Tuesday, January 19, 2010

In The Dark

I'm slowly beginning the process of pulling my massive mess of data into some kind of format that other people can understand... and perhaps I can understand better as well. For the last two days I've been going though session recording, cutting out individual words so I can analyse them using Praat (Pratt is a phonetic analysis program that, while constantly updated, still looks like it's from the late 1990s).

I have to start also pulling together the syntactic rules of of the language (such as, that the order of words is Subject, Object then the Verb - English, by comparison, is Subject, Verb, Object), and relate the whole thing to current theories about such things as typology (what features occur in different languages), Tibeto-Burman linguistics (the family in which my language belongs) and social cognition (the area I'm really interested in - how people use language in a with other people to create ideas about the world they live in).

I'm trying to work as hard as I can - but unlike in Nepal, I have more of a life here, so it can be easier to be distracted (I've certainly not has a 10 hour working day since I got home). I can say that I miss Nepal at the moment though, the enforced power cuts known as 'load shedding' have gone up from 5-6 hours a week when I left to 9 hours every day:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25306890/Load-Shedding-Schedule-Kathmandu-Nepal-17th-January-2010

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