[Mihalic] MAF scanning project

[BURTON John]

Hello Maurie (list members FYI)

No, I haven't forgotten. You contacted me at about the time that I was negotiating the hosting of a wider project to revise Mihalic's dictionary. This got off the ground in 2000, when we formed an email list and called it the 'Revising the Mihalic project'. I have subscribed you. Further information at:

http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/PNG/MIHALIC/Index.htm

As you will see from the site, the list members and I are going through Mihalic's entries and revising them. As you know, Frank Mihalic died in 2001 and we have also lost Prof Otto Nekitel from Linguistics UPNG, who indicated he would have liked to be a stakeholder. The formal host of the project is Divine Word University, though the web site is physically at ANU. I am in Torres Stait.

It is not 100% essential for us to have an electronic version of Mihalic's text, but if you do have increasingly complete amounts of it, we would be glad to receive a copy and we could put it on the site if you like. My intention is to have a first round of revision complete by the end of 2003 (probably unlikely) and then for us to switch our energies to having a series of workshops of a period of time. I haven't contacted Divine Word recently, but it would be logical to start with one there. Divine Word also has a fair amount of unpublished Mihalic material I believe.

To be clear, copyright in the dictionary was given ostensibly to me by Mihalic, but I wrote back to him and said it will belong to the project, and in that way to the list members, of which you are now the 60th. In other words, use the text how you like from private purposes, but post to the list by emailing mihalic at anu.edu.au in order to consult the other members on any matters to do with wider dissemination.

Regards 

John Burton
Revising the Mihalic project

-----Original Message-----
From: Maurie & Marg. May [mailto:mmay at daltron.com.pg]
Sent: Tuesday, 29 April 2003 6:44 PM
To: Burton, John
Subject: Tok Pisin


G'day John,

You probably do not remember me. I contacted you quite a while ago asking
permission to copy / use the Mihalic Tok Pisin dictionary for MAF personnel
in PNG, which you generously granted. It's a long time since I've been in
contact with you, but my interest in Tok Pisin remains.

I am now in Canberra. We came down on leave, but have had to stay on longer
than expected due to health problems. The extra time I've been using to put
the dictionary onto disc. One of our pilots scanned it all some time ago,
but unfortunately he had an English spell checker turned on at the time,
which combined with the usual OCR errors, has done some very strange things
to some Tok Pisin words. Consequently, I have been going through it word by
word checking everything against one of the dictionaries, and saving the
resulting pages as individual .RTF files.

I'm now on page 112, so progress is being made. When I last spoke to you by
email, you expressed an interest in getting these pages onto your web site.
If you are still interested, please give me a yell and we'll organise
getting them to you.

You can get me at this Email address, or 'phone me on 0403 559 454 or 6242
7060. I'll be out of town from Thursday afternoon (1st May) until Tuesday
morning(6th May), but will still be contactable by email or mobile during
that time.

Cheers

Maurie May