Cairns

A recent archival research project in the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) identified artifacts and human remains associated with the 1980 excavation of stone cairns and habitation areas on the west side of Lake Turkana. The presence of stone grave cairns across eastern Africa is common, but their cultural origins and construction times are enigmatic. This article presents the results of the archival project and contextualizes both the artifacts found and the unpublished research notes within the framework of evolving settlement patterns in eastern Africa during the middle to late Holocene. Despite the presence of numerous decorative features on ceramics and the recovery of many complete lithic tools, the material culture is generally non-diagnostic within existing typo-technological categories. The research indicates that there was tremendous diversity in the material culture of the Turkana Basin during the late Holocene.

A Native American ceremonial site can contain some or all of the following types of structures: Stone Cairns; Enclosures: Niches; Niche-Shafts; Miniature Chambers; Standing Stones; Manitou Stones; Pedestal/Perched/Rocking/Balanced Stones; Stone Chambers; Modified Rockshelters. Some of these structures can look similar to historic
farm structures. For example stone cairns can be confused with field clearing stone piles, stone chamber for a root cellar, a standing stone with a property boundary marker, etc. How does one distinguish between the two? On the following pages are some basic criteria for making distinctions between Native American stone structures and historic farm structures.

Zuckermann, Ghil'ad and Walsh, Michael 2011. ‘Stop, Revive, Survive!: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures’, Australian Journal of Linguistics 31.1: 111-127.

LINK TO THE ARTICLE: http://www.zuckermann.org/pdf/Revival_Linguistics.pdf

Final version:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a932426202~frm=titlelink

DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2011.532859

Australian Journal of Linguistics (AJL)
Volume 31, Issue 1, January 2011, pages 111 - 127

Stop, Revive, Survive: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures

GHIL‘AD ZUCKERMANN and MICHAEL WALSH

University of Adelaide and University of Sydney


ABSTRACT

The revival of Hebrew is so far the most successful known reclamation of a sleeping tongue and is a language movement that has been in progress for more than 120 years. By comparison, language revival movements in Australia are in their infancy. This article provides comparative insights and makes information about the Hebrew revival accessible to Australian linguists and Aboriginal revival activists.

Needless to say, the first stage of any desire by professional linguists to assist in language reawakening must involve a long period of thoroughly observing, carefully listening to the people, learning, mapping and characterizing the specific indigenous community. Only then can one inspire and assist. That said, this article proposes that there are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would be useful to endangered languages in general and to Aboriginal linguistic revival in particular.

This article contributes towards the establishment of Revival Linguistics, a new linguistic discipline and paradigm. Zuckermann`s term Revival Linguistics is modelled upon 'Contact Linguistics' (<language contact). Revival linguistics inter alia explores the universal constraints and mechanisms involved in language reclamation, renewal and revitalization. It draws perspicacious comparative insights from one revival attempt to another, thus acting as an epistemological bridge between parallel discourses in various local attempts to revive sleeping tongues all over the globe.


Keywords: Revival Linguistics, Language Revival, Aboriginal Studies, Hebrew, Social Empowerment, Hybridity and Multiple Causation, Purism versus Compromise, Language and Identity, Contact Linguistics, Yiddish, Aboriginal English, Anthropological Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Language Endangerment, Resilience Linguistics, Revitalization, Renewal.


Dedicated to Professor Michael Clyne z"l



ARTICLE

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

(John Adams, 1735–1826, second president of the United States)


The main aim of this article is to suggest that there are perspicacious lessons applicable from the relatively successful Hebrew revival to the reclamation, maintenance and empowerment of Aboriginal languages and cultures. 'Language is power; let us have ours', wrote Aboriginal politician Aden Ridgeway on 26 November 2009 in the Sydney Morning Herald. Previous revival efforts have largely failed (for obvious reasons, we are not going to single out specific failures here). While there have been some good results from several projects since 1992 (e.g. Kaurna, see below), Aboriginal people overall do not see as many positive outcomes from revival programmes as they would like. In large part this is the result of shortage of sufficient (continuity of) funding, lack of technical expertise, and lack of integration of school-based programmes with community language programmes. However, there are purely linguistic reasons too: Many revival efforts were not supported by a sound theoretical understanding of how successful language revival works. As pointed out by Thieberger (2002), decisions about the appropriate target for language maintenance programmes are too often driven by structural linguistics, where the supposed ideal is intergenerational transmission of the language with all its original structural complexity retained, thus creating unrealistic expectations among the Aboriginal community.

This article is the first of its kind as it will innovatively draw crucial insights from 'Modern Hebrew' (henceforth, Israeli – see Zuckermann 1999), so far the most successful known reclamation attempt of a sleeping tongue. Zuckermann's (2008a, 2009, 2010, 2011) research on Israeli demonstrates which language components are more revivable than others. Words and conjugations, for example, are easier to revitalize than intonation, discourse, associations and connotations. We should encourage revivalists and Aboriginal leaders to be realistic rather than puristic, and not to chastise English loanwords and pronunciation, for example, within the emergent language. Applying such precious conclusions from Hebrew will closely assist Australian revivalists in being more efficient, urging them not to waste time and resources on Sisyphean efforts to resuscitate linguistic components that are unlikely to be revivable.

While the results the endeavors we are proposing here have considerable value as a research enterprise, one can also consider them in terms of a cost-benefit analysis (Mühlhäusler and Damania 2004, Walsh 2008): Language revitalization contributes to social reconciliation, cultural tourism (Clark and Kostanski 2005), capacity building, and improved community health for Indigenous peoples (Walsh forthcoming B). In the process of language revival, some Aboriginal people will go from being dysfunctional (cf. Sutton 2009) to well-balanced, positive people. The benefits to the wider community and to Australian society are immense.

Reversing language shift (RLS) (Fishman 1991, 2001, Hagège 2009, Evans 2010, Walsh 2005a, Zuckermann 2011) is thus of great social benefit. Language revival does not only do historical justice and address inequality but can also result in the empowerment of people who have lost their heritage and purpose in life.

Some Aboriginal people distinguish between usership and ownership. There are even those who claim that they own a language although they only know one single word of it: its name. Consequently, some Indigenous Australians do not find it important to revive their comatose tongue. We, on the other hand, have always believed in Australia’s very own roadside dictum: ‘Stop, revive, survive!'


Background: The Hebrew Revival

I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so. (Haldane 1963: 464)

'Hebrew' is the most quoted example of a successful language revival. On the other hand, if we are to be brutally truthful with ourselves, the modern-day vernacular spoken in downtown Tel Aviv is a very different language – both typologically and genetically – to that of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or of the Mishnah, the first major redaction of Jewish oral traditions.

Hebrew was spoken since approximately the 14th century BC. It belonged to the Canaanite division of the northwestern branch of the Semitic languages, which constitute a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Following a gradual decline, it ceased to be spoken by the second century AD. The failed Bar-Kokhba Revolt against the Romans in Judea in 132-5 AD marks the symbolic end of the period of spoken Hebrew. We believe that the Mishnah was codified around 200 AD because Hebrew was then dying as a mother tongue. Rabbi Judah haNasi and his collaborators might have realized that if they did not act then to redact the oral tradition, it would soon have been too late because Jews were already speaking languages other than Hebrew. (In fact, the Gemara, the other component of the Babylonian Talmud, which was codified around 500 AD, was written in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew.)

For approximately 1,750 years thereafter, Hebrew was ‘clinically dead’. A most important liturgical and literary language, it occasionally served as a lingua franca – a means of communication between people who do not share a mother tongue – for Jews of the Diaspora, but not as a native language.

Fascinating and multifaceted Israeli, which emerged in Palestine (Eretz Israel) at the end of the nineteenth century, possesses distinctive socio-historical characteristics such as the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli, the non-Semitic mother tongues spoken by the Hebrew revivalists, and the European impact on literary Hebrew. Consequently, it presents the linguist with a unique laboratory in which to examine a wider set of theoretical problems concerning language genesis, social issues like language, identity and politics, and important practical matters, such as whether it is possible to revive a no-longer spoken language.

The genetic classification of Israeli has preoccupied scholars since its genesis. The still regnant traditional thesis suggests that Israeli is Semitic: Hebrew revived. The revisionist antithesis defines Israeli as Indo-European: Yiddish relexified; that is, Yiddish, the revivalists’ mother tongue, is the 'substratum', whilst Hebrew is the 'superstratum' providing the vocabulary (cf. Horvath and Wexler 1997). According to Zuckermann's mosaic (rather than Mosaic) synthesis, Israeli is not only multi-layered but also multi-parental. A Semito-European, or Eurasian, hybrid, Israeli is both Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) and (Indo-) European. It is based simultaneously on 'sleeping beauty' / 'walking dead' Hebrew and 'máme lóshn' (mother tongue) Yiddish, which are both primary contributors to Israeli, and a plethora of other tongues spoken by Jewish pioneers in Palestine in the 1880s–1930s, e.g. Russian, Polish, Arabic, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Turkish, German, French and English.


The Success Rate of the Hebrew Revival

The vernacularization of Hebrew was partially a success and partially a failure. It is hard to provide an exact quantification for such a multi-variable enterprise, but we would roughly estimate that on a 1-10 scale, 10 being a complete success and one being a complete failure, the Hebrew revival is at seven. More specifically, we propose the following continuum approximations for the extent to which Israeli can be considered Hebrew: mindset/spirit: 1 (i.e. European); discourse (communicative tools, speech acts): 1; sounds (phonetics and phonology): 2; semantics (meaning, associations, connotations, semantic networkings): 3; constituent/word order (syntax): 4; general vocabulary: 5; word formation: 7; verbal conjugations: 9; and basic vocabulary: 10 (i.e. Hebrew).

The factors leading to the partial failure of the Hebrew revival have little to do with a lack of motivation or zealousness, or with economic or political variables – not even with the fact that the revivalists, such as the symbolic father of Israeli, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (born Perelman, 1858-1922), were not as linguistically sophisticated as contemporary linguists. It is simply the case that one cannot negate one’s most recent roots, be they cultural or linguistic, even if one is keen to deny one’s parents’ and grandparents’ heritage (diasporic Yiddish) in search of cultural antiquity (Biblical Hebrew). It is therefore most unlikely to revive a clinically-dead language without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s). Thus, when most native Israeli-speakers speak Israeli, their intonation is much more similar to that of Yiddish, the mother tongue of most revivalists, than to that of Arabic or any other Semitic language. It is high time to acknowledge that Israeli is very different from ancient Hebrew. We should embrace – rather than chastise – the multisourcedness of Israeli.

That said, the Hebrew revival cannot be considered a failure because without the zealous, obsessive, enthusiastic efforts of Ben-Yehuda and of teachers, writers, poets, journalists, intellectuals, social activists, political figures, linguists and others, Israelis would have spoken a language (such as English, German, Arabic or Yiddish) that could hardly be considered Hebrew. To call such a hypothetical language 'Hebrew' would have not only been misleading but also wrong. To call today’s Israeli 'Hebrew' may be puristic but not wrong: Hybridic Israeli is based on Hebrew as much as it is based on Yiddish. So, although the revivalists could not avoid the subconscious influence of their mother tongue(s), they did indeed manage at the same time to consciously revive important components of Hebrew.


Hybridity, Camouflage and the Congruence Principle

Israeli is a new hybrid language rather than an evolutionary phase of Hebrew. Yiddish is not a 'foreign language' vis-à-vis Israeli, and the word intuítsya 'intuition' – to give but one example out of thousands of alleged loan words – is not a loan word (from Yiddish intuítsye, Russian intuítsiya, Polish intuicja etc., all meaning 'intuition') but rather an integral part of Israeli from its very beginning.

According to the Congruence Principle, the more revivalists speak contributing languages with a specific linguistic feature, the more likely this feature is to prevail in the emergent language. Based on feature pool statistics, this principle weakens August Schleicher’s famous Family Tree theory in historical linguistics, which may give the wrong impression that every language has only one parent. For example, most revivalists spoke languages, mainly Yiddish, that lacked that Semitic pharyngeal gulp ‘ayin (represented, for instance, by the apostrophe in Zuckermann's Christian – actually Jewish – name Ghil‘ad). Naturally, their children – the ones who, in fact, shaped the real character of Israeli – could not buy the argument 'do as I say, don’t do as I do!' The result is that most Israelis do not have this sound in their speech.

Similarly, má nishmà, the common Israeli 'what’s up?' greeting, looks like a calque – loan translation – of the Yiddish phrase vos hért zikh, usually pronounced vsértsekh and literally meaning 'what’s heard?' but functioning as a common greeting. However, a Romanian-speaking immigrant to Israel might have used má nishmà because of Romanian ce se aude, a Polish-speaker Jew because of Polish co słychać, and a Russian-speaker Что слышно chto slyshno, all meaning the same and functioning in the same way.

The distinction between forms and patterns is crucial here as it demonstrates multiple causation. In the 1920s and 1930s, gdud meginéy hasafá, 'the language defendants regiment' (cf. Shur 2000), whose motto was ivrí, dabér ivrít 'Hebrew [i.e. Jew], speak Hebrew,' used to tear down signs written in 'foreign' languages and disturb Yiddish theatre gatherings. However, the members of this group only looked for Yiddish forms, rather than patterns in the speech of the Israelis who did choose to speak 'Hebrew.' The language defendants would thus not attack an Israeli speaker saying má nishmà. Ironically, even the language defendants regiment's anthem included calques from Yiddish.

Zuckermann (2011, forthcoming) analyzes the hitherto-overlooked camouflaged semantic networking transferred from one language to another. Whereas mechanisms as calques (loan translations such as superman, from German Übermensch), phono-semantic matches (e.g. crayfish, from Old French crevice, a cognate of crab that has little to do with fish) (Zuckermann 2003) and portmanteau blends (e.g. motel, from motor+hotel, or sprummer, from spring+summer) have been studied, there is a need to uncover concealed semantic links between words in the Target Language which reflect – often subconsciously – semantic networking in the Source Language. Consider the Israeli word gakhlilít 'firefly, glow-worm' – coined by poet laureate Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934). This word is semantically and etymologically linked to the Biblical Hebrew word gaħelet 'burning coal, glowing ember.' Morphologically, Israeli gakhlilít derives from Hebrew gaħelet plus the reduplication of its third radical [l]. However, no Israeli dictionary reveals the crucial semantic networking aspect, namely that the Israeli concoction, gakhlilít, in using an element associated with 'glow,' in fact replicates a European mindset, apparent for example in the Yiddish word glivórem, literally 'glow' (cf. gaħelet) + 'worm', or in German Glühwürmchen.


Native Israeli Speech and the Academy of the Hebrew Language

Since its conception, Israeli has been the subject of purism (the dislike of foreign words – as in Icelandic: Sapir and Zuckermann 2008) and the enforcement of 'correct' pronunciation. Brought into being by legislation in 1953 as the supreme institute for 'Hebrew', the Academy of the Hebrew Language (known in Israeli as haakademya lalashón haivrít) is funded by Israel's Ministry of Education. It superseded the (Hebrew) Language Council (váad halashón (haivrít)), which was established in 1889 – as a branch of Safá Brurá (Clear Language) – by Ben-Yehuda and colleagues. As defined in its constitution, the Academy's functions are: (1) To investigate and compile the Hebrew lexicon according to its historical strata and layers; (2) To study the structure, history, and offshoots of the Hebrew language; and (3) To direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, requirements, and potential, its daily and academic needs, by setting its lexicon, grammar, characters, orthography and transliteration [in fact, transcription].

The first goal is most useful, as Israeli is indeed a multi-layered language. For example, one could say both (a) khashkhú enáv, literally 'His eyes became dark,' meaning 'He saw black' (‘black’ in this context meaning ‘bad news’), and (b) niyá/naasá lo khóshekh baenáim, meaning the same, albeit structurally different. While khashkhú enáv is Hebrew, niyá lo khóshekh baenáim is a calque of the Yiddish phrase siz im gevórn fíntster in di óygn, which might in turn be an adaptation of the very Hebrew khashkhú enáv (transcribed here in its Israeli form, which would have been unintelligible for an ancient Hebrew-speaker).

Israeli has many other minimal pairs, such as asá din leatsmó and lakákh et hakhók layadáim, both referring to a person violating the law, with the latter being more colloquial; as well as lelót kayamím, literally 'nights as days' (also yamím kelelót, literally 'days as nights'), and misavív lashaón, literally 'round the clock,' both often referring to hard work.

Somewhat resembling the 'catastrophic success' of the 1928-1936 Turkish Language Revolution (see Lewis 1999), many referents have several Israeli signifiers, one of which is puristically Hebrew and the other, often more commonly used, 'foreign' (in fact, Israeli ab initio). These include many internationalisms such as opozítsya 'Opposition' (according to the Academy, the word should be negdá – cf. Hebrew néged 'against') and koalítsya 'Coalition' (according to the Academy: yakhdá – cf. Hebrew yaħad 'together').

However, goal (3), to direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, is oxymoronic (cf. Zuckermann 2008b: 139). If the nature of a language is to evolve in a specific direction (cf. Sapir's 'drift,' the pattern of change in which the structure of a language shifts in a determinate direction), why direct its evolution by language policing?


From the Promised Land to the ‘Lucky’ Country

The three principles of linguistic revival and survival:
(1) If your language is endangered --> Do not allow it to
die!
(2) If your language died --> Stop, revive, survive!
(3) If you revive your language --> Embrace the
hybridity of the emergent language!

Questions of this kind, albeit in an implicit and sometimes confused fashion, are being raised within the context of Australian Aboriginal languages. Current language revival activities are worthy but often under-theorized. The tendency has been to attempt to revive the language en masse despite what has been indicated about the Hebrew rate of success for take up of particular components of language. There is a need to examine a range of existing language revitalization programmes with a view to assessing the rate of success for take up of particular components of language and at the same time adduce the preferences (and sometimes the prejudices) of the group in question (cf. Couzens and Eira forthcoming).

Indigenous Australians have been living in Australia for more than 40,000 years. Today Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders make up 2.6% of Australia's population. Unfortunately, one of the main findings of the most recent National Indigenous Languages Survey Report (2005) was that the situation of Australia’s languages is grave (in both senses). Of an original number of over 250 known Australian Indigenous languages, only about 145 Indigenous languages are still spoken and the vast majority of these, about 110, are critically endangered: they are spoken only by small groups of people, mostly over 40 years old. Eighteen languages are strong in the sense of being spoken by all age groups, but three or four of these are showing some disturbing signs of moving into endangerment. So of an original number of over 250 known Australian Indigenous languages, only 6% (i.e. 15) are in a healthy condition.

Aboriginal language revival began recently – from the late 1970s (Amery and Gale 2007) – and has therefore much to learn from other revival efforts, especially that of Hebrew, which began in the late nineteenth century. There has been little coordination among the geographically-scattered language revival efforts in Australia. Most recently, language revitalization practitioners have begun to share experiences at various conferences and workshops (Hobson et al. forthcoming). There is thus an urgent need for an on-the-ground, ongoing input, creating intellectual and practical synergy and complementing the mission of the regional Aboriginal language centres and the recently-established mobile language team based at the University of Adelaide – by adding significant advice based on scholarly and universal perspectives. Practical outcomes will include a useful handbook of the best practices for language revival in Australia (Christina Eira, pers. comm.), and an improved sense of well being in the local Aboriginal community.

There is community support in some parts of the country for revival and heritage learning programmes: either in reclamation proper (e.g. extensive courses similar to Israel’s ulpaním) or only in symbolic, postvernacular maintenance (teaching Aboriginal people some words and concepts related to the dead language – cf. postvernacular Yiddish among secular Jews in the United States – see Shandler 2005). At its broadest level language revival refers to the range of strategies for increasing knowledge and use of a language which is no longer spoken fully across all generations. In practice, however, this can range from largely symbolic uses of ancestral languages like naming buildings or places through to more constant involvement with the language through school-based language instruction (Walsh 2005a).


Comparative Analysis of Hebrew and Aboriginal Language Revival

Although they too were at the beginning very few in number, and encountered great hostility and animosity (e.g. by those who saw the revival as the desecration of a holy tongue), the Hebrew revivalists had several advantages compared with Australian revivalists. Consider the following:

(1) Documentation: extensive – consider, for example, the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah.

(2) Accessibility: Jews have been exposed to literary Hebrew throughout the generations, e.g. when praying in the synagogue or when saying the blessing over the meal. It would be hard to find a Jew who did not have access to Hebrew (unless in totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union).

(3) Prestige: Hebrew was considered a prestigious language (as opposed to Yiddish, for instance, whose Australian sociolinguistic parallel might be Aboriginal English). It is true that some Aboriginal languages are held in high regard by their owners/custodians but unfortunately usually not by the wider Australian society.

(4) Uniqueness: Jews from all over the globe only had Hebrew in common (Aramaic was not as prominent), whereas there are dozens of 'sleeping' Aboriginal languages and it would be hard to choose only one unifying tongue, unless one resorts to Aboriginal English. The revival of a single language is much more manageable than that of numerous tongues in varying states of disrepair.

(5) National self-determination: revived Hebrew was aimed to be the language of an envisioned state, where speakers of Revived Hebrew would eventually have the political power (cf. Yadin and Zuckermann 2010).

(6) Lack of ownership: Unlike in the case of Aboriginal languages (cf. Walsh 2002), anybody has the right to speak Hebrew, without getting permission from the Jews.

(7) Easy borrowing: Loanwords and foreign words are not considered theft. In fact, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda loved borrowing from Arabic, Aramaic and other Semitic languages.

(8) Lack of place restriction: Hebrew could be and was revived all over the globe – consider Haim Leib Hazan’s coinage mishkafáim ‘glasses’ in 1890 in Grodno (see Zuckermann 2003: 1-4).

(9) Multilingualism: Jews arriving in Eretz Israel in the time of the revival were used to multilingualism and did not have a ‘monolingual mindset’. For example, back in Europe many of them spoke Yiddish at home and Polish in the market, and prayed in Hebrew (and Aramaic) in the synagogue.

(10) Number: There are many more Jews than Aboriginal people in Australia.


But, as it happens, Aboriginal revivalists actually have some advantages vis-à-vis Hebrew revivalists. Consider the following:

(1) Deontological reason for the revival: As we see it, Aboriginal tongues deserve to be revived for historical, humanistic and social justice, inter alia addressing inequality (cf. Thieberger 1990). This can provide strength to the revival attempts. We hear again and again 'native title' but where is the 'native tongue title'? Is land more important than langue and (cultural) lens? And if land, langue and heritage are bound together as a trinity, then why ask for reparation only for land?

(2) Numerous utilitarian reasons for the revival: The revival of sleeping Aboriginal languages can result in personal, educational and economic empowerment, sense of pride and higher self-esteem of people who have lost their heritage and purpose in life (see concluding remarks). The Hebrew revival had many less utilitarian purposes, the main one being simply the constitution of a unifying tongue to Jews from all over the world. It would have been unfair, for example, for Ladino-speaking Sephardim if German were selected.

(3) Governmental support: Although it could obviously be greater, the Australian government does support the reclamation and maintenance of Aboriginal languages, or at least there is an obvious address to apply for money from. This has not been the case in fin-de-siècle Palestine.

(4) Similarities between Aboriginal English and Aboriginal Languages: Aboriginal English (e.g. Nunga English in Adelaide), spoken by some revivalists, contain various linguistic features – such as connotations, associations, sounds and morphological characteristics like the dual – of the reclaimed Aboriginal languages at stake. One might perspicaciously argue that Israeli semantics, which is deeply modelled on Yiddish semantics, also maintains the original Hebrew semantics after all because Yiddish, a Germanic language with Romance substratum, was deeply impacted by Hebrew and Aramaic. However, the Yiddish dialects that have been the most influential ones in Israel, e.g. Polish Yiddish, are, in fact, the ones that underwent Slavonization from the thirteenth century onwards, when Jews moved from Germany to Slavonic-speaking areas in Eastern Europe. Aboriginal English is much younger and therefore is much more likely to retain features of Aboriginal languages, than Yiddish is to retain features of Hebrew.


Universal Constraints of Language Revival

And yet, although obviously language revival attempts should be tailored to the specific contexts, needs and desires of each community, there are some universal constraints that should be recognized. As we have already seen, Hebrew revivalists, who wished to speak pure Hebrew, failed in their imprisoning purism prism, the result being a multifaceted and fascinating fin-de-siècle Israeli language, both multi-layered and multi-sourced. Most relevantly, some Australian interest groups (cf. Tiwi in Dorian 1994: 481-4) get hung up on misled views akin to the slogan ‘Give me authenticity or give me death!’ (cf. ‘Give me Liberty, or give me Death!’, the famous quotation attributed to Patrick Henry from a speech he made to the Virginia Convention in America on 23 March 1775), where the death, of course, ends up being the Indigenous language they wish to save from ‘contamination’! (On authenticity and language revival, see also Wong 1999 and Hinton and Ahlers 1999.)

Why should we encourage revivalists and Aboriginal leaders to be realistic rather than puristic? Purism creates unrealistic expectations that may discourage learners from acquiring the emerging language. A revived language should not be viewed negatively if it is seen to be influenced by a neighbouring language or by English. The use of words from a neighbouring language should not discredit the revived language. There might be some rare occasions when it is more appropriate for revivalists to favour purism – see Harlow (1993) on Maori. However, in the case of reclamation proper (i.e. the revival of a language that has no native speakers such as Hebrew), one must learn to embrace, celebrate and champion – rather than chastise – the inevitable hybridity of the emerging language.

One might argue that the difference between the conditions that surround Aboriginal languages and Israeli are so large that it is impossible to learn across these contexts. But denying universal traits or constraints in human language in general, and in reversing language shift in particular, is counter-productive. Linguistic reality lies between relativism and universalism. No progress will be made by turning a blind eye to any of these extremes. Based on a critical analysis of Israeli, one can predict accurately the situation in various reclaimed Aboriginal languages such as Kaurna [ga:na], a resurrected language spoken around Adelaide, which is the result of one of the most successful revival attempts in Australia – cf. Gumbaynggirr (Ash et. al. forthcoming), Ngarrindjeri, Walmajarri and Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay.

There are scholars, e.g. Dalby (2003: 250), who scoff at some attempts at reviving the use of an endangered language: 'this is no longer a language, any more than musicians are speaking Italian when they say andante and fortissimo. These are simply loanwords used in a special context'. A more balanced view is manifested in Crystal's (2000: 162) comments on Kaurna:

The revived language is not the same as the original language, of course; most obviously, it lacks the breadth of functions which it originally had, and large amounts of old vocabulary are missing. But, as it continues in present-day use, it will develop new functions and new vocabulary, just as any other living language would, and as long as people value it as a true marker of their identity, and are prepared to keep using it, there is no reason to think of it as anything other than a valid system of communication.

The impact of English (Aboriginal or Australian English) on reclaimed Kaurna is far-reaching. Consider the following:

* At the level of phonology, there are often spelling pronunciations, especially for sequences of er (as in yerlo ‘sea’ and yerta for instance), ur (as in purle or purlaitye). In classical Kaurna, the r in these words belonged with the consonant (it was be retroflex) but many times we hear an er vowel as in English slur or sir. The original vowel was /a/ in yerlo and yerta, and /u/ in purle and purlaitye. Stress is often placed on the second syllable rather than on the first (Amery 2000: 121-122; Amery and Rigney 2004: 2-3).

* At the level of vocabulary, there are many calques – see Amery 2000: 124, as well as Chapter 12 Wodlingga 'In the Home' (pp. 63-70), Chapter 15 Tidnaparndo 'Football' (pp. 81-84) and Chapter 16 Kuya Pirri-wirkindi 'Fishing' (pp. 85-88) in Amery (2007), where a range of calques have been developed – especially evident in the names of AFL football teams such as Kuinyunda Meyunna (lit. 'sacred men') for the St Kilda Saints. Knowingly – and jocularly – cricket (the sport game) was replicated as yertabiritti (the term for the insect with the same name in English) (Amery 2003: 86). It should be noted, however, that in reclaimed Kaurna there are relatively few loanwords/foreignisms from English per se, far less than we see in any ‘strong’ language such as Pitjantjatjara or Yolngu Matha.

* Constituent/word order is free in classical Kaurna as in other Aboriginal languages, though it tended to be SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). Naturally, there are contemporary users of Kaurna who tend to produce more SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) sentences, replicating English (Amery and Rigney 2004: 5).

* English semantics tends to carry through to Kaurna words (Amery and Rigney 2004: 5-7).

* The most pervasive influence from English is at the level of discourse. Almost everything said or written is translated from English. Thus, the turn of phrase and the idiom are from English (Amery 2001a: 190-194; Amery 2001b; see also Amery and Rigney 2006).

And still, the impact of English on Kaurna is less than in many other revived languages in Australia – cf. the neighbouring Ngarrindjeri, where published texts are practically English calques: an isomorphic 1 to 1 translation of English, including the use of interrogative ‘where’ for ‘were’ and ‘thus’ for ‘the’. Case suffixes are used as prepositions – see p. iii of Reviving Languages: warranna purruttiappendi: tumbelin tungarar: renewal and reclamation programs for indigenous languages in schools (1999), as well as Rhonda Agius in Proctor and Gale (1997: 4-6).

We predict that any attempt to revive an Aboriginal language will result in a hybrid, combining components from Australian English, Aboriginal English, Kriol, other Aboriginal languages and the target Aboriginal tongue. But we are going to assist Aboriginal revivalists to make their efforts more efficient and to embrace hybridity.


Concluding Remarks

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. (Nelson Mandela)

This article contributes towards the establishment of Revival Linguistics, a new linguistic discipline and paradigm. Zuckermann`s term Revival Linguistics is modelled upon 'Contact Linguistics' (<language contact). Revival linguistics inter alia explores the universal constraints and mechanisms involved in language reclamation, renewal and revitalization. It draws perspicacious comparative insights from one revival attempt to another, thus acting as an epistemological bridge between parallel discourses in various local attempts to revive sleeping tongues all over the globe.

There is a need to map the revival attempts throughout Aboriginal Australia by (1) assessing the success of the revival so far; and (2) categorizing the specific need on a continuum of revival efforts, e.g. reclamation (e.g. Kaurna), renewal (e.g. Ngarrindjeri) and revitalization (e.g. Walmajarri) – cf. other RE-terms to be defined such as restoration, resurrection, resuscitation, reinvigoration, reintroduction, regenesis, revernacularization, reawakening, rebirth and renaissance.

Needless to say, even if there is eventually a sound understanding and awareness of the linguistic/sociolinguistic issues involved and even if the endeavour is well-theorised, language revival efforts may well still fail. Internal factional politics are likely to be far more influential in deciding the fate of a language revival movement that any linguistic theory or lack of one. There is no doubt that the first stage of any desire by professional linguists to assist in language revival involves a long initial period of carefully observing, listening, learning and characterizing each indigenous community specifically. Only then can we inspire and assist. That said, this article proposes that there are linguistic constraints applicable to all revival attempts. Mastering them would be most useful to endangered languages in general and to Aboriginal linguistic revival in particular.

While we know that language revitalization can have numerous beneficial effects, we also know that some revival efforts are more successful than others (see Walsh forthcoming A). A better understanding of success in this arena by surveying numerous language reinvigoration efforts in Australia, and by drawing on lessons from the Hebrew revival, will enable less waste of resources and better outcomes. Besides significant scholarly impact and intellectual benefits, the results of such endeavours will also improve substantially the future of Australia's Indigenous communities, promoting and maintaining their physical, spiritual and cultural good health through:

(1) Transformation of disturbed individuals;

(2) Capacity building: Some Aboriginal people will undertake training only because they are interested in language(s). However, what they will learn in the process are useful generic skills such as literacy, computer literacy, conducting research and giving speeches in public;

(3) Improved sense of well being in the local Aboriginal community;

(4) Reconciliation and potential decrease in racism towards Aboriginal people in some country centres;

(5) Promoting cultural tourism to Aboriginal areas in order to learn about their cultures and languages.

Regaining language is a life-changing experience for many Aboriginal people. One Aboriginal person has told us that he used to be angry, often drunk and in trouble with police and his home life was a mess. Two years later, when he had regained his language, his situation had turned around and his family life had greatly improved.

Through this and other experiences we became convinced that a small investment in language revitalization could yield very significant dividends. Language revival can result in the saving of vast amounts of money and resources going into housing, social services and health intervention to little effect. A small investment into language revitalization can make an enormous difference to society. Public health can benefit from language intervention.

To date such money as has been devoted to Aboriginal language revival and maintenance has not been well targeted. This is partly because Australian Indigenous language policies have been piecemeal and un-coordinated at best or otherwise non-existent or implicit (Liddicoat 2008, McKay 2007, 2009, Truscott and Malcolm forthcoming; see also http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/ aust/policy.html – accessed 6 July 2010). We aim at a better informed Indigenous language policy at the national level, as well as in particular institutional contexts. For instance, in considering Indigenous policies of Australian universities, Gunstone (2008: 107) complains: ‘it is apparent that universities are still largely failing to adequately address the educational needs of Indigenous staff, students and communities.’

As cellist Yo Yo Ma said on 28 November 2000 at the White House Conference on Culture and Diplomacy:

A Senegalese poet said 'In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.' We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.


References

Amery, Rob 2000. Warrabarna Kaurna: Reclaiming an Australian Language. Swets and Zeitlinger, Lisse, The Netherlands.
Amery, Rob 2001a. 'Language Planning and Language Revival', Current Issues in Language Planning 2: 141-221.
Amery, Rob 2001b. 'Regenerating a Kaurna Literature'. Paper presented at the AULLA Conference, Uni of Adelaide, February 2001.
Amery, Rob (ed.) 2003. Warra Kaurna: A Resource for Kaurna Language Programs. 3rd edition revised and expanded. Kaurna Warra Pintyandi, c/- University of South Australia. Reprinted September 2005, Image and Copy Centre, The University of Adelaide. (Includes corrections, addition of introductory notes about the Kaurna language, translations and protocols, timeline of significant events, recent neologisms and sections on modern clothing, modern artifacts and new technologies.)
Amery, Rob and Lester Irabinna Rigney 2004. 'Authenticity in Language Revival'. Paper presented at the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA) annual conference held at the University of South Australia, 17th July 2004.
Amery, Rob and Alice Wallara Rigney with Nelson Varcoe, Chester Schultz and Kaurna Warra Pintyandi (2006) Kaurna Palti Wonga – Kaurna Funeral Protocols (book, CD and sympathy cards). Kaurna Warra Pintyandi, Adelaide. (launched 20 May 2006)
Amery, Rob and Gale, Mary-Anne 2007. 'But our language was just asleep: a history of language revival in Australia', pp. 339-382 of William B. McGregor (ed.), Encountering Aboriginal languages: studies in the history of Australian linguistics, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Amery, Rob with Kaurna Warra Pintyandi 2007. 'Kulluru Marni Ngattaitya! Sounds Good to me! A Kaurna Learner’s Guide.' Draft Protoype Version. (publication forthcoming)
Ash, Anna; Hooler, Pauline, Williams, Gary; and Walker, Ken (forthcoming). ‘Maam Ngawaala: Biindu Ngaawa Nyanggan Bindaayili. Language Centres: Keeping Language Strong’ in John Hobson, Kevin Lowe, Susan Poetsch and Michael Walsh (eds), Re-Awakening languages: Theory and practice in the revitalisation of Australia's Indigenous languages. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Clark, I.D. and Kostanski, 2005, ‘Reintroducing Indigenous Placenames – Lessons from Gariwerd, Victoria, Australia, Or, How to address toponymic dispossession in ways that celebrate cultural diversity and inclusiveness’, Abstract submitted to ‘Names in Time and Space’, Twenty Second International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, 28 August – 4 September 2005, Università Di Pisa, Italy.
Couzens, Vicki and Christina Eira (forthcoming). ‘Meeting Point: Parameters for a Typology of Revival Languages’ (submitted to Peter Austin and Julia Sallabank (eds), Endangered Languages: Ideologies and Beliefs, Oxford University Press).
Crystal, David 2000. Language Death. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Dalby, Andrew 2003. Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to our Future. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dorian, Nancy C. 1994. ‘Purism vs. Compromise in Language Revitalization and Language Revival’, Language in Society 23: 479-494.
Evans, Nicholas 2010. Dying Words. Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. Malden – Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Fishman, Joshua A. 1980. 'Minority Language Maintenance and the Ethnic Mother Tongue School,' Modern Language Journal, 64 (2): 167-172.
Fishman, Joshua A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon (UK): Multilingual Matters.
Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.) 2001. Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift, Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective. Clevedon (UK): Multilingual Matters.
Gunstone, Andrew 2008. 'Australian University approaches to Indigenous policy'. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 37: 103-108.
Hagège, Claude 2009. On the Death and Life of Languages. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson 1963. Review of The Truth About Death in Journal of Genetics 58: 463-464.
Harlow, Ray 1993. ‘Lexical Expansion in Maori’. Journal of the Polynesian Society 102.1: 99-107.
Hinton, Leanne and Ahlers, Jocelyn 1999. ‘The Issue of "Authenticity"
in California Language Restoration’. Anthropology and Education Quarterly (Authenticity and Identity: Lessons from Indigenous Language Education, March 1999) 30.1: 56-67.
Horvath, Julia and Wexler, Paul (eds) 1997. Relexification in Creole and Non-Creole Languages – With Special Attention to Haitian Creole, Modern Hebrew, Romani, and Rumanian (Mediterranean Language and Culture Monograph Series, vol. xiii). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
Lewis, Geoffrey L. 1999. The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Liddicoat, Anthony J. 2008 ‘Models of national government language-in-education policy for indigenous minority language groups’. In Timothy J. Curnow (ed.) Selected papers from the 2007 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. Adelaide.
http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2007/liddicoat.pdf [Accessed 6 July 2010].
McKay, Graham 2007. 'Language maintenance, shift and planning', pp. 101-130 of Gerhard Leitner and Ian Malcolm (eds), The Habitat of Australia's Aboriginal Languages: past, present, and future. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
McKay, Graham 2009. 'English and Indigenous languages in the Australian language policy environment', pp. 283-297 of Honglin Chen and Ken Cruickshank (eds), Making a Difference: Challenges for Applied Linguistics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Mühlhäusler, Peter and Damania, Richard 2004. ‘Economic Costs and Benefits of Australian Indigenous Languages’. http://www.arts.gov.au/indigenous/MILR/publications [accessed 6 July 2010]
Ngarritjan-Kessaris, T. and Ford, L. 2007. Tyikim/Blekbala perspectives on language. In G. Leitner and I. Malcolm (eds). The habitat of Australia's Aboriginal languages: Past, present and future. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 355-369.
Penfield, Susan D., Angelina Serratos, Benjamin V. Tucker, Amelia Flores, Gilford Harper, John Hill Jr. and Nora Vasquez 2008 Community collaborations: best practices for North American Indigenous language documentation. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 191, 187–202.
Proctor, Jo and Gale, Mary-Anne (eds) 1997. Tauondi speaks from the heart: Aboriginal poems from Tauondi College. Port Adelaide: Tauondi College, 1997.
Reid, Nicholas (forthcoming). ‘English Influence on the Pronunciation of Re-awakened Aboriginal Languages’ in John Hobson, Kevin Lowe, Susan Poetsch and Michael Walsh (eds), Re-Awakening languages: Theory and practice in the revitalisation of Australia's Indigenous languages. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Reviving Languages: warranna purruttiappendi: tumbelin tungarar: renewal and reclamation programs for indigenous languages in schools 1999. Adelaide: Department of Education, Training and Employment (DETE). Notes by Guy Tunstill.
Sapir, Edward 1921. Language. An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Sapir, Yair and Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2008. ‘Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching’, pp. 19-43 (Chapter 2) (References: 296-325) of Judith Rosenhouse and Rotem Kowner (eds), Globally Speaking: Motives for Adopting English Vocabulary in Other Languages. Clevedon – Buffalo – Toronto: Multilingual Matters.
Shandler, Jeffrey 2005. Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture. University of California Press.
Shur, Shimon A. 2000. Gdud meginéy hasafá beérets israél 1923-1936 (The Language Defendants Regiment in Eretz Yisrael 1923-36). Haifa: Herzl Institute for Research and Study of Zionism.
Sutton, Peter 2009. The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Thieberger, Nicholas 1990. ‘Language Maintenance: Why Bother?’. Multilingua - Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 9.4: 333-¬358.
Thieberger, Nicholas 2002. 'Extinction in whose terms? Which parts of a language constitute a target for language maintenance programmes?', pp. 310-328 of David Bradley and Maya Bradley (eds) Language Endangerment and Language Maintenance. London: Routledge Curzon.
Truscott, Adriano and Ian Malcolm (forthcoming). 'Closing the Policy-Practice Gap: Making Indigenous Language Policy More than Empty Rhetoric' in John Hobson, Kevin Lowe, Susan Poetsch and Michael Walsh (eds), Re-Awakening languages: Theory and practice in the revitalisation of Australia's Indigenous languages. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Walsh, Michael 2001a. 'A case of language revitalisation in ‘settled’ Australia', Current Issues in Language Planning 2(2and3): 251-8.
Walsh, Michael 2001b. Review of Rob Amery Warrabarna Kaurna! Reclaiming an Australian Language. Current Issues in Language Planning 2(2and3), 300-302.
Walsh, Michael 2002. 'Language ownership: a key issue for Native Title', in John Henderson and David Nash (eds) Language and Native Title. Canberra: Native Title Research Series, Aboriginal Studies Press, 230-244.
Walsh, Michael 2003. 'Raising Babel: language revitalization in NSW, Australia', in Joe Blythe and R. McKenna Brown (eds) Maintaining the Links. Language, Identity and the Land. Proceedings of the Seventh Conference Presented by the Foundation for Endangered Languages. Broome, Western Australia, 22-24 September 2003. Bath: Foundation for Endangered Languages, 113-117.
Walsh, Michael 2005a. 'Indigenous Languages of Southeast Australia, Revitalization and the Role of Education', Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. 28(2): 1-14.
Walsh, Michael 2005b. 'Learning while revitalizing: Aboriginal languages in New South Wales, Australia', in May, S., Franken, M., and Barnard, R. (eds.) (2005), LED2003: Refereed Conference Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Language, Education and Diversity. Hamilton: Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research, University of Waikato.
Walsh, Michael 2005c. 'Will Indigenous languages survive?', Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 293-315.
Walsh, Michael 2007. 'Indigenous languages: Transitions from the past to the present' in Gerhard Leitner and Ian Malcolm (eds.) The Habitat of Australia's Aboriginal Languages: Past, Present and Future. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 79-99.
Walsh, Michael 2008. 'Is saving languages a good investment?' in Rob Amery and Joshua Nash (eds) .Warra Wiltaniappendi Strengthening Languages: Proceedings of the Inaugural Indigenous Languages Conference (ILC), 24-27 September 2007, University of Adelaide. Adelaide: Discipline of Linguistics, University of Adelaide, 41-50.
Walsh, Michael 2009. 'California Down Under: Indigenous language revitalization in New South Wales, Australia' (with Kevin Lowe) in Wesley Leonard and Stelómethet Ethel B. Gardner (eds) Language is Life. Proceedings of the 11th Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Conference. June 10-13, 2004, University of California at Berkeley. Berkeley: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, 100-115.
Walsh, Michael [forthcoming A]. 'Why language revitalization sometimes works' in John Hobson, Kevin Lowe, Susan Poetsch and Michael Walsh (eds), Re-Awakening languages: Theory and practice in the revitalisation of Australia's Indigenous languages. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Walsh, Michael [forthcoming B]. 'The link between language revitalization and Aboriginal health: mental, physical and social' (to be submitted to Medical Journal of Australia)
Walsh, Michael and Troy, Jakelin 2005c. 'Languages Off Country? Revitalizing the 'Right' Indigenous Languages in the South East of Australia', in Nigel Crawhall and Nicholas Ostler (eds.) Creating Outsiders: Endangered Languages, Migration and Marginalization. (Proceedings of Ninth Conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 18-20 November 2005). Bath: Foundation for Endangered Languages, 71-81.
Walsh, Michael and Troy, Jakelin 2004. 'Terminology planning in Aboriginal Australia', Current Issues in Language Planning Vol. 5 (2): 151-165.
Walsh, Michael and Troy, Jakelin 2008b. 'Terminology planning in Aboriginal Australia' in Anthony J. Liddicoat and Richard B. Baldauf Jr. (eds) Language Planning and Policy: Language Planning in Local Contexts. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 156-170.
Wong, Laiana 1999. ‘Authenticity and the Revitalization of Hawaiian’. Anthropology and Education Quarterly (Authenticity and Identity: Lessons from Indigenous Language Education, March 1999) 30.1: 94-115.
Yadin, Azzan and Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2010. 'Blorít: Pagans' Mohawk or Sabras' Forelock?: Ideologically Manipulative Secularization of Hebrew Terms in Socialist Zionist Israeli,' pp. 84-125 (Chapter 6) of Tope Omoniyi (ed.), The Sociology of Language and Religion: Change, Conflict and Accommodation. London – New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 1999. Review Article of Nakdimon Shabbethay Doniach and Ahuvia Kahane (eds), The Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary. Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. International Journal of Lexicography 12: 325-46.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2003. Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. London – New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2005. 'Abba, why was Professor Higgins trying to teach Eliza to speak like our cleaning lady?: Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, prescriptivism and the real sounds of the Israeli language.' Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 19, pp. 210-231.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2008a. Israelít safá yafá (Israeli – A Beautiful Language). Tel Aviv: Am Oved.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2008b. '"Realistic Prescriptivism": The Academy of the Hebrew Language, its Campaign of "Good Grammar" and Lexpionage, and the Native Israeli Speakers.' Israel Studies in Language and Society 1.1: 135-154.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2009. 'Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns.' Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2: 40-67.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2010. 'Do Israelis Understand the Hebrew Bible?', The Bible and Critical Theory 6.1-6.7. DOI:10.2104/bc100006
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad 2011. 'Hebrew Revivalists’ Goals vis-à-vis the Emerging Israeli Language' in Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García (eds), Volume II of The Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity: The Success and Failure Continuum, Oxford University Press.
Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (forthcoming). Language Revival and Multiple Causation. New York: Oxford University Press.



Brief Bios:

Prof. Ghil'ad Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics of Endangered Languages and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow at the University of Adelaide, and 211 Professor at Shanghai International Studies University. He is the author of Language Revival and Multiple Causation (Oxford Univ Press, forthcoming), Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli - A Beautiful Language) (Am Oved, 2008) and Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). He has been Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, has taught e.g. at the Univ of Queensland, Univ of Cambridge and National Univ of Singapore, and has been research fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference Center (Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy), Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (UT Austin) and Japan's National Language Research Institute. www.zuckermann.org
Ghil'ad Zuckermann's EMAIL: gzuckermann@gmail.com.

Since 1972 Dr Michael Walsh has conducted fieldwork in the Top End of the Northern Territory, mainly in the Darwin-Daly region. This has been a mixture of academic endeavours as well as consultancies since 1979 mainly relating to Aboriginal land issues. From 1999 he has participated in the revitalization of Aboriginal languages in NSW. From 1982 until 2005 he was part of the teaching staff of the Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney. Since then, he has continued his research interests especially through a large ARC grant involving a team of linguists and musicologists running from 2004 to 2010. http://azoulay.arts.usyd.edu.au/mpsong/
Michael Walsh's EMAIL: michael.walsh@sydney.edu.au

Moya-Maleno, P.R. (2017): “Majanos y difuntos: túmulos en la Hispania Céltica desde una perspectiva de Larga Duración”, en M. Almagro-Gorbea y A. Gari Lacruz (eds.): Sacra Saxa: Creencias y ritos en peñas sagradas. Actas del Coloquio Internacional celebrado en Huesca del 25 al 27 de noviembre de 2016. Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses. Huesca. ISBN: 978-84-8127-285-7. pp. 34-65.

The Spir Mountain Cairns are two exceptionally well preserved Bronze Age cairns in Ångermanland, Norrland, Sweden. This is by all means a prehistoric site that deserves more attention. Most of Sweden's cairns are dated to the Bronze Age. The dominant position of the surrounding area is often typical, and some scholars believe that they have been markings for particular groups, tribes, clans or families. Scandinavian Cairns from the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age are cremation burials.
Keywords: Scandinavia, Sweden, Norrland, Ångermanland, Örnsköldsvik, Spir Mountain Cairns, Bronze Age Europe, Bronze Age Archaeology, Conservation of archaeological stone monuments, Bronze Age Cairns, Bronze Age Scandinavia.

In the following paper, an attempt is made to form a model to explain the location of late prehistoric sites in the Flint Hills area of the Central Plains. To achieve this, early journals and historic records describing the Native American groups known to have inhabited the area were examined. These were then used to reconstruct known travel routes and occupation sites used by these groups, and to describe the annual seasonal round they followed to gather resources. Archeological reports from the area were then reviewed to find any sites or data that might shed additional light on this pattern. Source areas of raw materials, known to have been important to native peoples, were also located, using ecological references. Finally, cultural factors such as tradition or religious beliefs, which can also significantly affect site location, were examined. These factors vary in importance and are often interdependent. By comparing the geographic locations of occupation sites, travel routes, and raw material source areas to cultural biases, and the seasonal round of native peoples, a model to explain the location of many late prehistoric archeological sites in the area was obtained.

During several periods from 1984 to 1986, a pedestrian survey of the upper Deep Creek Drainage, in Riley, Geary and Wabaunsee Counties of Kansas, was performed. The project area is in the northern Flint Hills, a few miles south of Manhattan on a tributary to the Kansas River. Because this drainage is a natural unit, small enough to be covered by the limited funding available yet rich in both historic and prehistoric sites, it was particularly well suited to a study of prehistoric human ecology. The survey covered portions of forty-eight sections with a land area equivalent of nearly thirty-seven sections. Two hundred and twenty-nine sites, twenty-one of which contained historic components, were recorded. Two hundred and twenty-one isolated finds were also recorded, and evidence for an "Indian trail" from the early historic period was located. Most of the sites found were directly related to prehistoric quarrying and/or to the trail. Most of the sites were confined to the surface, and very few of the lithics were diagnostic. Therefore, good temporal control for prehistoric sites in this area was difficult.

This was a very productive field survey of an area of upland adjacent to Dunmail Raise, an axial crossing point of the mountains of the Lake District. It was carried out as part of a project to consider the use and significance of the Cumbrian Mountains in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Periods when the Stone Axe Factories of the Central Fells were in production. Clearance cairns and likely burial cairns as well as ring cairns were amongst the prehistoric features identified hereabouts.

This paper emphasizes the landscape as a key factor in the long-term standing of one of Norway's largest prehistoric burial grounds: the Iron Age cemetery of Hereid, located in the village of Eidfjord in the Hardanger region. A recent field investigation generated important new data on the Hereid site, which has contributed to the high-resolution analysis of the cemetery presented here. The paper explores the wider 'meshwork' of people, animals, farm settlement, outfield resources and tracks within a new materialist perspective to argue that the Hardanger landscape served as a co-agent when constructing a regional mortuary order. Theories of relational agency are used to investigate whether Hereid's geography and topography can explain its scale and continuity. It is argued that Eidfjord constituted a focal point for wayfaring to and from the Hardangervidda mountain plateau, and the significance of the site is closely tied to its favourable location with regard to these communication routes and outfield resources. Beyond this case, the funerary settings in other large and medium sized cemeteries in Hardanger mirror Hereid remarkably. They all draw our attention to landscapes that facilitated movement and demonstrate the societal importance of burials and cemeteries in a long time perspective.

Suite à l’évolution de la science, les disciplines entament de nouvelles orientations dont certaines s’inscrivent dans le paradigme de la complexité. De ce fait, il devient opportun d’étudier la possibilité que les sciences sociales adoptent une complexité dans leur application et dans leur théologie. Il convient aussi d’analyser si cette approche par complexité contribue à l’avancée de ces disciplines et/ou permet de créer des nouveaux champs ou si sans le remarquer, certaines disciplines des sciences sociales avaient déjà une complexité non remarquée. Cet article annonce une réflexion sur l’ontologie du marketing en fonction de la complexité.

A cairn field was excavated at the divide between Nahal Mitnan and Wadi el-Halufi in the western Negev Highlands, 3-7 km east of 'Ain el Qudeirat, as part of a rescue excavation project along the border road between Israel and Egypt. The caim field (Fig. 1), spread over an area of about 4 sq km on a series of hilltops, contains some 250 caims in 11 main clusters, and is one of the largest caim fields in the Negev Highlands. The site was first surveyed by Z. Meshel (1973), although the caim field described by Woolley and Lawrence (1915:7) at the source of Wadi 'Ain el-Qudeirat may be part of the same field. In 1980, the field was surveyed by the author part of the Negev Emergency Survey (Haiman 1986). In 1982, a rescue excavation was carried out in Clusters 1 and 3.

Moya-Maleno, P.R. (2016): “Sacra Saxa: Creencias y ritos en peñas sagradas. Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses - Gabinete de Antigüedades de la Real Academia de la Historia. Huesca, 25-27 de noviembre de 2016”, en Complutum, 27(2). Universidad Complutense. Madrid. pp. 436-447. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/CMPL.54755.

Two trails are reported here. One ran along the crest of the Flint Hills from Oklahoma to Nebraska. The other led from Pawnee villages in central Nebraska to the Great Bend of the Arkansas River. Both of these trails, and others in the Central Plains followed the divides between stream systems in order to obtain the easiest route of travel. The trails have great potential to illuminate the archaeology of the region. Associated sites include villages, campsites, cairns, quarries, burials, petroglyphs, and sacred animal lodges.

This article examines the convergence of amateur and professional documentary practice, particularly photographic self-portraiture, as it is performed on the mountainside. It uses a tight selection of examples drawn from the community of hillwalkers known as ‘Wainwrighters’ to examine the phenomenon of ‘produsage’ (Bruns 2008).

While the world of digitally co-created artefacts may seem a distance away from the top of a mountain, I argue here that high peaks and mountain tops are no more immune from the influence of social media than any other space. In this context, the article seeks to answer a series of questions relating to the practice of taking ‘summit selfies’: What do the self-made digital artworks produced by walkers, and disseminated in tight-knit online communities of mountain hikers, look like? What is it about the mountains that provokes such forms of mediatized self-expression? And how do artefacts evolve and transform, to form ‘palimpsests’ as Axel Bruns terms the outputs of produsage? These questions are discussed in relation to three main examples sited in the Lake District National Park in England: Karen’s Forster’s 214 Headstands, my own celebration of ‘Completion’ on the peak of Pillar; and Charlotte Mellor’s #HoopingtheWainwrights project.

The article concludes by repositioning the selfie as a collective creative act and challenging its popular representation as an expression of youthful selfishness.

Nova Scotia’s only monument to any group of Germans who settled in the province is located in a rural area of Annapolis County. On the corner of the Purdy Road and the Waldeck Line Road,a few kilometres East of Bear River, is located a Cairn which marks the Waldeck Line Road and remembers the men of the Waldeck Regiment who fought in the American Revolution on theside of the British and afterwards came to Nova Scotia to settle.

In August 2016, the In-Africa Project, which focuses on the palaeo-environment and human occupation of West Turkana during the late Quaternary (http://in-africa.org/), encountered a stone platform and cairn whilst surveying an area between the Napudet Mountains and the Kerio River in Southwest Turkana. Different from other simple cairns in the area, this structure, locally known as Aliel, also exhibits: a) a single standing stone within the construction of the cairn; and b) a significant assemblage of pottery sherds (including Nderit ware) upon the surface of the platform. Cairns, circles, platforms and stone structures are well-known features of the prehistory of the Turkana Basin (Robbins, 2006, Wright et al., 2016), including complex megalithic architecture in the form of ‘Pillar sites’ characterised by the presence of multiple stone pillars emplaced vertically on the ground within a constructed platform, such as Lothagam, Jarigole and Kalokol (Hildebrand et al. 2011, Grillo & Hi...

Saidel, B. A.
2014 Suggestions for Future Research  In Saidel, B.A. and Haiman, M. (eds.), Excavations in the Western Negev Highlands: Results of the Negev Emergency Survey 1978-1989. Pp. 177-184. BAR International Series 2684. Oxford: Archaeopress

The history of prehistoric monument building on the coast of central Västerbotten is put into the perspective of the environmental history of the region to find out if the society constructing these monuments based its activity on agriculture, pastoralism or hunting-gathering. A new method of past river sedimentation reconstruction is proposed which presents a continuous record of the land use. The sedimentation history is compared to the settlement history of the valleys by studying finds, archaeological sites and the monuments dated by the past shore lines. The different sources concord and tell the story of a population practicing agriculture or pastoralism on fertile lands close to the river deltas during the main phase of monumentalisation of the coast in the Early Bronze Age. Their funeral monuments were constructed several kilometres away on rocky ground situated directly on the sea shore or on small islands because of their beliefs in an afterlife in connection with the sea, as shows a closer study of the monuments’ morphology and situation in the long alignment near Ånäset. A trackway following the past shore line in the same period seems to have connected the monumentalised coast to the activity area of the Flarkån river valley.

The Norse settlements of the North Atlantic are located in dramatic landscapes, often a single farmstead at a time, sitting alone in a terrain devoid of cultural markers and monuments. This article attempts to explore how a sense of home could be constructed in landscapes like these. Based on the anthropologically informed threshold theory of determining the extent of home combined with archaeological data, the most likely limit of the Norse home can be demonstrated to be the home field boundary. There is, however, often at least one more encircling line to be found in the landscape around the farmstead: a line of cairns that crowns the horizon line behind the farmstead. When these cairns and the line they describe are compared to the extent of the landscape room of the particular site, they are seen to closely coincide with this. In this way, they strengthen the sense of home that shapes and is shaped by the extent of the landscape room, laying cultural claim to an otherwise entirely natural landscape. The cairns thus extend the Norse home into the natural landscape—the wild—and become the materialization of the relationship between North Atlantic nature and the culture of the Norse farmsteads.

La valorisation de l'eau, levier du développement et de la création d'emplois : cas des activités agricoles dans la région de Jendouba en Tunisie Par Luwawu kalemba Nathan (Luwawu K.N) Résumé : La notion de la valeur tel que abordée en marketing ou dans les disciplines économiques, permet de nos jours à comprendre plusieurs phénomènes et situations que ce soit d'une approche économiques, hédonique, altruiste que sociale. A l'aide de la notion de la valeur perçue (PERVAL) nous essayons de démontrer combien une valorisation économique de l'eau pourrait conduire à la création d'emploi et ainsi causer un développement de la région.

Within the framework of the Negev Emergency Survey, an area of 450 km2 in the western Negev Highlands was surveyed. Hundreds of cairns were discovered in 1500 sites. This article deals with dating the cairns and with questions regarding their function as graves. Based on Kochavi's excavation of Har Yeroham (1967), it is sug- gested that the cairns be divided into two categories, one of large cairn fields at the tops of hills, the second of small groups of cairns in settlements. The current survey dates the large cairn fields to the Early Bronze Age because they were associated with settlement sites from that period. However, individual cairns were found in set- tlement sites from different periods. The vast majority (92.5 percent) of cairns in the cairn fields were empty, while most of those excavated in settlement sites (83.3 per- cent) contained human remains. It is thus suggested that the large cairn fields in the Negev Highlands were not burial sites, but were probably used in a death ritual