The disappearing field trip

The fun thing about a short field trip is the almost breathless pace life takes on. I came back the other day from 6 days visiting a Tam speaking friend in Chitwan, and after 2 days of sightseeing in Kathmandu with a friend I'll be heading off to Helambu to see just what the Yolmo there is like, before heading off to Lamjung for a week. That'll give me enough time to get back, get my laundry done and say my farewells.

This blog has taken a bit of a back seat this year. That's partly because of Superlinguo I guess, but also partly because this is no longer so novel. I'm used to Kathmandu, with it's shoddy electricity, cows on the road and chaotic colour. I'm also more relaxed and confident about exactly what the hell I'm doing with my work day to day. 

I'll drop back and report after my Helambu adventures - this is where speakers of Tam migrated from a century or so ago so I'm excited to hear what the language there is like!

Into India

I'm in India this week for the North East Indian Linguistics Society annual conference. Having only just settled into Kathmandu life I've suddenly found myself sight-seeing in Delhi for a few days and today I'm heading to Assam where the conference is being held.

Delhi has presented no great culture shock. If anything I'm impressed that the roads are so nice, the cars so new and the weather less bitterly cold. I have found getting around rather difficult, and I keenly feel how much easier life in Nepal is because I can speak Nepali. These few days have actually been a rather pleasant reminder of just how easy I find living in Nepal compared to when I first got there. 

Gastro, Bhandas, and Festivities

These are the three things that, for me, take the most time away from doing any actual work here - and they've all happened in the last few days.

The festival was Sonam Losar for the Tamang community, and appears to fall in line with the Chinese New Year. This festival actually wasn't disruptive to my own plans - and it was fun to see lots of women dressed in traditional Tamang clothing.

The gastro was much more on my mind. It's never fun to have the voms - but when I only got started on work a couple of days ago it put a bit of a dent in newly forming work habits. It's also less fun when there's not a decent shower to be had, nor enough electricity to allow me to spend all day watching DVDs in bed.

The bandha is on today. For people new to Nepal/this blog a bandha is a work stoppage - where everyone from big factories to street vendors stop work for a morning/day/several days to protest something. This one is over the rising price of petrol and LPG - it's been a while since I've seen one quite this effective. Normally one can head off the main streets or into the tourist area to find life kicking on as usual, or things will start out serious and then ease off by about 2 when everyone is bored. But this time things are still well shut up at this hour of the day (if you don't know where to look).

All I can say is that I'm glad I didn't have to go anywhere more than walking distance today!

Back in the 'du

It's nice to be back, but Nepal is having the coldest winter in quite a while and the chilly temperatures in the morning and evening are quite a shock. The days are still warm enough if the sky is clear and the sun can shine - and it's certainly a good topic of conversation.

Many people from last year are still in Kathmandu, which has eased the return, and today I get back into the full swing of things; a morning lesson with A. and them I'm off to deliver the dictionary-making gear to N. and his family. Here's hoping some mental exertion will distract me from the cold!

Hello, Goodbye

Hello sadly neglected blog! Another field trip looms - I'll be back in Nepal on Monday for the final PhD-related visit. It's only two months, which I know sounds facetious given that two months is a long time, but after the previous visits this one feels much shorter. I'll also be spending a week of that time at a conference in India, as though two months weren't short enough already.

It's been a big year of linguistics for me. Superlinguo has taken over much of my linguistics blogging time, but there have been other adventures as well. On the work front I managed to get a dictionary printed up, and I'm starting a small-scale dictionary project with speakers of a related language.

In linguistic activities not related to the PhD specifically, I wrote an opinion piece for The Age on the commentary around politicians' language. My friend Jill and I did some work on LOLcats, which we presented at ALS, and it was rather popular.

I'm looking forward to this field trip. It's largely going to be double-checking things in the thesis and testing some hypotheses that have come out of recent analysis. So the work won't be too strenuous, I'm confident my Nepali will come back good enough to get by, and I'm excited to see everyone.

I'll be back here posting about the usual kinds of crazy things that happen when working in Nepal, and I'll cross-post any linguistically related topics both here and at Superlinguo. And as always I look forward to sharing the experience!

Spring at home

Thanks to a couple of years of fieldwork it's been a long time since I've enjoyed a spring at home. It's been so nice with the football grand final, the start of daylight savings and the jasmine blossoms. It makes a change from the humid, sticky end of monsoon in Nepal!

First Lecture

This year I'm making the most of being home for a whole 12 months by doing lots of teaching as well as lots of writing. Last week I was fortunate enough to give a lecture in the subject that I'm tutoring for! The subject is all about linguistic diversity, and it's designed for students who are at the end of their undergraduate course.

The class I had to take was on cross-linguistic variation in event description. I was lucky enough to be able to base it on two of my favourite areas of research - evidentiality and gesture. I used lots of real examples and all of my favourite examples. I was amazed at how quickly an hour of talking could go! Hopefully the students also found it relatively painless...

Strange ideas I sometimes have

I was chatting to a class about dialects of English the other day, and how some are so different as to almost boarder on being non-mutually comprehensible.

How excellent and interesting it would be to get two disparate groups of English speakers - for maximal difference let's say northern Scottish and Indian - and get them to work together in a situation where there is no standard English. I wonder if they would try and drift towards a dialect that is not native to any of them, or create a pigeon/creole? I think it would be excellent to have a Creole where the superstrate and substrate languages are both English. I got terribly excited about the idea but the students didn't appear to take to it as much as I did.

Break time

I handed a giant wad of printed pages to my supervisor last Friday, which somehow constitute my two-year report. I've got at least a week until she gets it back to me, so I'm using that time productively to get some serious tv/reading/gaming in, as well as a bunch of social engagements. It's so nice to have a few days brain recharge.

year three (?)

Sometimes PhD comics are just a bit too close to reality:



I've technically been on leave for three months to get myself back on track after the last field trip (the kind of leave where you still work every day, which is not really fun). I should have done my 2 year milestone report about three or four months ago, and even if you subtract the 3 months leave it's still a good month or two over due. If it wasn't for the fact that the enrollment office keeps track of these things on the internet I'd have no idea that they're under the impression that I'm going to get this finished by the end of May next year.

New (financial) year resolution

It's the end of the financial year here in Australia, although that doesn't mean too much to a PhD student.

While walking home from dinner the other night in the beautiful fog I decided rather abruptly that I would like to have a first draft of my thesis done by Christmas.

This is a good three months earlier than any other time-line I've considered, and also requires a terrifying words-per-week count - but I figure that while I'm brain deep in data I may as well just smash out as much of it as I can. I also figured that if I told the internets of this plan I'd be more likely to be stuck with it.

We'll see how I go - I've already written at least 10,000 words in the last month an my brain is already quite melty, but a draft would be the best possible Christmas present I can think of.

Map Win!

I've so excited - I've just found out that the satellite images of the area I work have been updated in Googlemaps. So now, instead of pixely greenery I can see each village and the paths between them. It's going to make it a lot easier to map the area now, especially after my GPS tracker failed on the last trip.

I don't think I'm going to get any work done today, instead I'm taking a virtual tour of where I work!

Nepali cinemas banned from early session

One of those "only in Nepal" stories today, from one of my favourite Nepal blogs that is not written by an ex-pat in Nepal or a Nepali-overseas; X-Nepali.

Their most recent post was on the news that the Film Development Board of Nepal have decided to act as moral police and stop early film screenings to stop students cutting classes. X-Nepali point out many good reasons why this won't work, and what other problems face school-age children in Nepal. But why I find it delightfully and typically Nepali is that the ban is on films before 11 am. In Nepal it is completely typical to see a film at 8:30 in the morning. Until I went to a session that early while there I don't think I'd ever set foot in a cinema before about 2pm.

I have no idea whether this ban will come into effect, but it will be interesting to see how the FDB fare coming between Nepalis and their beloved cinema.

The alphabeical bibliography

I've been reformatting my bibliography for the work I've written so far and I've realised that I'm only a few letters off having a reference from people with surnames from every letter of the alphabet. The only ones I'm missing so far are:

F, I, Q, R, U, X and Y


The 'F' should be easy. I'll just mention something by Fürer-Haimendorf or Fisher who both wrote a lot about Sherpa, which is closely related to Tam. The 'R' will also be easy; one whole chapter of my thesis is a reflection on Robbins and Rumsey's 2008 collection on the Opacity of Mind doctrine. The others I'm not feeling so sure about. Surely there's a Young that's written something about Tibeto-Burman languages or copula verbs or something? Perhaps a Xaviers or Xenophone? A Quinn or an Unger?

Opening line

When not finishing up the sketch grammar, most of my time this week was taken up with fretting about writing the introduction to my thesis. I always leave introductions until the end, but I have to have this one done for a meeting in a few weeks. I know I can always come back to it, but the first crack is never fun.

Given that the thesis is looking at how Tam has all these cool grammatical features that encode social information I decided to start with a truism: 'Humans are a social species.'

I relish the irony that it's past 11pm on a Saturday night and I'm sitting on the sofa in my tracksuit pants, ignoring Handsome (who is, in turn, ignoring me and playing computer games) and indulging in some very anti-social activity.

Sketch grammar done, for now

I've finally finished adding all the additional bits to the sketch grammar part of my thesis! It's terribly exciting, even if it's a still a bit terrible in parts. There's not a lot I can do about that, I'll have to wait until I've written some other chapters so I can fix up this bit to reflect what is written further down the track. As you can probably tell, it turns out writing a document this big (ie. a book) is quite a different pace to how I normally write, and a lot more circular.

Still, for now I'm happy with where it stands - it's around 31 thousand words (31, 308, but who is counting?) - although around 7,800 of those are of examples, so I have 23,500 words of thesis content which is very exciting. Because all of the examples are presented so spaced out, and thesis formatting requirements include 1.5 spacing and giant margins the document is a 230 page behemoth - and that's without the title, table of contents, bibliography or any appendices. It's dawned on me that the final product is going to be pretty darn hefty, which I'm quite pleased about.

Speaking of final products, finishing the sketch grammar means that I can turn my attention to other matters, like the tiny problem of the 20 thousand words I have due for my 2 year milestone in 6 weeks time. This is going to include my introduction, general background reading and then look at a bit of data. I've already got a couple of thousand words kicking around, but that leaves me having to write 600+ words a day (although I've scheduled weekends in there). It's going to involve some serious finger crampage but I'm excited at the prospect of having half my thesis written once it's done!

Happy birthday Rajesh Hamal!

Today is the birthday of one of my, and one of Nepal's, favourite actors - Rajesh Hamal.




Debonair, with a good voice and the ability to land a flying kick, Rajesh possesses all the skills needed to be one of the top actors in Nepal, which is why he has been for many years, and still continues to be. His youthful long hair allowed him to play a university student journalist in last year's Desh (my review here).

He's also king of Nepali product endorsement. It wasn't his fault that after his endorsement for Real Juice there was evidence they were selling out of date juice. During my time in Nepal I've also seen billboards where he's spruked concrete and canola oil - not to mention the dozen or so films he is in every year. Even turning 47 today Rajesh shows no sign of slowing down. Happy birthday Rajesh!

Stuff that (linguistic field workers) like

I've been reading 'stuff expat aid workers like' since it started up six months ago. I was put into it by a friend doing aid work in Nepal - and while I occasionally find it hard to relate there are some posts that really hit home for me. For these you could do a find-and-replace with 'expat aid worker' and 'field linguist' and it would basically be a post on this blog. For these occasional gems SEAWL is the only 'stuff X like' blog that I always read.

The most recent post about 'having a guy for that' is so on the money with how I run my life in Nepal. I have my tailor, my shoe guy, my fabric guy, my Nepali sweets guy, my jeweller, my travel agent, my bookshop guy, my paan guy and all number of other specific people for specific jobs. Like the blog above mentions, I really like introducing friends and colleagues to 'my guys' and, of course, if you're going to Nepal I'll happily put you in touch with them.

Although the SEAWL post gives the impression that this set up is to make one feel more impressive when showing off in front of fellow foreigners, there are also other more practical reasons as to how these relationships develop. It's partly out of laziness - places like Kathmandu are big and if you want something but don't know where to start looking it can be a slow slow process. Once you found someone who'll get you what you need why go back to looking? Also, being such an old-ball giant white Nepali speaker means that going back to the same people every time circumvents the 'yes I do speak you language/no I'm not rich/I don't have kids/etc.' conversation. And finally, in a place where if always takes a little while to feel like you've got social connections, it's nice to have familiar faces to say hello to on your way though somewhere.

Snail Mail

The Nepali postal system has set a new benchmark in tardiness and inefficiency. A postcard that I sent to the Handsome Penpal arrived on Friday. Which is quite impressive considering that I sent it in early October last year... good thing it didn't say anything too important!

My IPA craft project

I don't normally cross-post content here and over at Superlinguo but I'm so excited that I've finally finished my Easter craft project that I want to share it with everyone.



I cross stitched the pulmonic consonants of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It ended up taking so long not because of the individual characters but because it took forever to grey out the areas that aren't physiologically possible.

If you're not familiar with the IPA I'll give you my patented 30 second lesson. The vertical categories vary by the place of articulation - that is where in the mouth they are made. The first are 'bi-labial', made with the lips. The 'p' and 'b' are more or less exactly as you make them in English, by time you get to the question-marky think you're at your glottis, where you make sounds. If you say 'uh-oh' that gap in the middle is a glottal stop. See, you make them without even knowing! Good work you! On the horizontal the difference is manner of articulation - that is how you make the sounds. The first ones are 'stops', which you make by closing your mouth fully at some point and releasing it. below that are nasals, such as 'm' and 'n' and 'ng' in English. And so on. A chart with all those labels can be found here. Linguists, and especially phoneticians, use these symbols to accurately represent the same sounds across many different languages.





Next I'll have to start on the vowels!