BF Journal: 1/7 - 1/16

1/7

I was not feeling much like anything today.  My solution?  Have a beer while doing text translation.  10 a.m. is late enough right?  By the way, what exactly is “extra quality?”

1/8

Zaki, Bakary, Oumar , Oumar’s side chic, and I all went out tonight because this is Oumar’s last night with us.  We went to a mostly empty bar.  We bought tons of street meat from the vendor outside the bar.  We gorged an drank some beers.  By some, I mean too many.  I am honestly impressed that Zaki could safely drive us home.

Throughout our last night out the bar remained quiet.  It gave Zaki and Oumar the chance to swap stories about people in the project.  The scent grilled meat stayed long after it was devoured.  At one point, after a couple tall beers, my head started to feel that familiar fuzz.  Everyone else seemed fine.  I am definitely a light weight now.  Dance music played at a normal volume but nobody danced except the lights. 

1/9

Oumar left today early in morning.  I was supposed to ride to the bus station with him but I apparently slept through everything.  I expect that he will call and I will apologize.

His departure seems to make sense given the project reorganization.  Jeff is heading back to Mali and not trying to do much more in Burkina Faso.  The idea is to have Jeff slowly give up the rains and some capable/experienced person (or people) will take over in Burkina Faso.  As such, this operation needs to become self-sufficient and dependent on Burkinabe.  All the same, people here will miss him.

Jeff left for Karankasso-Vigue with Bakary to fill in some names for fish and frogs or whatever he didn’t have yet.  I stayed behind to work on other projects.

1/10

Oumar called me and let me know that he arrived in his village safely.  He thanked me for the gift (a new phone because his old one was both old and the screen was cracked in several places).  I wished him well, apologized for missing him the other morning, and told him to keep in touch.

Now, for news about my project.  I may have mentioned before that I think adjectives are really nouns or at least all derived from nouns.  I am wondering about the state of prepositions and adverbs in Viemoŋ.  I am starting to think this language might not have them either.  There are precious few words that my consultant ever translates as prepositions or adverbs and half of the time when he does, I recognize it as a verb with a plausibly related sense.  Or perhaps there is are classes of each category that derive from verbs.  Examples: 

Note: I actually use a nasal consonant following the nasal vowels in orthography (ex: the language name, Viemoŋ)

(1)    Preposition:    hã      vs.      Verb:     hã-bɔ 
                             for                            give-INF

(2)    Adverb:          jĩ        vs.      Verb:     jĩ-bɔ

                             before                        know-INF

However, at this point in time, such observations are merely conjecture until I can demonstrate a systematic correspondence.  It could be coincidence, it could grammaticalization, or some other process I don’t know of yet.

1/11 - 1/14

The past few days of text were pretty standard.  We would get through a couple/few sentences per day and I learned something every day.  I am definitely going to train Bakary to get me more texts.

Jeff and Minkailou left early this morning.  I was awake this time.  It was pretty simple, just handshakes and they were off.  Minkailou called us later that day to let us know they had arrived safely in Bamako.  I guess I am truly running the show here now for the coming months.

1/15

I spent most of the day moving across the hall into Jeff’s old room.  And cleaning it.  It kind of smelled like… old (I really hope he never reads this).  I will take some pictures for the next blog post.  I definitely enjoy having a bigger space and my own bathroom.  This move is interestingly just in time for me to start spending less time here as I make plans for village trips.

1/16

Today’s text work was much the same as usual except we ran into an interesting part.  My translations into English are likely a little rough at this point, but it was still an interesting excerpt.  When responding to the question about what he knows about AIDS transmission and prevention, he had apparently said:

Note: the punctuation and capitalization are his doing.

Bã hueci vi vi yɛrɛ võmi võmi nĩ lata larɔ, a bi hiyewo yi bɛ yi dori di desi mũ hã.  Hali a tego sida yãrũ fɔ a dɛ a kapɔti jẽge, a jĩ sõ ocɔ nu.

In the city, the girls are very big now.  If you see them, you will want them.  After you chat up a girl, you should often put on a condom, due to AIDS, before sleeping with her.

Well, that escalated quickly.