Hussein: What is the difference between describing and documenting a language?
I think after two weeks of the MA in Language Documentation and Description I should (finally) know the answer to that question! Let me try to put it into words for you:
Documentation is when one makes recordings (audio and/or video), ideally in large number and of a great variety of different speech acts such as conversations and songs) and/or collects texts and annotates them with phonetic/phonological/orthographic transcriptions, translations and comments such as on words that have no direct translation.
Description is when one analysis this data with the purpose of creating grammars, dictionaries etc.
We were told that description has mainly linguists as audience while documentation is interesting for academics of other fields and the speech community as well. On the other hand, we just got a quote by Aikhenvald (2006) who thinks that grammars and dictionaries (in book form) are more useful to the speech community since those communities often lack the technology that is needed to make use of the products resulting from documentary linguistics (such as hyperactive texts with audifiles on the Internet).
In the past, documentary linguistics was just a necessary part of descriptive linguistics, one simply had to document a language in order to descripe it. The downside of that was that a lot of data was not available because the descriptive linguist just presented a few examples to proof his/her theories and the rest disappeared in some dusty drawer inside his/her office. Now, documentary linguistics is developing into an own field that has its independent right of existence,
i.e. a documentation without a follow-up description is still regarded as a valuable piece of work.
Aikhenvald, A. (2006). Linguistic Fieldwork: setting the scene. La Trobe University, MS. www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/StaffPages/aikhenvald%20downloads/Aikhenvald.Settingthescene.doc
[14/10/06]
Austin, P. K. (2006) "Data and language documentation". In Gippert, J., Himmelmann, N.P. and Mosel, U. (eds.) Fundamentals of Language Documentation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
http://www.hrelp.org/aboutus/staff/peter_austin/AustinDoc.pdf [14/10/06]
Himmelmann, N.P. (2002). "Documentary and descriptive linguistics". In Sakiyama, O., Endo, F.(eds.) Lectures on Endangered Languages:5.
http://www.hrelp.org/events/workshops/eldp2005/reading/himmelmann.pdf [14/10/06]
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