Some good papers available on web

The number of linguistics papers dealing with East Timor languages is low and is very hard to find available on web as well. Today, I will post talking about good papers that can be found on web.


I start with Hull’s paper The Languages of East Timor. Some Basic Facts. that is available on:
http://www.portphillip.vic.gov.au/default/CommunityGovernanceDocuments/The_Languages_of_East_Timor_Some_Basic_Facts.pdf.
I already cited this paper on a previous post (Preliminaries Notes 2: Number of Languages). On this publication, Hull (2002) presents a review of the results of his research with a lot of information about linguistic contact, historical linguistics, and notorious facts about each language.

Two others are available on:
http://webzoom.freewebs.com/jpesperanca/Timor%20e%20cultura/crioulo_Timor.pdf
and http://webzoom.freewebs.com/jpesperanca/ling_timor.pdf. Both are Esperança authorship, a Portuguese linguist (for a complete list of Esperanças’s works visit: http://www.freewebs.com/jpesperanca/). Actually, they are chapters of his book called Estudos de Lingüística Timorense (Esperança 2001). This book contains in each chapter Esperança’s paper about East Timor linguistic situation during the 90s.

The first one is an important paper in which the author has a hypothesis that the Bidau Creole Portuguese (BCP) influenced Tetum language. This is exactly the contrary that Baxter (1990), as others previous authors that written about BCP, attested, because there are indeed a lot of linguistic data that show the influence that BCP suffer from Tetum. Esperança does not deny this Tetum influence on BCP, but show that BCP influenced Tetum as well. In others words, the influence it was on both ways BCP>Tetum, and Tetum> BCP. I recently have finished a paper (Albuquerque 2009) analyzing these influences and the importance of BCP to Portuguese language spoken in East Timor at the present time.

The second one is a miscellaneous with several chapters of the book. There is a long chapter with an introductory phonological description of Tetum called Inventário de fonemas do tétum, um olhar sobre a sílaba e algumas questões sobre a reduplicação. In this chapter there is a segmental inventory of Tetum, an analysis of syllable structure and reduplication. The others chapters are brief observations about linguistic policy for native languages and Portuguese language.

So, if you are looking for introductory papers on Tetum, and others East Timor native languages, those are good links for you check it out!!!

References:

Albuquerque, D. B. 2009. Revisitando o português crioulo de Bidau: contato e influências lingüísticas. Unpublished Manuscript.

Baxter, A. 1990. “Notes on the Creole Portuguese of Bidau, East Timor”. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 5: 1-38.

Esperança, J. P. T. 2001. Estudos de Lingüística Timorense. SUL, Aveiro.

Hull, G. 2002. The Languages of East Timor. Some basic facts. Available on: http://www.portphillip.vic.gov.au/default/CommunityGovernanceDocuments/The_Languages_of_East_Timor_Some_Basic_Facts.pdf