5k Kate

It’s the middle of January, nearly the new moon, and a good time to reflect on what I’ve accomplished and what I’m dreaming to accomplish.  After the big recording frenzy of the holidays, I’ve been putting most of my attention on organizing and transcribing the corpus. Partly because Limolians have been very busy the past few weeks and also because I want the corpus in archival state by the end of this summer. This has involved a number of tasks: 1. I went back through all the raw data to find recordings that didn’t make it into the database. Many of these were chance recordings of spontaneous speech or intentional recordings done by someone that wasn’t me. This resulted in 500+ unique recordings. 2. Once all the material was in, I tagged each recording for a number of characteristics to generate a file name. The language spoken, the type of speech (spoken, read, or written), whether or not it was spontaneous, prompted (by me), or elicited word for word (by me), and whether it was ...

Today, I am celebrating the new moon! In Ende, the phrase new moon (kok sisor) is used on the first day that a sliver of the moon is visible. When the moon is gone, it is called dead moon (kok kuddäll). Sometimes people greet the new moon by tapping their mouths with their hand and yelling out, which reminds me of my sweet baby Sisi.  My run today went well this morning. I walked the whole third kilometer because I was trying to figure out a phonology problem in my head. I have a few concurrent analyses about how some verbs have "moving" sounds. In one instance, the verb is tänd and in the next it's ntäd. The "n" moves from the middle to the beginning or vice versa. Anyway, I was worried because an alternative analysis that came to me in my dream last night seemed to negate my current analysis, but on the run I found the example that killed it so I could put it to rest! As I was walking back through the village home, I passed old man Giniya's house who becko...