112 
William B. McGregor 
2001 
Anthropos 102- 
of, for instance, all the entries in a particular 
language. 6 * 
The web browser interface provided does not 
permit the same flexibility of access as the Tool 
box files, and is quite basic, lacking bells and 
whistles. It should be useful for some purposes. 
For instance, this interface could be developed to 
present the information in a manner more suitable 
to certain users, such as descendants of speakers 
of moribund or extinct languages. The editor en 
courages computer-literate users to develop better 
interfaces, though for reasons of copyright, anyone 
wishing to do so should first contact the publisher, 
editor, language community, and/or regional lan 
guage centre. 
The three figures (6-8) provide illustrations 
of the entry for the word djagal from Part III 
(442) in the original microfilm, viewed from Tool 
box, and from Microsoft Internet Explorer. As 
can be seen, the major advantages of the latter 
two representations lie in more accessible visual 
presentation and separation of data into fields. 
One problem I was unable to solve was how to 
present the example sentences with interlinear 
glosses vertically aligned with the morphemes or 
words in the language line. Thus one is forced 
to associate glosses and morphemes mentally by 
linking respective white spaces in the two repre 
sentations. 
The CD-ROM contains in addition to the dic 
tionary files also a PDF file of the entire book, a 
digitized facsimile of the entire microfilm, a sec 
ond PDF file with each (relevant) page of the book 
side-by-side with the corresponding page of the 
original microfilm, and other auxiliary materials, 
including photographs, maps, sample pages from 
the authors’ notebooks, and one of the Nyulnyul 
songs recorded by Fr. Worms. 
To sum up, editorial intervention was as far 
as possible restricted to what is essential. Pains 
were taken to make it fairly obvious where the 
editor intervened significantly in the text, while not 
giving the work an excessively disjointed aspect. 
My concern as editor was to both interpret the 
work of Frs. Nekes and Worms so that it could 
be appreciated by a wider audience, and to permit 
the reader access to the original to find what the 
authors really said, thus rendering my interpreta 
tions falsifiable. Comparison of the two versions 
6 Unfortunately, Toolbox is not available for Macintosh 
systems, and users will need to purchase a copy of its 
precursor, Shoebox, from SIL International. Shoebox is not 
Unicode compliant, and the phonetic fonts will probably not 
display properly. 
is facilitated by the PDF file linking the pages of 
the book to the pages of the microfilm, and the 
links from the HTML files of the dictionaries to the 
pages of the microfilm. (From the Toolbox files, 
one has to manually go to the relevant page, which 
is specified for each headword.) I also wanted to 
provide a historical perspective, and situate the 
work in the context of its times. 
Conclusion 
“Australian Languages” is, as I hope to have 
shown in this article, a remarkable piece of 
missionary linguistics from mid-twentieth-century 
Australia. Its primary virtue lies in the documenta' 
tion it provides of a number of moribund language 8 
of the far northwest of the continent. It is, that 
is, more noteworthy as a piece of documentary 
linguistics than a piece of descriptive linguistic 8 
(see Himmelmann 1998; Gippert, HimmelmanH, 
and Mosel 2006 on the distinction between docm 
mentary and descriptive linguistics). It is here, & 
documentary linguistics, where the lasting value of 
Frs. Nekes and Worms’s work lies, although thi 8 
documentation is somewhat limited in scope by 
modern standards. The descriptive component of 
their work is less well-developed, and is of mo 8Í 
interest to the historian of linguistics, rather that 1 
to the descriptive Australianist. Moreover, it is i* 1 
its descriptive aspects that most stumbling block 8 
for the unwary reader are to be found. 
The edited version of “Australian Language 8 
constitutes a documentation on two levels. Fir st ’ 
like the original manuscript, it provides documem 
tation of a number of moribund Australian la"' 
guages. Second, it provides a documentation of tb e 
authors’ research on Australian languages. Just a 8 
language documentation aims to provide “a lad' 
ing, multipurpose record of a language” (Himnnek 
mann 2006: 1), the edited version of “Australia 
Languages” (Nekes and Worms 2006) atternp^. 
to provide a lasting and multipurpose record 0 
Hermann Nekes and Ernest Worms’s linguist 
work on Australian languages. Indeed, the majd 
goal of the editorial process was to produce sud 1 
a documentation. This is done by providing 0l j 
the one hand extensive commentary on the te* 
- annotations in the terminology of documenta') 
linguistics - to make it comprehensible to ^ 
modern linguist (a combination of description af 
documentation), and on the other hand by P re 
senting the original data from the microfilm a 
the source against which the ultimate lingui stl 
documentation can be evaluated.