959

That is the number of entries I currently have in my Tam lexicon!

So in the next couple of weeks, with the rate I'm collecting data, we should hit 1000 individual words in the lexicon (not including personal names, village names and some borrowed terms). What will it be? Hopefully something amusing! Stay tuned and I'll let you know when it happens!

New Month

Happy October!

I've found today's date extra amusing for data collection...

Every day when I record I upload these recordings to my computer. There I keep track of all the meta data (date, place, speakers, content - all very important stuff).

One very important thing with lots of files is keeping naming conventions consistent. My system is to put the date, backwards to keep everything in order, and the file number, because often I'll make more than one recording across a day. And so perhaps now you know why I'm so amused by today. Yup, doesn't take much to keep me amused - the first file recorded today I got to name:

101001-01

Am also greatly looking forward to Sunday week...

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!

Toolbox

Although I waxed lyrical about Toolbox's usefullness very early on, for the last month I have been trying to tweek it to actually work in the way I want it to. That and intermittant periods of willfully ignorning it. Toolbox is a database program, which means that if it's set up the way you want it's effective and efficient.

All credit for getting it working actually falls to Nick T at uni, who is currently very high on my list of incredibly awesome people.

Now I just have weeks worth of data to input...

For Example...

There are basically two aims to fieldwork. The first is to try and figure out exactly what the hell is going ok, linguistically speaking, when people use the language they use. The second, which is inextricably linked to the first, is to furnish yourself with examples of the phenomena you've observed.

A written grammar is really just someone making assertions about a language and backing them up with examples. For example , if I were writing a grammar of English, I may make some observation like "plurals normally end in -s" and then give example sentences that I'd collected from an English speaker - "the three dogs", "she ate four cakes".

Examples are important - but when you're reading a grammar you take them for granted because they're just there, in print, looking very legitimate and impressive. Some of them are quite famous. Any Tibeto-Burmanist would instantly recognise "He said that he went there" as being from Hale's seminal work on the conjunct/disjunct system (the rest of you don't need to worry about it at all).

Anyway, it's easy to forget that these examples come from somewhere. Hale actually sat down at some point and asked a Kathmandu Newari speaker to say "He said that he went there". Also, when you start thinking about it, a lot of example sentences are quite strange and you wonder where they come from. Were they prepared by the researcher? Recorded on the fly during a session? Part of a narrative? How do you get such wonderful sentences as "(It is said that) I used to love my little dog a lot" (taken from Aksu-Koc & Slobin 1986)?

I'm building up a fair corpus of wacky sentences - especially as I've been turning to Nepali textbooks for inspiration. I wonder at this early point what will take my fancy later as being clear and pertinent examples of what is important in this language. I hope it's not some of the sentences from recent sessions such as:

"why do you beat the dog?"
"the earth is round"
"you never spoke English while living in Australia"
"before eating I wash my hands"
"he was cured because of good medicines"

A Quiet Place in Kathmandu...

... it doesn't exist...

Although I am becoming familiar with the dude selling stuff that starts singing his wares at 7:30, and the construction team that starts at 8 o'clock, and the motorcyclist that leaves outside the house at 8:30. It makes for an interesting session, trying to record around the daily noice of the city.

Paper, Paper, Paper

I thought having four work books would be enough - plus a smaller one for non-linguistic notes, my daily diary, my planner, my three books to write neat copies of vocab lists in IPA and my wad of paper for working stuff out... But after 3 sessions I've already used 30 pages of one of my 60 page books. I'm going to go through all my note books in less than a month at this rate!

Between the twenty-thousand note books and the huge number of resource books I've been buying it's likely that I'll not have any room in my luggage home for anything but paper...