BF Journal: 10/8 - 10/14

10/8

Yup, coffee makes everything better.  Everything.  I am pretty sure after 7 weeks of no coffee: I went into a hyperactive attack mode.  I went running twice.  Who does that?  I couldn’t sit still and I worked on a little bit of everything today.  I could swear everyone was avoiding me today.

Not much new in the way of lexicon/language planning.  I am honestly still debating whether or not I should bother with a brand new dictionary or just adapt and older one.  Today was taking care of emails, side projects, and studying French.  One needs days like this.  Hopefully future house-cleaning days will not be under the dramatic effects of caffeine reintroduction.  Either way, they will be fewer when I commence my language elicitation.

10/9

Today was about the same as yesterday with a little progress in each of my side projects.  And I made plans for a day trip tomorrow to check out a Viemo village.

10/10

The trip to the Viemo (from now on referred to as Vigue, because that what the people who speak it call it) settlement went well.  We got some contacts for Jeff’s flora/fauna project and possible contacts in case I elect that language.

The place where people who speak Vigue live (Karankasso) is a conglomeration of many small villages.  This makes me curious for the potential for future sociolinguistc studies (non-linguists read: variation within a language).  The person Zaki and I chatted with today said that people who speak Vigue and come from different parts of the area do speak slightly differently.  I started imagining dialectology projects almost instantly.

Karankasso does happen to be the closest to Bobo of the places/languages I am considering.  That would make village trips extremely convenient.  Everyone in the villages (including children) speak the language.  And Jula.  The trouble will be finding a consultant who is educated in French as that is my contact/elicitation language.  I also need to be able to teach my consultant how to help me transcribe, once I devise a writing system.  This obviously implies already having the ability to read/write (in this area: that means French).

I still have some work to do figuring out which language will work best and if I can find a reliable informant.  But I think I will start probing this language first.  I am also not settled yet on my dictionary method.  My French gets better though.  And I pick up little bits of Jula, every so often.  My Jula side-project got side tracked so I can concentrate on my main business.  However, I am not exactly done with that.  Jula is the lingua franca (as I have mentioned) and I am trying to get a sense for what scholars have done with it.  I hope my future academic career (presuming I get into grad school) allows me the chance to work with it.

Anyways, that’s all very speculative at this point.

10/11

I decided to make my own dictionary.  I will do this for a few reasons:

1) I want to make my dictionary my way where I organize the content.  And I know what is inside it.

2) Jumping off that point, I am making one that is organized around semantic content.  Imagine a dictionary built and organized like an outline filled with subject matter sections (sort of like language textbooks).  That is my vision, time to make it happen.

3) Jeff’s Dogon dictionary will be helpful for sure, and I will pillage many entries from it.  However, I want one specifically for Gur languages and cultural nuances in Burkina Faso.

4) This dictionary can be used and updated by future members of this project who will likely work on Gur languages.

5) Practically nobody is an authority on Gur languages at the moment (according to Jeff), which might make this a good idea to establish a presence in this family of languages for future research.

I did a lot of dictionary construction today.  Like, I think I hate words now.  This might be a problem for a linguist.

10/12

Finished roughest sketch of dictionary, tons more to add, but the basic structure is in place.  I based it off a Comparative African Word List produced by SIL.  The work is boring for the moment, mostly consisting of hours of copying, pasting, and formatting.  But I will be glad that I did this.

10/13

Zaki arranged for me to meet a potential Vigue speaker on Thursday (10/16).  That is exactly two months after I left the U.S.  Perhaps that is an appropriate anniversary activity.  I am not ready with everything yet, but are we every really ready?  Well, I am definitely not. 

My readiness regarding the grammar outline is not where I want it to be.  But, I will be starting using my dictionary with the informant anyways, so I am not going sweat it.

10/4

Today I charged ahead and my dictionary skeleton is looking pretty sweet.  I have added much to the rough sketch and reorganized sections.  It is starting to sort of look like I wanted it to.  This work is unbelievably tedious, though.  Any future Gur scholars, who might use some version of this dictionary, you can thank my headache for this. 

Also, I am glad that I packed Ibuprofen.  But I have no chocolate or ice-cream, which help my headaches a lot.  Don’t send me those things though.  It won’t work out.  If you do, I will buy you a helmet.

Going to make it an early night on account of the headache and me not sleeping well the past few days.  I know it is possible that it is the result of the coffee.  I can stop drinking the coffee any time I want to.  But you can’t make me stop drinking the coffee.  The coffee is my precious. 

Goodnight world!