Gary Holton

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    Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) database
    (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Department of Linguistics, 2018-04-12) Holton, Gary
    This SQL database file from the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) can be used to access the raw vitality assessments for endangered languages.
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    Workshop on Documenting Minority Languages in Nusa Tenggara Timur Indonesia
    (UKAW Kupang, 2018) Jacob, June ; Klamer, Marian ; Holton, Gary
    The Workshop on Documenting Minority Languages in Nusa Tenggara Timur was held 7-13 May 2018 in Kupang, NTT at the Universitas Kristen Artha Wacana (UKAW). The goal of the workshop was to provide practical training in language documentation for people from Nusa Tenggara Timur with an interest in their local and regional languages, and have the potential to play a major role in documenting these languages. In addition to classroom study, the workshop included three days of field study by eight different teams. These teams visited Desa Bolok (Bahasa Helong), Nekmese and Burain (Bahasa Uab Meto), Pukdale (Bahasa Termanu), and Rote (Bahasa Thie and Bahasa Lole). In addition, Bahasa Abui was studied with Abui speakers living in the Kupang area, and Bahasa Sar was studied with a speaker who was visiting from Pantar. The book contains the initial field reports compiled by each of the eight teams during the three-day field practica. The reports were compiled in a single day on 13 May 2018 and as such should not be considered to be final products. Still, these reports demonstrate the enormous potential of well-trained local documentation teams to complete professional quality documentation in a relatively short amount of time. One of the greatest challenges for documentary linguistics is the lack of capacity, especially in regions were language endangerment is most severe. It is our hope that the workshop participants will continue in their efforts to document local languages and preserve the rich linguistic heritage of NTT.
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    Developing collection management tools to create more robust and reliable linguistic data
    ( 2017-03-07) Holton, Gary ; Hooshiar, Kavon ; Thieberger, Nick
    Lack of adequate descriptive metadata remains a major barrier to accessing and reusing language documentation. A collection management tool could facilitate management of linguistic data from the point of creation to the archive deposit, greatly reducing the archiving backlog and ensuring more robust and reliable data.
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    Differing conceptualizations of the same landscape: The Athabaskan and Eskimo language boundary in Alaska
    (John Benjamins, 2011) Holton, Gary
    This paper further explores the non-universality of landscape terms by focusing on one particular landscape, the Yukon Intermontane Plateau of western Alaska. This region serves as the boundary between two great language families of North America, Athabaskan and Eskimo, and thus offers a unique laboratory in which to examine the extent to which cultural factors in two genetically unrelated languages influence the categorization of a single, fixed landscape. Drawing on published lexical sources, unpublished place name documentation, and first-hand interviews with Native speakers, the results presented here demonstrate that while Athabaskan and Eskimo speakers may occupy the same landscape, their respective languages conceptualize that landscape in different ways.