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 6th 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.
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