My summer holidays have given me much needed time to review some work I did early last year, searching for signs of syntactic ergativity in Pama-Nyungan languages.
The boy I employ for such work was up and down the ladders in my library looking for the raw data, at least when he was not fixing me a cocktail, filling my foot bath, or attending to my other needs.
The finer technical points of linguistic typology may be lost on some readers - I, of course, have a degree in the subject - but for the young Dunedin person who has spent the holiday season searching for a path into the opaque and mystifying world of linguistics, the excellent Heartland channel has the answer.
Next Sunday (January 15), Heartland is bringing back the marvellous New Zild: The Story of New Zealand English, at 7.30pm.
Even the dullest, most lacklustre and boorish young person, or adult for that matter, should find their interest sparked by this excellent 2005 documentary.
New Zild begins with what one would expect from such an outing, looking at regional variations like the rolling `r' of Southland.
It follows the changes to Kiwi vowels that make Australians laugh at us when we purchase deep-fried sea food and potato portions, and when we say the number that relates most closely to half-a-dozen.
New Zild passes through some of the basic tenets of sociolinguistics, setting the scene for one of the more fascinating areas of local language research, an area that should take the interest of Otago viewers.
The Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) Project, based in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, has charted the origins, features and changes of New Zealand English.
New Zild plays us just some of the remarkable recordings used by ONZE, put on tape by a mobile unit that, in the 1940s, gathered the speech sounds of speakers born between 1851 and 1910.
The unit was created by the New Zealand National Broadcasting Service between 1946 and 1948 to gather pioneer reminiscences, but became a linguistic goldmine.
It has a recording of Mr Anthony Tweed, of Milton, who early last century had the strongest rolling `r' you might like to hear, a linguistic feature that at one time spread throughout New Zealand, before retreating to Southland.
It has Mrs Annie Hamilton of Arrowtown, who, all that time ago, had already changed her short 'a' sounds to short 'e' sounds, meaning "sacks" came out as "sex", and `'packed" came out as "pecked".
It is fascinating, and must be watched, if only to keep the children out of the sun.
