BF Journal: 11/15 - 11/22

11/15

Today’s work seemed to drag on a bit.  I can tell that I am growing weary of grabbing vocab and checking tones.  I will likely start grammar elicitation earlier than expected.  My plan will likely evolve to building vocab for checking noun and verb classes alongside very basic grammar.  I like shaking things up and not always following the plan. 

Don’t get me wrong, it is important to have a plan.  I like doing what Abbie Hantag suggested, going into each day with a question I want to try to answer.  That was some of the best advice I have gotten so far.  But being able to go with the flow is important too.  Especially when you don’t find what you think you will.  That is nearly guaranteed to happen.

Later, Oumar and I went to a Jazz concert at the French Institute.  I did not meet anyone because everyone was just seated watching the concert but it was a good concert.  I will likely go again sometime.  I am anxious to check out their library anyways.

11/16

Today’s work went half vocab and half beginning elicitation of pronouns (a start to grammar elicitation).  This was more challenging than I recall it ever being in any other language I have worked with.  It was challenging because my informant did not quite understand what I was after when I asked for some things.  However, it opened things up and I have tons of questions about pronouns. 

In the following examples you can see the paradigm I get with most verbs.  There are apparently multiple forms of the third person singular subject pronouns.  You can see the copula construction doesn’t have a verb ‘to be.’  However, I am much more interested in the unusual forms of the pronouns with ‘BE small.’  You can see this is not the case with all copula constructions too with the example ‘BE red.’  I have some ideas I will test when I do these again in a few days.

ɲūɔ̄ɲbɔ̠  ‘to eat’

1SGSubj     mīŋ ɲūɔ̄ɲ

2SGSubj     wāā ɲūɔ̄ɲ    

3SGSubj     a / (yā) yī ɲūɔ̄ɲ    

1PLSubj      sāvā sā ɲūɔ̄ɲ

2PLSubj      āŋvā āŋ ɲūɔ̄ɲ        

3PLSubj      sā tāŋ sā ɲūɔ̄ɲ       

ɲīsībɔ̠  ‘to go’

1SGSubj     mīŋ ɲise̠

2SGSubj     wāā ɲise̠

3SGSubj     a / (yā) yī ɲise̠

1PLSubj      sāvā sā ɲise̠ 

2PLSubj      āŋvā āŋ ɲisē̠

3PLSubj      sā tāŋ sā ɲise̠

BE red

1SGSubj     mīŋ saŋse̠

2SGSubj     wāā saŋse̠

3SGSubj     a / (yā) yī saŋse̠

1PLSubj      sāvā sā saŋse̠        

2PLSubj      āŋvā āŋ saŋse̠       

3PLSubj      sā tāŋ sā saŋse̠

BE small

1SGSubj     mūŋ bāŋrɔ̠̀ŋ

2SGSubj     wāɔ̄ bāŋrɔ̠̀ŋ

3SGSubj     a / (yā) yū bāŋrɔ̠̀ŋ

1PLSubj      sāvā sɔ̄ bāŋrɔ̠̀ŋ

2PLSubj      āŋvā ɔ̄ŋ bāŋrɔ̠̀ŋ

3PLSubj      sā tāŋ sɔ̄ bāŋrɔ̠̀ŋ

I also realized today that I might not be as good about taking my malaria prophylaxis as I would like.  Today was my 3 month anniversary here.  I have bottles of 90 pills which I supposedly take every day.  However, I had twelve left in the bottle…

11/17 – 11/18

More attempts a establishing precisely the pronoun system.  I can tell you at this point that I need more time.  I suspect part of my trouble is still that my consultant doesn’t always know what I want.  This is likely my fault for not explaining things clearly.  And he seems to attempt to put things into what I think is the past tense randomly.  I realize that this is not likely random and it is part of something subtle I have yet to pick up on.  But until then, it really messes with me and my pretty paradigms. 

11/19

Today was a little disheartening.  After spending a couple days on some pronouns and a few verb conjugations, I had decided that today (morning and afternoon) would for tone checking the previous days’ work with Bakary.  However, my recordings were useless.  There was a loud hum in all of them.  Never mind a decent F0 track, some parts were so bad that most formants (harmonic frequencies used to evaluate vowel qualities) were wiped out too.  After trying different settings on my recorder with my consultant for hours this morning, we narrowed down the problem.  It was naturally the one thing that I hoped it wasn’t.  My directional microphone no longer works with my recorder for some random reason.  Great.

This means I must settle again for using recording settings that pick up everything.  If you work in an open area because you must available to everyone when they need something (which is the case with me), then there is a lot of background noise.  The directional mic was amazing for removing most of this.  I might turn into some sort of sound police.

11/20

I had to work without the microphone today because I did not find a solution.  It wasn’t too terrible but we had to stop and pause a lot for other noises.  Such as: people talking in the same room as me (because I am required to work in the living room when Jeff is not here), doors opening and closing, telephones going off, etc.  The recorder I am using is very good.  Almost too good.  It wasn’t impossible to work, but this will get annoying fast.

In other news, broke my phone because I am graceful.  It fell out of my pocket into the smallest puddle in the world.  I guess it is time to waste more money on phones.  I didn’t do that enough back in the U.S. or anything.

Bakary and I did a long session today on verbs and I hope our recording took.  We agreed on almost all of the tones.  This could mean that we are getting better or we suck equally.  I’d really love to check.

11/21

Bad news on the recordings again.  I am getting pretty frustrated with all this.  After more experimentation it was determined to be that the mic gives the constant disruptive tone with my Zomm H4.  When I record with Praat it does not.  The Zoom is also giving a little bit of an issue with a constant band on energy without the mic.  However, I found a good setting for the Low Cut filter, which seemed to erase that.  To be clear, it wasn’t mind or nearby electronics making the sound, but that setting worked anyways.

I planned something more interesting tomorrow for Bakary and me because today was very trying on both our patience.  And it was disheartening that we lost the recording for yesterday’s session.  We were both feeling very good about it.

11/22

Learning greetings and such was fun today!  That and numbers.  There is nothing unusual about the numbers really.  It is a base-ten system.  The words for numbers combine in predictable ways. 

11 = 10 +1

538 = (5 +100), (3 +10), 8

Other than that, everything was pretty quiet and I plan on going to bed early.  On a Saturday.  In a foreign country.  I am so lame.

BF Journal: 11/6 - 11/14

11/6

Today’s session with Bakary went a bit differently.  Up until now, I have been eliciting from a list I made.  I have been doing this for a few reasons. 1) This is my first real fieldwork with an unfamiliar language and I was a little nervous.  It felt good to have something prepared. 2) Grabbing a bunch of words out of context is a good way to see what lexical tones exist and to get some basic phonology.  It is an especially good idea to grab words with semantic similarity if it is possible you might have noun classes. 3) I have the Viemoŋ project, along with some Jula, still imperfect at French, NSF graduate grant application (not anymore though!), grad school applications, and a couple side projects.  I think organization makes sense when you have a lot on your plate. 4) It makes my consultant feel like I know what I am doing.  Even though I do feel amateurish at times.  Like I am pretending to know what I am doing.

I went totally off script today.  I had an agenda but no set plan on how to do it.  It was very fun.  I chased random tangents and circled back to my main agenda.  And I got the data I was after (on uncommon sounds).  I came up with ideas for tomorrow.  It was nice to feel creative again.

Jeff and Zakari came back from a village right before dinner.  I can’t wait to hop back into the gym with Zaki. 

After dinner I sat outside the gate with Oumar and Bakary.  I can’t really remember what we talked about.  The conversation wasn’t the attraction anyways.  The moon was full and the sky was littered with billowy clouds.  It reminded me of snow drifts.  I missed winter for the first time in years.  It reminded Oumar of sea foam.  I did not ask if it was from pictures or if I had seen the ocean in person.  The clouds moved in front the moon every so often.  It looked like they were strafing the moon, as though they were taking turns.  In a country where everything seems to take its own time, it was odd to see clouds moving in a hurry.  When they started to dissipate, leaving only the moon, I went inside to write this entry.

11/7 – 11/9

The past couple days have been relatively quiet.  I went to see some people play the balafon again.  This time it was outside on the side of the road.  I found the French Institute in Bobo and I plan to check I out soon.  Apparently they do cultural events, concerts, dances, etc.  They also supposedly have a huge expat community.  Maybe I will find an English speaker there.  Unlikely.

Speaking of English speakers, Jeff left for the Ouagadougou today.  He leaves the country tomorrow and won’t be back until the 6^th of December.  That leaves me in charge.  I will try not to destroy everything while he is gone.  My only consistent English connection is gone (aside from random missionaries I have seen like twice).  I will seek ways to change this.  It’s not that I need to speak English but always speaking in a foreign language is exhausting.

In other news, since the rackets have made an appearance, the flies have been less of an issue.  I would like to take credit, but I presume this is because we are commencing the dry season.  It is supposed to get colder soon.  But what people are calling cold here sounds rather pleasant.  But, I have a jacket just in case.  Anyways, if it is supposed to be colder, I cannot tell.  It has been unreasonably hot.  It reminds me of Kuwait some days.  I mostly try to stay cool and make progress on Viemoŋ phonology.  I think I have a handle on most of the possible segments.  I have done some serious exploration of glides and vowels the past couple of days and I am excited to look at Praat for something other than an F0 track.  If I come up with something, I will surely let you know.  I am also itchy to get back to vocabulary and start on some basic sentences. 

11/10 – 11/14

The past few days have been mostly vocab stuff.  There is not much to report here.  I elicit vocab and check our tone transcription later together.  I am considering a slight change to my previous notation but I am not going to do so until I have a better idea about the contour versus flat tones.  And after I get some sentences so I can tell how tones interact (if at all).  I still haven’t figured out why sometimes tones are consistently flat and other times they show distinct contours.  This is starting to frustrate me a bit so I may step away from that issue and return to it a bit later.  I am anxious to get started on more than vocabulary anyways.  On the plus side, I think I am getting pretty good at recognizing tone levels. 

In weather news, the air is definitely getting dryer here.   This is naturally to be expected, given the region I am in.  But it feels even drier than the Middle Eastern deserts I was in, which I was not expecting.  Perhaps my memory of the past is strangely rosy but I can’t imagine giving my time in Iraq or Kuwait a positive spin.

In the War of the Flies, I have found that I am all but useless.  What I mean is that I got tired of trying electrocute them right before lunch a couple of days ago.  I put the racket down at my side and forgot to turn it off.  Two minutes later, I heard a zap.  I laughed at the dumb fly but left the racket on to see what happens.  By the time lunch was over there were four dead flies on the racket.  I have never killed four flies in a row.  So basically the addition of a human makes this tool less effective.  I guess I can just be lazy now?  I am no longer laughing at the dumb flies because I put a lot of effort into killing some and I could have apparently let them kill themselves.

I also showed the guys the movie Transformers (in French).  However I was exhausted when I was trying to explain the movie.  I could have just said it was a movie with transforming robots.  That would have been easy.  Especially since the words in French are: transformateur ‘something that transforms’ | transformer ‘to transform’ | robot ‘robot.’  But naturally I did it the hard way and tried to explain some details.  My first attempt was les voitures qui parlent ‘the talking cars.’  I shouldn’t do French when tired.  Or anything that requires brainpower. 

Enjoy snickering at me.

BF Journal: 10/30 - 11/5

As promised, here is a picture of me and Bakari.

I am the fashionable one

10/30

The coup stuff occurred, but other than streets being filled with random crap and stores being closed, not much changed for us.  Except the curfew is a not going to be fun this weekend.  But I think things could be much worse so I am not really complaining.  Except that I am?

10/31

Today was more of same.  I got some work done because the coup activities didn’t really affect us.  There was a small demonstration near our house and a few folks tried to break down the doors of the hotel across the street.  They thought it had some connection to the president.  Anyways, they failed.  Nobody bothered us, but our gate was locked anyways.  I went running afterwards and Jeff sat outside and chatted with people.  I don’t want to sound dismissive of the coup, it is a big deal.  It just didn’t endanger me, which is what most of you reading this blog probably care about.

Also, enjoy your candy.  Except the candy corn because nobody should not eat sugary earwax.  

11/1

Now that the president left, things are returning to normal.  Small shops were open today and street vendors were out.  There is still a curfew tonight, but I think I will live.  I really need to make my NSF application better anyways.  I suck at administrative/application stuff.  However we now have…

TWO ELECTRIC GOD RACKETS.  I will kill all the insecty things.

I am probably happier about this than I should be.

 

11/2

Today started a bit rough.  At about 1:00 a.m. to be exact.  A mouse jumped on my bed and bit the back of my kneecap.  Nothing serious, no blood drawn.  But I tried for the rest of the night to trap it.  I not generally driven to the point of violence very easily but I wanted to kill it sooooooooo badly.  I almost got it once.  I probably looked like a cartoon character fumbling in the dark (at first) tripping over my chair to get this thing.  Apparently my room is like a house of horrors where only the mouse knows all the secret passages. 

I trapped it in a drawer and it disappeared.  Apparently this mouse hates me enough to bite me in strangest place and it is smarter than me.  Wish me luck.

Anyways I spent the full day on almost no sleep.  Didn’t really get much done, except some progress with my NSF grant materials.  On the plus side, I think they are looking much better.

I met Bakari’s family here in Bobo.  His mother does not speak French but his sister and nieces do.  They were all very cordial.  His nephew was afraid of me, and wouldn’t shake my hand.  It was kind of cute though.  He would peak at me from behind his older sisters from time to time.  As soon I locked eyes, he would disappear from sight. 

11/3

Today was considerably more productive.  I got my NSF grant application turned in and had a very interesting session with Bakari this morning.  I found a sound in Viemo/Vigue that is interesting to me (quick side note: I am no longer sure that Vigue is the appropriate term for the language, more to follow).  I happened across co-articulated labiovelar nasal /ŋ͡m/.  It makes sense that a language with /k͡p/ and /g͡b/ would also have the nasal version, but I have never heard it before.

ŋ͡mʷoŋbɔ  ‘nurse (v), suckle’

The tones are flat/low then flat/high.  Don’t mind the lack of traditional tonal transcription.  I am experimenting with other ideas to help me better capture what I am hearing.  At least until I get handle on things.

My old system was simply marking a three way distinction in terms of high (v́), mid (v̄), and low (v̀). However, I noticed that sometimes the tones were rising/falling in every example elicited and some were always flat.  So I needed a system to capture both a three-way height distinction and whether or not tones were falling, rising, flat.

Now I use combinations until I get a better idea what is going on.  Each vowel may have two markings.  Every vowel will be recorded the relative tone height: high tone with no marking (v), mid is the same (v̄), and low is underlined (v).  Flat tones receive no additional marking, but rising tones are marked (v́) and falling tones are marked (v̀).  So the possible combinations are: flat/high (v), rising/high (v́), rising/mid (v̄́), flat/mid (v̄), falling/mid (v̄̀), flat/low (v), falling/low (v̀).  This annoying seven part system captures the tone trajectory, which I need until I figure out the patterns or if I can safely go back to a three level system (or something else).  I am aware that I may be needlessly complicating things right now, but I feel that is better than being too simplistic and having to redo work later.  There is probably a better way to do this.

Today was also the first day that I let Bakari determine the tones I transcribed in our morning session.  In the afternoon we checked some together in Praat and he was roughly as accurate as me (which isn’t saying much sometimes).  Looks like we both have some learning to do before we settle on something.

11/4

We put two different types of mouse trap in my room today.  One was the classic steel bar type.  The other was the worst thing imaginable for me.  It was a trap with glue on it.  Next to some frequently used drawers.  In a small room with a klutz.  You can see where this is going.  It only took me a few hours to step in it.  Obviously I couldn’t let just one foot have all the fun.  I stepped in the glue with one foot and the trap fell behind me.  I got mad and stepped backward until the other foot was even.  Because I am an adult. 

So I walked to the bathroom getting the floor sticky with every step.  I forgot my body wash.  So I went back to my room and back to the bathroom again.  By this time, the floor looks like I mated with a gummy bear.  It took hours and a ruined washcloth and luffa to fix everything.  I am pretty sure I still have glue between my toes.  Definitely some in the shower.

I HATE this mouse.  Yup, it’s the mouse’s fault.  It did leave me alone last night though.  It is probably laughing at me from some hidden lookout as I type this.

Also it turns out that my reticence regarding the name of the language was well founded.  However, I was wrong (Vigue is not correct) AND SIL (Ethnologue) was wrong (It’s not Viemo).  But I was more wrong.  The name given to just the language is Viemoŋ (nasalized o).  My initial rejection of SILs name had to do with asking people in the village what they called the language that everyone speaks.  Everyone said Vigue, but I think I likely asked the question wrong and made it sound like “what do you call people who speak your language” or something.  I presume the mix up had to do with the word “speaker.”  So, I will be changing what I call the language for a third time. 

My consultant Bakari is a Vigue speaker who speaks Viemoŋ.  Totally not confusing right?

11/5

In linguisty news, Bakari and I are getting better at our tones.  I may start with simple sentences soon, but there are some other sounds I want to explore first. For example, I think Viemoŋ has a retroflex tap/flap [ɽ], but it is not its own phoneme.  I only have one example. 

dooɽ cīcɔ̠̀  ‘bush dweller’

However it is also my only example with a flap in a syllable coda.  Every other one (transcribed as <r> for ease) has been in a syllable onset.  Obviously one example does not confirm allophonic variation, but that is my first idea.

In other news I woke up with morning to a pretty horrendous smell.  I could not figure out it was or where it was coming from for hours.  I left my room because it was so rancid it gave me a headache.  Long story short: that mouse is dead.  It did me the favor of dying (not in the traps) but under my suitcase tucked away in a closet.  I guess it had to die like a jerk too.  I was so happy that I almost took a picture for you.  I am going to by myself a drink later to celebrate.

I guess we can end on that happy/morbid note.