Four weeks in...

I arrived in Kathmandu exactly four weeks ago today. When you spend every day working with dated data files, and grant money requires you to track your daily spending it's never very easy to forget the date. So far the trip feels to be going at a good pace, it's certainly not dragging but I appear to be getting quite a bit of work done.

Today is also the last day of sessions I'll be doing with A. for the while. It's been a very productive month tying up lots of questions left over from last year (and raising a few more!). I've felt more relaxed this time, I'm sure having a schedule of things to do has made it much easier.

I'll be hanging out in Kathmandu to celebrate Dasain, then taking a quick trip for about 10-12 days to the country. This will give me a chance to sus things out for a longer trip, and clear my lungs of the KTM smog!

But before that I have a few days to chill out and enjoy the relative peacefulness that had descended on Kathmandu for the holiday season.

Relatively excited

I'm rather excited after today's session because during an elicitation task A. produced some awesome, spontaneous relative clauses. A relative clause in English would be something like:

The man who is wearing glasses.

They're generally hard enough to elicit in forced constructions, and it's not often you get some good, clear natural examples. Today we were working through some video stimulus created by the rad people at MPI, which had about 60 short videos of people 'putting' - putting hats on heads, water in cups, books on shelves, napkins in exhaust pipes, apples in socks... all a bit strange but a nice break from the usual routine.

A. used some great relative clauses to describe some of the people - including the man who is wearing glasses that I described above. Although, it probably translates better from Tam to say something like 'the glasses wearing man'.

Yup, I know, probably not much to get excited about you might think - but then it doesn't take much to make a session satisfactory!

Half way throught the week...

In trying to be positive about the 6 day working week in Nepal, the only thing I can come up with is that half way thought the week happens on a Tuesday night, a whole half day earlier than for you five days a week lot.

Not only am I comfortably transitioned to the second half of the week, but I'm beginning to transition to the second phase of my field work... I'm almost wound down asking questions about things I had to chase up from last trip. That's not to say I now understand things perfectly, I'm just moving on to more naturalistic narratives, conversations and things like that - certainly makes a nice change!

A suddenly peaceful day

I've been getting back into the swing of sessions - and the data crunching that comes with them.

Today I was supposed to meet with another speaker that L. had met - I'm beginning to be convinced that L. really does know everyone in Nepal.

Anyway, so I had time today to digest all the data from working with both A. and the new woman I only did a little bit of work with A. this morning. When I got back to my guest house I found L. there, waiting to tell me that the new woman was too busy to come today. So now I only have a fraction of the usual work to do... I think some leisurely afternoon reading is in order!

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...

Final Session

Today I had my final session with A. for this trip - I can't believe three months has gone already!

Although I know I'll have a million questions once I start analysing things at home, today's session wasn't actually that long or arduous. I spent the last week or so before heading to the country tidying up glaring questions, and this session was actually all the questions that came out of those sessions. If we were to go on this path any longer we'd be sucked into a black hole of endless questions.

It's interesting to compare it to the first few sessions, when I look back at how stilted and awkward they were, and how I missed such glaringly obvious things - I'm sure I do that still, but they're not obvious to me yet so I don't know...

To The Country!!

In posts across previous weeks I have made tentative references to my impending trip to the countryside to visit K. speakers living in the area that they come from. It has taken me til now, two weeks before my field trip comes to an end, to finally make my way out there.

This has not been due to any unwillingness, or laziness, on my behalf, but due to political instability in Nepal. The opposition party in the National Parliament were preventing anything from happening, and decided to attempt the population to rise up in the name of 'Civilian Supremacy'. During the weeks of political unrest we never did quite find out what that rhetoric meant.

I haven't bothered writing about it until now for a few reasons. Firstly, I didn't want to to concern anyone unnecessarily, which kind of flows on to point two, which is that it felt so surreal and never really affected our daily lives. This was rather hard for me to deal with, as - on one hand - the whole thing was majorly messing up my plans to get out of Ktm, and - on the other hand - my life kept ticking along like nothing was the problem. The 'bandah' days, where everything shuts down as a sing of solidarity, didn't really touch my little area, and the larger protests happened on the southern end of the city.

But, as mysteriously as the whole drama arose, it has dissipated again, and I'm now taking a trip out of the valley. It is shorter than I would have liked, and it's coming so late in things that I won't really get a chance to process or confirm any data that I get, but it is certainly better than not going at all.

So, if I can't find an webbage in my journeys for the next week I'm afraid the anecdotes will have to wait until I return home on Friday.

Vocabulous, pt 2.

The cool thing about long, sprawling freestyle narratives is that all kinds of fun things pop up. Today I learnt a verb that meant 'to crack someone's resolve' - ie, their resolve not to drink. I also learnt that the verb used to mean that someone's hands were tied is the same verb as 'choke', so their hands were literally choked.

I'll let you try and work these amusing pieces of vobabulary into your own story.

That Feeling In My Stomach...

There's less than thre weeks to go until it's time for me to pack up the audio-recorder and call and end to this adventure. In that time I have to get to the country-side, visit another consultant in a village near Kathmandu, attend a conference, finish transcribing the video I recorded and tidy up what loose ends I can find.

I can no longer tell whether the feeling in the bottom of my stomach is the mild food poisoning that's been plaguing me since I arrived or the thought of everything there is still to do...

Yaks In The Jungle With Gastric

No language is an island, and every language is constantly borrowing words and constructions from it's neighbours. Well, that is the speakers borrow them, and then they become part of the language.

This is something I have been reminded of time and time again while here. I've had Nepali people ask me what the English words were for 'load shedding'(ie enforced blackouts) and 'gastric'(stomach upset) - they were rather confused when I said they were the English words.

It's happened the other way as well - during sessions one of the words for forest was 'jungle'- a word that, like us, they have borrowed from their Indian neighbours, and, of course, the word for 'yak' is 'yak' - in this case we're the ones that did the borrowing from Tibetan.

Word borrowing can be a useful record of how languages interact and share. It's also fun to see what words get borrowed.

A Tale Of Two Languages

While in Nepal, my time is taken up with two different languages - Nepali, which I use to get by in life, and run a lot of the elicitation session in, and K. which is my target language of study. My experiences of, and with, these two language, has been rather different.

Nepali is the langauge in which I have some productive competence. That is, I can speak it - not fluently by any benchmark, but certainly enough. In K. however, stringing together two sentence is a task of great difficulty. It's a common phenomenon that linguists don't possess any fluency in the language they're studying. While there is a school of thought that emphasises learning to speak the langauge being studied, I find that, especially on this short trip, I'm stuggling to find time to document, let alone learn.

That doesn't mean that I have no competency in K. I have found I've developed relatively good intuitions about what's grammatical - often for reasons I haven't expicitly analysed yet. My competency in K. would definitely fall into a much more passive category than my Nepali.

Because the two languages operate in two very different parts of my brain, there is relatively little cross-linguistic interference. There are a few lexical domains where I've done extensive elicitations in K. that interfere with Nepali - I'm much better with K. body parts than Nepali - but on the whole I don't tend to get too confused between the two languages.

Unfortunately, between the two of them they've obliterated any Polish-speaking skills I had remaining.

Vocabulous

The cool thing about doing narrative tasks is that you never really know what's going to come out of them. For that reason I can now add fun vocabulary to my K. lexicon, like 'alcoholic', 'cower', 'medicine' and 'newspaper' - none of which I would ever think to elicit in a usual session.

The uncool thing about narrative sessions, is that they're mind-numbingly tedious to deal with. And I've jumped straight from cute little 2 minute monologues full of single verb sentences, to a 40 minute 2 person dialog shot on two cameras and an audio recorder, with lots of mumbling, talking over each other and language switching. We get through a few minutes of this every session, but it's painfully slow, and there's a lot of data entry behind that that takes up most of the day. And A. is getting sick of having to listen back to her own voice every day for 2 hours.

Looks like this is going to consume a lot of my remaining time here, but there's lots of fun stuff coming out of it thus far...

All Quiet On The Work Front

Today I took my little laptop to A.'s house so that we could begin to listen through the audio recording of the videoed task for my transcription.

Anyway, while I thought the speakers would be loud enough, they were no match for the ceaseless ambient noise from the neighbourhood. Spend a frustrating 15 miuntes with three of us hunched around the computer before calling it a day. Annoyed at myself for not just buying speakers yesterday and instead wasting a whole day.

Thoughts Of A Home Invader

Today's session was rather different to the routine that we've established over the last couple of months. Today I ran a task that involved A. and her cousin speaking - where I normally rely mainly on A. - and a task involving telling a story with pictures I provided - instead of usual tasks like sentence and word elicitation, or simple storytelling. And, just to really shake things up, I recorded the whole thing, not only with my audio recorder, but two cameras as well.

When I proposed this task, I really had no idea how A. would react to it. I mean, it's one thing to sit around with an audio recorder (in fact, it's quite easy to forget that it's on), and it's another thing to shut all the windows, turn lights on, have cameras staring at you and not drink any tea for a whole hour.

But she was totally fine with it, as was her cousin. In fact, they really enjoyed the task. It made me reflect upon just how obliging people can be. It's something that S. and I have discussed (Incidentally, I will point out with much excitement that S. is returning to Ktm on Tuesday after a month in the field). People can be incredibly generous with their time. I don't know if it's because they're flattered someone is showing an interest in the language they speak (or, in the case of S., their children), or if it's that we're just too stingy with our time back home. All I know is that everyday when I rock up at the house at 7 am I'm awed by the fact A. is willing to sit down for two hours and talk with me.

Changing pace

Over the last week or so I've definitely noticed a change in how I approach sessions, and my attitude to this whole project in general. I find there is less and less that surprises me during sessions, and there's less and less time spent on collecting new data and more time spent going over old stuff.

That's not to say that I understand everything that I've got so far. Far from it. That's part of the reason for the shift. Going through things rigorously to put into the Toolbox database has made me much more critical of things that I'd overlooked earlier - like why only one sentence in a paradigm is different ('I eat', 'you eat' and 'she eats' all have the same verb, but 'it eats' is different).

Anyway, things are likely to take an even bigger shift after tomorrow. As part of my data collection I'm video taping A. and her cousin at a prepared task. It's likely to take anywhere between 20-40 minutes, and is designed to get lots of different grammatical constructions. Most of the remainder of my time here will be spent going through it with A. and transcribing what was said.

Am now going home to check for the 8th time that the batteries in both of my cameras and my audio recorder are all charged.

Minimal Pairs, Maximal Entertainment

Today I spent a large part of the session going through sets of minimal pairs that I've accumulated. A phonetic minimal pair is where two words are exactly the same except for one feature. So 'tin' and 'ten' are a vowel minimal pair in English, and 'pet' is a consonant minimal pair with 'bet'. You can have more than two words that have minimally same features, for example, 'head', 'had', 'who'd', 'hid', 'hod' and 'heed' are a minimal vowel set for Australian English speakers.

Anyway, A. thought the whole affair was hilarious. After the first set or two she cottoned on to what I was doing, and with every pair her and her cousin would fall into fits of laughter. My recording of the session is punctuated by fits of giggling and exclamations of 'same, same!'

It made me remember that while my knowledge and understanding of K. grows daily, for A. it's a natural and subconscious thing. She's spoken the language all her life without ever having to reflect on the fact that 'brother' and 'body hair' are exactly the same, but the former has low tone and the later has high.

It also made me remember that language is silly and fun - as though I needed reminding.

I Think It's Time We Started Seeing Other People...

... it's not you... it's me. You just can't give me everything I need...

For most researchers, fieldwork is mainly completed working closely with one or two people. But there comes a time when you need to broaden your horizons. It's a chance to check that what one person thinks is right holds across a number of speakers. That way you're documenting a language, not an idiolect. And no, an idiolect is not a language spoken by idiots - it's someone's personal (ie idiosyncratic) variety of language.

Today I had my first session with someone other than A. One of her cousins is staying with her for a week. It was a very basic session, we did the 100 word Swadesh List, which is a list of basic vocabulary that a lot of linguists use as a starting point. It was one of the first things I did with A. almost two months ago, and it was exciting to notice while we were going through it that I felt about a thousand times more confident than I did the first time I worked my way through this list with A.

This will hopefully be the first of many sessions with other speakers. Plans for a trip to the country are beginning to firm up.

Ngew Sounds

One of the (many many) differences between K. and English is that K. has word initial velar nasals.

To back up from the jargon a second - a velar nasal is a sound. English has this sound as well, it's a nasal sound you make by closing your mouth at the velar (near that hangy-downy bit) and making a sound through your nose. It's the -ng sound in 'sing', 'thing', 'ring' and 'wing'. The differences is that in English it only occurs at the end of a word, never at the start.

The word for 'I/me' in K. is 'nga'. It's been more than a month and I still trip up trying to get my tongue to fall into that position. It's just not natural for me. It ends up somewhere near my hard pallet (ie. the roof of my mouth).

I've started a rigorous training regime so that A. doesn't have to correct me every time I try and say 'I'.

In The Bag

When it comes to my handbag I like to think that I walk the fine line between minimalists (keys, phone, wallet) and girl guides (prepared for anything). Fieldwork has definitely pushed me well to the 'be prepared' end of things. Every day I make sure I never leave without the following:

- usual wallet stuff (keys, phone, wallet)
- pens, pens, pencil, erasers, and spares
- audio recorder (who has not misbehaved since that one unfortunate incident)
- spare batteries and spare spare batteries
- phrase book (generally pointless but occasionally useful)
- anywhere between one and three mini dictionaries
- a shawl, because Ktm is starting to get chilly of a morning
- tissues (because one should never assume here that people have toilet paper in their houses
- fieldwork book where I write everything as we go
- my camera, because I'm determined to get a photo of the man riding the flatbed tricycle laden with wobbling meat who I occasionally pass on my way to A.'s house
- water bottle (I'll happily drink hot tea, but prefer my own water)
- my little notebook in which I organise my entire life

Unsurprisingly, my small handbag was long ago abandoned for a big slouchy bag. I'm building up rather good shoulder muscles. Perhaps I should upgrade to a hiking pack.

Global Lexicon

As I try and move away from set elicitation (where I ask A. to translate a sentence from Nepali to K.) I'm trying to get more natural spoken data. So, today, I asked Asa to tell me about the different food and drink that they have in her home village.

I found out all about the different meats they eat, and about these dumplings they make by mixing salty milk tea and sweet flour. One of the drinks that A. mentioned was koga. I asked her to tell me more about this Nepali beverage:

"You know, coca cola."

And so once again my romantic notions get in the way of capitalistic realism. Still, it's good evidence of the voicing of non-word initial syllables. Or perhaps that's just a lack of aspiration and my ears playing tricks on me again. Back to the tapes!