BF Journal: 9/5 - 9/9

Note to my readers: some of this uses some technical sounding linguistics terms.  For non-linguists reading this page, the Wikipedia articles on them are not bad if you feel like you want to know more.  Also, let me know in the comments section whether or not the technical stuff is even interesting.  I can always leave that out n future posts.

9/5

Not much of consequence.  I can't be awesome every day.

9/6

I went to three Siamou speaking villages to do some plant hunting for Jeff and check out the overall situation.  By that I mean: are people friendly/helpful, are they interested in sharing their language, how much do they expect in compensation, what is the rod like, and is he village a place where I could reasonably find a place to stay (if I needed/wanted)?  One of the villages was a slight pain to get to but not overly so.  Another was right along the main road.  The other was nearly perfect.  It was far enough away from the main road so as to not be touristy but the road leading to it was in good condition.  The farming practices there are interesting too.  Every other place I have been, the fields were… well fields.  In this location, people also used the hills. There was an entire side of a hill that was dedicated as a corn field.  It was mixed with the terracotta colored rocks that are everywhere and it made for a picturesque color juxtaposition.  Sadly, I did not get any pictures for you.

This language is one of the options I am considering because it appears to be a language isolate.  According to the Ethnologue information it is the only Kru language in the area which might make for an interesting study.  However, it would also mean that if I wanted to keep working on Kru languages in the future, that I would likely have to make arrangements elsewhere. 

Oumar was sick today so we did not go out.  Sorry: there is no debauchery to report.

9/7

Today’s excursion was to a Viemo speaking village: Karankasso.  I went with Jeff, Zaki, and Milkailou and we were eventually accompanied by a man in his 50s (I think) during our time in the village and in the bush.  It was in a somewhat accessible location and the village was built up more than I expected (in comparison to others that I have been to).  I think when one conjures up examples for the world village, I doubt it includes a credit union, a hospital, and a gas station, but that was the case here.

We walked around the village for a while (it was pretty spread out) and I saw people going about their daily routines.  Women with infants on their backs dried various nuts and herbs.  Some men and adolescents were busy in the bean and corn fields.  Elderly people sat around and people chatted with them, including those among my gang who could speak Jula (which is everyone but Jeff and me).  Some people sat around brewing tea.  Minkailou seems to have a knack for finding people doing exactly that (and joining them for the duration of our visit).  I should take a page from his book.

We were in the brush for a while and ate a late lunch of sardine sandwiches.   I went back to the 4X4 early because I was starting to redden, despite my SPF 70 sunblock.  This gave Minkailou plenty of ammunition against me on the ride home.   The following quotes are the basic sense of what he said in French:

“What do you use those muscles for?  Studying?  Reading?  Typing?  Definitely not for surviving in the bush.”

“I guess American women are stronger than American soldiers” (Referring to Abby and Laura, I presume).  Despite multiple explanations from Jeff, he still doesn't get the differences between soldiers and Marines.  Meh.

My French isn’t good enough yet to stick up myself.  <<Gigantic Sigh>>

Oh well.  I have gotten sun poisoning more than once and plenty of sunburns in my life.  I’d rather take verbal harassment from a person who doesn’t have to worry about sunburns than getting sunburns or sun poisoning.

Also, I am not really a huge fan of the implication that women aren’t Marines or that being compared to a woman should be an insult, but I will pick my battles.

Speaking of the ride home, the rain brought a swampy area right up to the road and other parts were slightly tough to traverse.  This might be a strike against the village (in terms of accessibility during the rainy season), but we shall see.  Everyone there was super friendly and welcoming.

9/8

I lost my appetite this morning and stayed home during today’s excursions.  It allowed me some time to organize my Jula notes a bit and plan future elicitation.  I also had some time to read up on fieldwork with tone languages.  It turns out that I was doing Jula in a reasonable way (if I am trying to figure out tone), in terms of fieldwork (basically this means getting mostly collections of nouns to start with as bare nouns tend to have little morphological complexity).  The interaction of word structures parts or other sentence elements or morphemes can effect tone structure, which essentially means it introduces confounding variables to the equation.  I am not really supposed to be fieldwork on Jula, I am supposed to be getting conversational. 

I may change strategies a bit on this.  I might worry less about getting the tones and more on how to build sentence parts.  I have some work on a few verbs with a little tense work (which does not appear to be super complicated, but you never know what you might find), but nothing on mood, aspect, conditionality, etc.  I also need more exploration of non-subject pronouns.   I have basically zero prepositions, postpositions, adjectives, and adverbs.

I do need to do a bit more Jula elicitation, but I cannot really do that on trips, so I haven’t gotten new data for a few days.  This is kind of nice because I have had the time to put it all down in digital form, but knowing colors and names of trees isn’t helping me converse much.

9/9

Today’s work was a bit different.  Jeff wants to make sure that the group of people coming for the Mande conference have some information on a couple languages.  So he tasked me with getting basic nominal and verbal structure in Seeku/Sembla.  We started out with him asking both the informant for another language and the Seeku informant (Clement) roughly the same questions about how to say certain things.  After a while he got sick of that and just sent me off with Clement.  He was somewhat vague about the information he wanted prepared, so I hope I got what he wanted.

I had time to do some serious verb work today with Jula, and it turns out that it is more complicated than I originally thought (in terms of the number of tense distinctions).  However, there is a lot of regularity in the verb conjugations.  By that I mean, basically the only thing that differs is the pronoun for each person and number.  I haven’t worked out yet how to construct the tenses yet, but I don’t see this being an issue, after I collect more verb paradigms.  This work is so much easier when I am not concentrating on tone.  Jeesh.

I guess this post is kind of long.  Deal with it.