First two weeks - basic stuff

I am about to finish my second week of elicitation with my consultant whom I got into contact with on my first day out in the community of Triunfo de la Cruz to the west of Tela. I got referred to him by the president of the patronato of Triunfo to whom I was directed by a friend of my wife's. The funny thing is that the first moment I hear the guys name even before seeing him I knew that he was one of the tree people who worked with me in 2007 when I was doing a paper at the MA level and living here for 7 months.

So far we have been working on the basics of noun morphology, number, possession, gender and locative markers among other things, adjectives and their gender marking and more recently verbal morphology. There is differential number marking as in many American languages and I'm trying to find out if there is also dif. obj. marking - so far the picture is obscured by some parallel constructions; so, there are basically two ways of saying 'I will smell the coconut' - one that involves a feminine gender object indexer on the verb stem which is the same as for 'I will smell the woman' and one that involves a 'prepositional pronoun' with no marking on the verb - it's too early to tell. I'm thinking that from next week some time I will start working with one more informant in addition to this guy - somebody with whom I also worked 5 years ago; I have reasons to believe that his speech is more conservative - partly because he is not part of a circle of "intellectuals" / school teachers which sort of includes my current informant and partly because he uses the original uvular /r/ that Garifuna used to have, while most Garifuna speakers in Honduras have switched to the Spanish /r/ - also, he is a bit older. In any case it will be nice to get data corroborated or to get competing possiblities. Something that continues to elude me is use of special 1sg possessive words - so basically 1sg.pos is supposed to be n- prefixed either directly to a noun or to a 'possessive classifier / pronoun' but sometimes I get yudi or yegü and these do not have counterparts in the rest of the paradigm -´this means that I'm not even sure if they are morphologically complex.

So, all is good and work is progressing - I want to start recording and transcribing natural speech soon, probably short stories or other monologues when I have almost been through the mayor parts of speech.

Supplies

Yesterday night a tired but excited fieldworker arrived at the airport of San Pedro Sula and was greeted by wife and relatives.

Today he took a small but vital step towards commencing fieldwork - stocking up on office supplies. All tasks are best undertaken using the appropriate tools, so I headed into town to get note books, pens, battery charger, rechargeabel batteries etc.

In half an hour we are heading out to Tela, the place this project will be based this season, and tomorrow morning I will be heading out to Triunfo de la Cruz to make the create the first contacts. I plan to visit the local "patronato", i.e. the local authorities in that community - first of all to inform them of the work I would like to do in the community, and hopefully to get some vital contacts from them to get to speakers interested in working with me.

We are also visiting old school mates of my wife who speak Garifuna - this could also proove a valuable entry into the Garifuna speaking community.

Hopefully I will be able to begin the actual fieldwork in the course of the next few days.

Workflow

When undertaking any task, scientific or otherwise, it is always a good idea to have a plan that states which tasks you are going to do, and in which order it would be most convenient to do them. But there are different levels of detail in such plans, or lists of  tasks; some take a bird eye's view and helps get a look at the entire state of things and to see if anything important is missing somewhere; I like to call this bird eye's view plan my Game Plan. At a different level of detail we have the kind of plan that states every little detail that should be taken care of - this kind of plan almost tells you when to breathe and when to go to the little linguist's room and will take you though all the steps from first sitting down with the speaker(s) who was agreed to work with you and until your data are safely stored on your labtop and backed up on your external HD; this kind of detailed and operational plan I like to call my Work Flow. Traditional linguistic fieldwork workflows are somewhat simple since they basically only involve the linguist asking questions to the speaker, receiving an answer which is then written down in the notebook before asking a new question etc. A modern workflow may also involve such tasks as these but would involve many other important tasks in addition, such as:

• informing the speaker of the purpose of the research 
• the inteded uses of the data
• the speaker's rights related to the data and their use
• obtaining the speaker's signature on an informed consent form 
• explaining how elicitation works
• explaining what kind of questions you will be asking and their purpose 
• turn on recording equipment
• checking recording equipment is working properly by listening with headphones
• properly position external microphone
• document the circumstances surrounding the recording, i.e. write meta-data
• transferring raw recordings to labtop
• enter elicited data into dictionary database and text editor for analysis

If you plan to record naturally occurring speech apart from elicited speech you further need to:

• make any necesary revisions to recordings for transcription
• link media files to annotation files in a transcription program
• transcribe, translate and interlinear glossing

The most time consuming and tedious of all of the above mentioned task is without any doubt transcribing and glossing. On the other hand these are also the most helpful and valuable kind of annotations you can make because they essentially make the data you collected available to other non-speakers, laymen and researchers alike.

So, how do you transcribe a stream of speech without speaking the language - the answer is of course "with the help from a speaker". Of course, if the speaker is willing to learn how to use a transcription program then this eases the process because he just needs to be equipped with a computer and a set of headphones. But in many cases this is not possible; there might not be enough time for him to learn how to transcribe, there might not be any orthography used for writing the language, there might not be any litterate speakers, the speaker you are working with might be an elderly person who might not be geared towards computers. So, in these cases the transcription setup needs to enable two people (you and the speaker) to listen to the recording at the same time in order to arrive at a common understanding of what is being said.

I have done some experimenting with different setups for this kind of work:
      
One involves two high quality headsets (such as the Sennheiser HD-280 pro or the Beyedynamic DT 770 pro) and a splitter that channels the sound into both headsets; soundwise this setup is ideal because it employs high quality closed headsets which is always the best way to transcribe. On the downside, I have found that some people get uncomfortable wearing headphones for extended periods of time, especially if they're not used to wearing headphones (many speakers of endangered languages have never even wore headphones before in their life). I have also found that wearing closed headphones makes communicating difficult - and you need to both hear what the speaker is saying to be able to type it in and to be able to make analyses while transcribing and glossing. 
     
The other setup simply involves a set of speakers allowing the both of you (and everybody else in the vecinity) to hear the recording. The obvious advantages of this setup lies in that you avoid the above mentioned problems. The serious downside is that you just can't get the same kind of accurate accustic transfer from sound file to your ear as when you use closed headphones - a milder downside is that good quality loudspeakers such as the Roland Cakewalk MA-15DCW weigh almost 7 kg and they are even compact versions capable of the same output as larger stationary studio equivalents.

It may be hard to believe that there is such a big difference between closed headphones and loudspeakers; recently a colleague objected to my insistence that one of the above two setups is strictly necesary in order to do proper transcription suggesting that "you might as well just use the built-in speakers of your labtop when you don't need to do any fine tuned phonetic transcription and analysis". To this I would reply "not true!" - you really need to set down and hear the difference in order to really appreciate it. And of course, for a large part transcribing with loudspeakers, or perhaps even low grade headphones is not a problem - it is when you get to that final maybe 10 % of instances when you, and even the native speaker, as hard as you try are unable to make out what is being said. I've had this experience transcribing English, and also Danish, my native language, let alone when I was transcribing Nawatl, Tol and Garifuna which to me are exotic languages that I mostly have non-speaker knowledge of.

For the current project I will be using the second setup, the one with the loudspeakers, but I will also have by Sennheiser 280s with me in the field in order to better resolve doubts and for when I'm listening on my own.