Negative failures and other post-trip data holes

One of the most stressful things about field work is that you have a limited amount of time and an unlimited number of things you want to ask. Often you end up with so much more data than you can ever analyse, but sometimes it's not until you get home that you realise that no matter how comprehensive you've tried to be there are things you've forgotten to get.

One of the things I seem to generally forget is to make sure that I get the negative equivalent for some constructions. so while I have lots of 'let's do X' and 'I want Y' I don't have a lot of 'let's not do x' and 'I don't want Y.' I also can;t find a decently set out di-trasitive paradigm (X gave Y Z).

I'm sure that all these things are possibly buried deep in notebooks, especially from some of the older sessions when I wasn't as up to speed on databasing all the utterances I collected. Still, it's learning these things that make me more competent every trip. It's just annoying on a Friday when I just want to finish writing this chapter section.

Nasal dramas

I appear to be the only person among my nearest and dearest not suffering from a winter runny nose (maybe my body and I have reached a mutual understanding that I don't have time to be sick). However I am currently having my own nasal crisis, although of a slightly different, more orthographic kind.

Because most languages have sounds beyond what are easily represented by the standard English alphabet, one way to transcribe is to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It has lots of handy symbols for lots of handy sounds (here's an interactive version).

I've been using a few of the symbols - eg. ʃ to represent the sound English speakers write as 'sh', or ɖ and ʈ to represent sounds that we don't have in English - they sounds much like 'd' and 't' for English speakers, but the tongue curls up and the underside is used - they're called 'retroflex' for this reason.

There is also one more nasal sound than we have in the English alphabet, called a palatal nasal. This is made by making an 'n' sound - but moving the tongue back so it's against the top of your mouth - sounds a bit like 'ny'.

The IPA has a handy symbol for this; ɲ. However, I've just noticed that I've actually been using this symbol instead; ɳ - which is a retroflex nasal instead. A subtle difference indeed, but how it has escaped my attention and the attention of 3 supervisors until now is quite a mystery to me.

All I can say is thank goodness for the find and replace functions of word processors!

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.

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...

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.

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'.

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'' Drama That Won't End

Continuing to listen to more and more data, I'm now less convinced that the problem I had trying to tell the difference between two As is actually a problem of two different sounds.

Instead, I think that it's just one /a/ sound, but that can be made more forward in the mouth (like Australian 'rang'), or further back (like 'rung') but which can change depending on things like which other sounds that it's made near, whether there's a high or low tone, or whether it's long or short.

This kind of mind-changing throughout the analysis period (and after!) is a standard part of the process - no one's going to hear everything perfectly on the first parse - but it does lead to crazy, messy notes, which doesn't sit well with my clean-freak nature.

Other phonological problems I'm still not sure about (If you have no interest in phonetics, just stop reading now):

- There is one sound that could either be an affricate [dz](like English 'jam') or a frictive [z] (like the French 'rouge')
- This language has alveolar stops - like the t and d in english (although I think they're more dental)- and retroflex stops (where you curl your tounge under) and I can't here the difference a lot of the time.
- As well as alveolar/ retroflex distinctions there's a voiced/voiceless unaspirated/voiced aspirated distintion on all the stops. Basically, aspiration is where a little bit of air comes out when you make a sound, like English sounds p,t and k. Unaspirated is where your vocal cords don't vibrate, but you don't actually make any noise. English b, d, and g are often voiceless and unaspirated. Voiced stops are really heavily voiced. My silly English speaker ears hear all voiceless unaspirated as voice.
- Tone. I'm getting better, but you know, it's like suddenly realising reality has another dimention, but only if you look at it from the right angle...

A Spot of 'A' Bother

So, reading back through my notes, and listening to files, it's become apparent that I've been transcribing two different sounds with the same symbol. I've been using 'a' for the vowel sounds similar to those in 'rang' and 'rung'. this is not surprising, I'm not a geat phonologist - actually, I'm not really a good syntactician, or morphologist, or semanticist really.

Not sure how to rectify it in the transcriptions I've already done, or in the transcription program I use where there's no access to fancy fonts, but I guess recognising the mistake is the first step...

To Work Indeed!

L. sure has lived up to the stories I heard about him, after yesterday morning's post he introduced me to A., a K. speaker living in Kathmandu, and this morning we had our first session!

So this is probably a good juncture to explain exactly what (ideally) happens in an elicitation session. As it was only the first session, I decided to keep it simple, and get words for body parts, colours, numbers - things that I kind of know the Nepali words for, because A. doesn't speak much English. L. had explained to her that she needed to repeat what I said in K. three times. Only problem is, when I asked her "what is your name" she tried to teach me how to say it in K. - much confusion ensued...

It was a very crazy session, L. stayed, and A.'s son helped translate, and other family members kept coming in to check out what was happening, and of course, everyone had an opinion. Also, being Kathmandu, it is impossible to not have background noise, the recording is littered with the sounds of motorbikes, birds, people hocking up lungs, and mobile phones ringing.

Although I'd prepared about 7 pages of words, all in English and Nepali, we were done in a little over an hour. So I'm going to have to do heaps of work to ensure that I have two hours worth of stuff for future sessions.

A, is lovely, and appears to approach the whole endevour with the attitude of a bemused mother. Her son and daughter understand a little K., but they mainly speak Nepali.

So now I have about 60 minutes worth of audio, and some 60 or 80 pieces of vocabulary. I'll spend the rest of the day reading over the transcriptions, checking the recordings, adding things, writing it up in the 'good' notebook, putting the words into the database program, and figuring out what to do for the next session tomorrow.