Core team members
The Waimaha documentation project is being undertaken by five main researchers. A number of other researchers are also contributing to the project, as you can glean from the documents found under the Commentary node of the corpus. The main researchers come from three different countries: East Timor, Australia and Germany. You can follow the links on this page to pages giving further details on each of them.
Maurício da Conceicão Aparício Belo, Caisido Village
Maurício is a native speaker of Waimaha and comes from Caisido village near Baucau in East Timor. As well as Waimaha, Maurício speaks Tetum and Malay. He also learned some Portuguese after independence.
John Bowden, Jakarta Field Station, MPI für evolutionäre Anthropologie, Leipzig
During the main phase of the project (2002-2006) John was a research fellow in linguistics at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. He then went on to work as a researcher and local manager of the Jakarta Field Station of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He has spent a large part of his professional career working on minority indigenous languages from East Timor and eastern Indonesia.
John Hajek, University of Melbourne
John is Professor of Italian and a linguist in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Trained originally in Italian, French and Romance linguistics, he had already worked closely with the East Timorese expatriate community in Melbourne before the start of the Waima’a documentation project. He is fluent in Tetum and continues to work on and teach Timorese languages and cultures.
Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Universität zu Köln
Nikolaus is Professor in Linguistics at the Universität zu Köln in Germany. He has a long-standing interest in linguistic typology and the languages of Austronesian family. He has worked in the Philippines, Indonesia, and East Timor.
Alex V. Tilman, Dili/Melbourne
Alex grew up in an East Timorese expatriate family in Australia, speaking Portuguese and Tetum as his two main languages. He joint the project when he was studying in Melbourne, helping with annotations in Portuguese and Tetum.
John (left) and Maurício (right) working in an office of the Research and Resource Center of the Instituto Católico para Formação de Professores (ICFP) in 2003 (© NP Himmelmann)
Maurício (left) and Nikolaus (right) discussing Waima’a data on the balcony of Hotel Timor Leste in 2003 (© J Bowden)
Alex (left) and Maurício (right) in Baucau, 2006 (© AV Tilman)
Contact
Nikolaus P. Himmelmann
Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Institut für Linguistik
Universität zu Köln
50923 Köln
Germany
E-Mail: sprachwissenschaft@uni-koeln.de
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Waimaha research team would like most to thank the people of Caisido village for their cooperation in this documentation project. Without them, the project would not exist. All of the efforts of the Waimaha people who have contributed their time and energy to talking with us, letting us record them, and welcomed us into their community is very much appreciated.
There are also a number of institutions who have contributed a lot to this project: the Instituto Católico para Formação de Professores (Catholic Teachers’ Training College in Baucau) has given us access to their offices and resources, provided Maurício with an office and handled his salary payments during the main project phase. We would also like to express our thanks to everyone at the Instituto Nacional de Linguística in Dili who have facilitated and supported our work from 2002 to 2005.