Andean Aymara

Last Sunday was the last day of the VII Simposio internacional de arqueologia at the Pontificada Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. The conference definitely had a greater focus on arqueology than linguistics, but even so, during the course of the three days, it forged the beginnings of a bridge between the two disciplines.
Highlights were [...]

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Mair at LanguageLog picked up on an interesting story from the Yonhap News Agency: An Indonesian tribe with an endangered language has chosen the Koren alphabet as its official writing system. I wonder what the political (or esthetic?) factors were that lead these people to choose this alphabet.
SEOUL, Aug. 6 (Yonhap) — A minority [...]

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The Peruvian Times (English) has a good write-up regarding the arrival of the pig flu in the remote villages of the Amazons:
Last week, Peru’s Health Ministry reported that seven Matsiguenga tribe natives living along Peru’s Urubamba River tested positive for swine flu. These natives have intermittent contact with more isolated and vulnerable tribes, living deep [...]

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This book looks like it is pretty relevant to people interested in this topic.  Check out the description on Linguistlist.

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This is an interesting look at the mesh of numerical operations and Andean culture with a particular emphasis on Inkan khipus and the Quechua weaving. The book is accessible even to those with little knowledge of mathematics or anthropology and gives plenty of background, beginning with the initial chapter which offers a brief overview of [...]

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ABC  Radio National has a lot of interesting podcasts — most notably All in the Mind with Natasha Mitchell. There is, however, another show which may be of interest to linguists, Ockham’s Razor. The penultimate show, entitled “Language and prehistory”  deals with contact situations between speakers of English and Australian Aborigine populations. I haven’t had [...]

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De acuerdo a las investigaciones realizadas, los indígenas apostados en la Curva del Diablo (Bagua, Amazonas) el 5 de junio pasado no portaban armas de fuego.
Enlace

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In any earlier post, I mentioned the importance for fieldworkers (and everyone really) to have backup software. Although I leave it to the tech experts to compare the variety of different resources which exist, I throw my two cents in for Mozy.  This software will backup and encrypt 2GB for free (or an unlimited amount [...]

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The AOP (a US NGO) is doing a lot of great work in the Andes, specifically in Peru. Just recently one of their projects was featured on the local Huancayo news.
Full disclosure: I am the Director of the Netherlands chapter.

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In this entry I will list some of the most useful programs I’ve found to help with the language documentation-related aspects of this project.  I will focus more on three programs which you may not have heard of but which are definitely handy. I’ll leave Elan and Praat for a different entry.
1.  Wavosaur - This [...]

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