Staying the course

Today is Saturday, the first day of week 8 and officially the longest I’ve ever stayed in Limol in one go. Because of Grace’s 60-day visa restriction, we’ve only been able to stay in Limol for 7 weeks, using the last days as cushion to travel and get out of Port Moresby. My visa allows me to stay for three years, and just mentioning that enormous amount of time makes my “eight weeks” seem insignificant, but I’m celebrating and feeling grateful that I haven’t run out of anything I really need, that I’m still healthy and happy, and most importantly that my hosts/family have not gotten tired of me or the work yet.

I sent Nick a text yesterday catching him up on the past two weeks: we’ve recorded five instantiations of what’s called the Family Problems Picture Task which include four recordings each of two speakers each. They are supposed to be interactive speech so this dataset is really diversifying my corpus which is mostly narratives and songs. This task has also been done throughout many other parts of South Fly and the world, so I’m excited to contribute my data for comparison with other languages. Anyway, we’ve recorded five and transcribed/translated 2.5 of those which is the primary focus of February. The corpus is sitting at 95,500 words - so we’ll hit 100K probably this week! I’ve also spent a lot of time this week comparing notes with Dineke on Idi and building a sociolinguistic sample to match hers. Ideally I need to get reasonable transcription data (at least 500 and ideally 1000 words) for 8 people in each sex/age group of male/female and 14-29, 30-45, 46-61, and 62+. With that kind of data we can pick a variable to look at, for example final ‘n’ deletion, and see if people in different sex or age groups are speaking Ende in different ways. The groups above don’t just indicate age however. Those in the 62+ group are also those in the village that were too old to go to school when schooling was introduced in the 1960s. I’m also gathering data on clan membership and spouse/parent languages to see if those play any role as well. 

Besides all this I’ve also been reading three grammars - one by Alice Gaby on Kuuk Thaayoore, one by Hannah Sarvasy on Nungon, and one by Christian Döhler on Komnzo. It’s inspiring to read and I hope I can write a grammar like this one day! It also makes me anxious realizing how much I still don’t know about Ende... but I’m confident that the answers are there waiting to be uncovered!

Until next time,

Kate