, as in da-dad-gujujunyi , "he repeatedly tied it or them up" as opposed to dad-gujujunyi , "he was tying it or them up". In addition to

1656-577: The phrase structure characteristic of such languages as English. Hale was born in Evanston , Illinois. When he was six, his family moved to a ranch near Canelo in southern Arizona. He attended the Verde Valley School before Hale said he was "thrown out" for being too distracted by his study of languages, before transferring to Tucson High School. As a young man, Hale was an avid bull and bronc rider . A film clip of Hale being thrown from

1702-593: The phrase structure characteristic of such languages as English. Non-configurational languages, according to Hale, display a set of properties that cluster together, including free word order , unpronounced pronouns and the ability to disperse semantically related words across a sentence. Much of his research in the last two decades of the twentieth century was devoted to the development of syntactic models that could explain why these properties cluster. Hale's ideas initiated an important research program, still pursued by many contemporary linguists. In 1960, Hale's recording of

1748-415: The pronoun markers on nouns (see above) and verbs (see below), Marra also has independent personal pronouns . Unlike other nouns, pronouns do not show a nominative/ergative distinction but instead use the nominative form to mark all subjects as well as the direct object of a transitive verb. Because these pronouns are marked within the verb clause, their inclusion is often optional and can be used to highlight

1794-405: The proximate stems, there are separate forms for predicative (in the "predicate" of the sentence, or the part that modifies the subject) or nonpredicative nouns. Proximate refers to the area around the speaker, the equivalent of "here". The immediate refers to the area around the person being addressed or to the area approximately two meters away from the speaker. The localized immediate specifies

1840-410: The suffix -yu(rr) is added. Like many of the languages of Arnhem Land, Marra 's cardinal directions correspond closely with English "north, south, east, west", but have intricate case morphology . There are also directional words for "up" and "down" (i.e., upriver, downhill, etc.) that display a similar morphological complexity: Yes–no questions in Marra are identical to assertions, with

1886-949: The verb bu-ngarlini is intransitive and thus yija , "game" takes the purposive and not the nominative. Possession is typically marked by a genitive pronoun, though if the possessor noun (in the ergative/instrumental case) is present the pronoun is sometimes omitted. For example, n-nga-radburr n-jawurru means "his camp" with the third person singular genitive pronoun jawurru , and either nariyi-marr n-nga-radburr n-jawurru or nariyi-marr n-nga-radburr can mean "the man 's camp." Marra has five basic numerals, one through five: The numerals six through ten are expressed by combining "five" with another number, e.g., mani n-murrji wurruja wurruja for "nine". There are also more general quantifiers such as jari and mijimbangu , "many"; dangulirrnya , "big group" (non-human); garnyirrimba , "big group" (human); and murrgu , "a few". Like many Australian languages, Marra has

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1932-424: The word gurnarru , "sun". Nouns in Marra are marked by suffixes for one of six cases: The nominative ( -ø ) is used for intransitive subjects or transitive objects – such a case is usually called the " absolutive ", though some languages to the south of Marra have an absolutive case that is distinct from this usage. The ergative or instrumental case (also –ø , though takes the non-nominative prefix)

1978-531: The years 1973–1975 and 1976–1977, the linguist Jeffrey Heath worked with some of the surviving speakers of Marra to create a sizeable grammar and dictionary. With the help of four principal informants – Mack Riley, Tom Riley, Johnnie (who was Warndarrang but spoke Marra and Nunggubuyu for most of his life), and Anday – Heath was able to collect grammar and vocabulary information as well as extensive texts on clan songs and totem rituals. (All grammatical information from Heath 1981 unless otherwise noted.) Marra has

2024-425: Was also associated with a totem ( olive python or fork-tailed catfish for mambali , goanna for guyal , black-headed python or antilopine kangaroo for burdal , and king brown snake for murrungun ) and had responsibilities for that totem. Note that Warndarang people use the same system of semimoieties, under the names mambali , murrungun , wurdal , and guyal ( wuyal ). In

2070-542: Was also in contact with Alawa (spoken inland, to the west), Binbinga and Wilangarra ( West Barkly languages to the south), and Yanyuwa (a Pama–Nyungan language to the southeast). The Marra people were traditionally divided into three clans that lived along the Limmen Bight River in Arnhem Land ( Northern Territory , Australia ): burdal , murrungun , and mambali . In the 1970s, when

2116-438: Was an American linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied a huge variety of previously unstudied and often endangered languages —especially indigenous languages of North America and Australia. Languages investigated by Hale include Navajo , O'odham , Warlpiri , and Ulwa . Among his major contributions to linguistic theory was the hypothesis that certain languages were non-configurational , lacking

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