Work... in a hardware store

I've spent a couple of afternoons this week loitering around my local hardware store, stealing their paint colour swatches. I'm not planning on repainting my room at the guest house in Nepal, instead I'm using the little colour swatches to check the definitions of different colours in Tam.

My current database has two separate words that roughly equate to blue and green - but a similar language I've been looking at has only one word for the two. This isn't too uncommon cross-linguistically; they're known generally as grue languages.

So I've got a whole bunch of blues and greens and aquas and bluey greens, greeny blues, yellowy greens and purpley blues as well as a bunch of other colours and I'm hopefully going to get a clearer picture on what the deal is.

If I were a proper linguist I'd use a Munsell Chip set, which is obviously much more universal than the 2010 Dulux colour range. However paint shop swatches are free and this is really only a primary analysis.

I've also been spending time in magic shops, buying magic tricks to hopefully elicit the way Tam speakers show surprise. It's times like these that I find it rather amusing to do the work that I do...

By the book

This week I've started getting into some serious note book preparation. Those shiny new notebooks I purchased a couple of weeks ago are already being put to good use. I've started writing down all the questions I've got from last trip (for example, I got the verbs 'hear', 'see', 'touch' and 'taste' but not 'smell') and I've started writing down all the things I think I'll need to explore on this trip.

I'm excited because every hour I spend working on it here is one less hour of my afternoons this tedious process (and stressful when there is the time constrain of the next day's session) will take up while I'm in Nepal, which will leave me more time for proper analysis, and, of course, socialising!

New Toys!

Getting ready falls into a few categories, and one of my favourite is geeking out and getting ready all the electronic gear that I need. This trip I'll be taking two new toys... I mean... electronic items for work purposes that I am very exited about.

The first is a shiny tiny new eee pc. Last trip I took an older one and my good old MacBook. This time I've merged the compactness of the small computer with (a fair amount of) the functionality of my bigger laptop. I'm impressed by how far the specs have come on these things even in the 12 months since my last trip. Hopefully it's going to save me about 3-5 kg in weight for only a small sacrifice in usability.

The second is a cute little geo-tagger, about the size of a Mars bar. Turn it on while outdoors and let it silently beep away as you journey along. While it's on it chats to satellites and stores that data away. Then, when the journey's finished plug it into your computer and it will map your path onto Google Earth, and if you taken photos (and your camera's clock is correct) it will merge that info with your photos so you know when/when you took them down to the meter (also the altitude and and the temperature!). This is hopefully going to sort out that small problem I have of there being no known maps of the area I'm working in.

As always I'll also be bringing my audio recorder (actually, property of the department, which I must remember before I become too attached), video camera, still camera, backup hard-drive and jumbo headphones. Geek out indeed!

Taking Note

Yesterday morning was a flurry of all those dull post-holiday activities; washing, clearing out the inbox, checking my bank balance etc. Which left the afternoon free for me to do the first thing on my pre-departure to do list - buy my field note books.



I have always been a bit of a stationary fiend, and so I take buying field books very seriously. On a whim last year I purchased some Marbig Colourhide 120 page books. They're not the most fabulous paper quality but they have some other features I quite like. The first is that they are spiral bound, which makes it easier to fold them when working. It makes them slightly less sturdy than say a moleskine or general exercise book, but convenience wins out in this instance. Secondly, they have a nice sturdy plastic front cover and thirdly, the covers come in a range of colours which makes it easier to rummage for the right one when they're scattered all over my desk.

I've purchased 10 so far, they're stacked up on my desk waiting to be filled. Some I will sketch out ideas for sessions and things I need to ask still. The others will be filled at later dates when I have new questions, or with narratives and stories.

I've also purchased some A5 moleskines for general ethnographic notes and couldn't resist buying some adorable A6 ones as well for general notes. I'm fond of moleskine for the relative robustness as well as the nice paper, although it appears there's a dead bug pressed into one of the pages of the first book I opened which I hope is not an ominous portent.

And so this marks the beginning of the pre-departure month of organisational festivities. I will probably return to a more ad hoc posting schedule so you can join me on the bureaucratic adventure that is organising a field trip!

By the Book

The complexity of sentences that I'm attempting to elicit in K. have so quickly outstripped my competency in Nepali that all my example sentences from yesterday's session came out of S. and my rapidly expanding collection of Nepali course books. It still took me longer to prepare the session than to run, so much so that I didn't even bother to feel guilty.

Let me tell you a story...

At some point in any elicitation process you have to let go of the comfort, safety and laziness of translating wordlists and sentences and move on to short narratives and stories.

Yesterday I asked A. if she could tell me about her family. This provoked much consternation, and so I said I'd let her prepare for today.

She had decided to get her daughter to write it in Nepali and recite it to her and then she translated it into K. Not the most natural language situation, but a good start. Then we listened back and line translated it into a strange Nepali-English hybrid. Although I often find my lack of Nepali and A. limited English a hindrance in sessions the story turned out to be not that hard to work though.

I already collected family terms, so a lot of the narrative makes sense to me, but there's lots of exciting things that haven't come up in sessions so far. Of home now to transcribe it and check it out in detail!

Lowering the Tone...

... sorry... this post isn't actually smutty (and yes, yes, I promise I'll remember to tell you how it goes if I have a session of eliciting naughty words).

I'm not talking about the tone of decorum - I'm talking about linguistic tone. Tone is where you use the relative pitch of what you're saying as a way of contrasting lexical difference - So if you say 'uncle' in Mandarin with a different pitch you could accidental say 'rabbit' - which is embarrassing for you - unless you're uncle is a rabbit.

Most languages from the Tibetan family have tone - Lhasa (modern 'Tibetan'), Sherpa, Gurung, Yohlmo and Manange all still have lexical tone. So, after my first session, I wasn't too surprised to have found the tone pairs that I was so excited about.

Thing is, I'm not very good with tone. I'm not good at hearing it, or analysing it. And because it's basically only a two way distinction in Tibetan languages it can be hard to really hear the contrast.

S., with her usual, level-headed dispensing of advice, has loaned me her intro to Tibetan book (I'm not sure how she had room for clothes with all the invaluable books she has with her). I've been listening to the accompanying CD trying to get my head around it. Not much luck so far - lets hope that there aren't too many minimal pairs more likely to cause offence than uncle and rabbit.

All I Want Is a Book of Nepali Verb Conjugations...

It's not too much to ask, is it?

They've got them for every European Language. Was not impressed by S.'s suggestion that I write my own.

I do love a good slaughter...

In a couple of days it'll be one of the biggest holiday seasons in Nepal - Dasain. Although mainly a Hindu festival it's a bit like Christmas, where families get together and the wheels of commerce come to a grinding halt for a few days. Although, unlike Christmas it has a whole day dedicated to slaughtering goats all over the place.

I have been looking forward to the festival as a chance to have a few days off from sessions to catch up, regroup and have a break (the working week here is 6 days, and the one day off is never enough). It's mentally straining for two hours in the sessions, then I spend about four hours processing (although I don't get it all done and a backlog of things I want to do is already mounting) and another two hours preparing for the next session, because I have to figure out everything I want to do first and then translate it into Nepali. Then I also have Nepali classes, and have to do other things like eat, be social, sleep.

So I asked L. how many days holiday I should give A over Dasain. - 'Oh, no problem,' he said. 'She's a Buddhist, you give her one day off.' I almost wilted at the thought. Have decided to embrace my inner Hindu for a week and make myself a vegetarian goat to slaughter...