It's Not Always That Difficult

As predicted, now that I'm home in a country where I generally understand what's happening, and there is not a flood of data nor chances to embarrass myself during sessions, blog-worthy events have tailed off.

I'm currently writing out my phonology of the language (ie - what sounds people use to speak). It's very slow going, but satisfying to be finally ironing out some of the quirks that have been troubling me from the outset.

One thing that has been troubling me is the word for meat, which sometimes sounds to me like 'sha' and other times like 'shya'. I was playing them through for the supervisor, explaining how my ear can't cope with making the distinction. It was suggested I just put both of them in the phonology and explain they are in free variation (ie. speakers can use which ever they want and others will still still understand them).

It reminded me that just because an answer is simple doesn't mean it's wrong. Unfortunately, not all my phonological problems are going to plan out so easily.

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

Trip Statistics

As promised, here are some of the more, and less, enlightening statistics from my field trip.

Days away: 104

Days in Nepal on which I did no work: 11


Number of hours of audio data collected: 42 hours, 41 minutes and 52 seconds

Number of K. words currently in my Toolbox lexicon: 694

Number of notebook pages used: 354

Total number of leads used in my favourite pink mechanical pencil: 11.3


Amount over budget: AUD 245.84

One month's rent: 10 000 Rupees

Average exchange rate during my stay: around 65 NRS to 1 AUD

My rent in Nepal as expressed as a percentage of my rent in Australia: 25.74%


Most expensive meal in Nepal (inc. drinks): AUD 23.82

Percentage of weight gain attributable to cheese: 0%

The First Meeting Back

Yesterday was my first meeting with my supervisor since I left on my trip. For the three months I was away she was subjected to emails from me if I had a problem. I was, to say the least, apprehensive about showing my work - I had visions of the conversation ending with 'so that's all that you did in three months' or 'you forgot to check whether it had x/y/z important feature.'

Much to my relief there were no comments along those lines. It was relieving when I was told 'well, it looks like you'll have enough to actually write a thesis.' It kind of scares me that it takes until almost 1/3 of the way through to come to that conclusion.

And no, I haven't forgotten those all important statistics, I'll put them up over the weekend.

Confirmation

I think, in an earlier post, I made passing reference to that dreaded C-word. That distasteful word that makes me cringe every time I hear someone say it. Yes, that's right - it's coming up to confirmation time...

Christian initiation rites aside, confirmation is the 12 month point of a PhD research program, which for me is early March. It involves a variety of horrors. One is that I have to write a 10,000 word paper, which I haven't even started thinking about. Considering I spent 9 months writing a 12,000 word piece for Honours this gives an indication there might be a few sleepless nights over the next month or two. The other thing is that I have to present my research-to-date and future plans in a talk to the entire department.

My plan, at the moment, is to just fill my slides with lots of pretty pictures of the landscape that I took on my field trip. I'm sure this plan can't possibly fail me!

Count On It

It's nice to have been back for the silly seasons but before I wrap things up from the trip and deliver the all important trip statistics I need to fulfill my old year resolution to blog about numbers in Nepali and K.

While I was pleased with my general progress with Nepali during my time away, one thing I totally sucked at was counting, I only managed to reliably count to twelve so that I could tell the time.

To give you a rough idea why it's so hard, here's a website with numbers to thirty:

http://www.learnnepali.com/numbers.html

There is basically no consistent pattern, which means you basically have to learn a hundred separate vocabulary items. I decided to save the lexical space in my brain for more important words - most of them related to food and shopping...

Kagate numbers are also sufficiently fascinating to warrant mentioning here. Like Nepali, they present a small challenge to the learner-speaker because they have not one counting system, but two. One of these systems is base 20.

As an explanation, English counting has a base 10 system, where things work really well in groups of ten, whereas in one of the K. systems things work really well in groups of 20. So, basically, imagine you start counting at 20, and keep going to 29 - instead of 30, it's more like twenty-eleven, twenty-twelve etc. up to twenty-nineteen, and then you get to 40, because it works nicely as two groups of twenty.

And finally, on the topic of numbers, I'll be putting up those all important trip stats in the next few days. Hope you've all had a great holiday season!

Home Again

Coming home has been lovely. Normally my return home from overseas adventures is a petulant concession to financial constraints, but this time I have been happy to return to my life of Western middle-class comfort, my family, and my lovely and long-suffering boy.

It has been, on the whole, a pretty good homecoming. I remember a conversation with my supervisor where she said she freaked out the first time she went into a supermarket when she returned from her first field trip. I figured I wouldn't have to worry about that - in Thailand I was able to reacquaint myself with tall buildings, shopping malls, obnoxious Westerners and air-conditioning. Also, although I liked to talk up how tough living in Nepal was, I really didn't have it all too bad there.

I was doing ok, until an adventure to Brunswick street for ice-cream last night. It was, for my jetlagged brain, to great a density of loud, drunk and vulgar 20-and-30-somethings. When we got to the supermarket I almost lost it when I saw there were no fewer than six (six!!) varieties of small tomatoes in plastic wrapping. We really are a stupid society to think that life is good because we can chose from six (six!!) different small tomatoes conveniently wrapped in plastic.

Hopefully as I get over the jetlag I'll become more immune to being back at home. There was a rather ominous present awaiting me - my bright yellow confirmation talk forms...

Tongue Thai-ed

I've been having a lovely time in Thailand, filling my days with green curry, temples, shopping, massages and air-conditioning.

It's taken me a few days to get used to the heat, big freeways and franchise restaurants - but one thing I've really struggled with is not being able to speak the language. I've once again become a tourist who can't even say thanks in the local lingo. I always make a habit of learning 'hello', 'please' and 'thank you' where ever I go, but right now my brain isn't even working to well at that.

I certainly don't want to overstate my proficiency in Nepali, but I always forget how unstressful a situation is when you can speak the language. I also forget how much of a guilt complex I have for being a native speaker of the tourism lingua franca. I don't know if anyone else feels foolish - it's silly. If English were my second language I'd be glad that I could use it all over the world, but as it is I just feel lazy and rude.

But still, there are 42 more hours to learn to be a bit more polite and indulge in a few more curries, temples and massages.

Farewell To Nepal

Tomorrow I'm flying out of Nepal after three months and six days of crazy fun-times rollercoaster adventures. I still have some things that I've been pondering that I'd like to share, but that will come later. Unfortunately there'll be no more stories like yesterday, where I accidentally had to pay three times more for a cab than I thought I was going to because I still can't count to anything past twenty in Nepali (the reasons for this, however, I will hope to blog about soon).

I'm sad about leaving, especially having had a week off - but I'm also looking forward to being able to head back to my own country, regroup and start making sense of the esoteric scribblings that constitute my fieldnotes.

I may drop out for a bit over the next few days, as I've only four days in Thailand to eat as much curry and get as many massages as possible.

A Jog Around The Lake

I have a friend from Australia visiting me for the week before I pack up, make use of his excess luggage and spend a few days in Bangkok eating curry and relaxing.

It's been good to have someone from home to hangout with, and a bit strange as the two spheres of my life collapse into one. We've been doing lots of things I've kind of forgotten to do in the last few months - we drank beer, played cards and backgammon, went for a jog and slept in past sun rise.

It made me realise just how crazy my life has ben for the last few months. S. and I have had a lot of fun, and done lots of cool things, but just chilling out and forgetting about work eluded me while in Kathmandu. Hopefully I'll get to do some more chilling out before getting home.