Back at the office

It has been about a month since I left Honduras and ever since I've been working on different strategies for best handling the large data set - that is, how do I get the most convenient overview of all the words, phrases, sentences and texts that I collected from my Garifuna consultants. During elicitation sessions (when the linguist sits down with the consultant to ask about words, phrases etc. in their her/ his language)  I like to use a notebook and not the laptop because I think that the laptop adds a kind of unnecessary barrier between the speaker and myself - also, I like to be able to see the tings that I deleted - this is an old fieldworker's trick - on a computer, if you delete something it will look more or less like this                             .... an empty space - but on a page of paper in a field notes book, it will look like this nidiba gub bu'bugürü 'I will follow you (immediately)' - this is a quote from my field notes, and apart from telling how to say 'I will follow you' in Garifuna, it also reminds me that I was struggling a bit with hearing the difference between g and b in the speech of my main consultant. This fact in turn tells me that perhaps the Garifuna b and g somehow have more in common than, say, the English equivalents - this has to be analyzed at some point and go into the Garifuna grammar in a section called "Articulatory Phonetics" or something like that.

At the end of the day I would then type all of the entries in my field notes into an Excel spread sheet - this results in two things: 1) I get a searchable database of my elicited data, although a pretty rudimentary one, and 2) I get the data through my mind one more time and am able then to make an initial analysis by putting in hyphens in the examples. So, the small example above would look something like this ni-di-ba bu-'bugürü 'I will follow you'. I didn't add glosses to the spread sheet - partly because there is a limit to how much time you have for each task when you are in the field, and partly because a lot of the time I did not yet have the required analysis ready to be able to know what each and every part of an example actually was.

The other thing I did and always do is to build a dictionary data base in Toolbox - this is standard in linguistic fieldwork and is helpful in more than one way. I use the dictionary database to get a overview of the lexical items (words) that I have documented so far, but also for transcribing longer texts and semi-automatic glossing, but let me get back to that some other time.

So, it shouldn't be long now before you will start seeing some of the fruit of all that hard work. I was working on my verb data for a long while and I have to say that it is not entirely straight forward, but then it almost never is - or rather, it never is. So I'm not going to give you anything on verbs just yet; instead I am going to go slowly over the nominals and their parts. The first bit will be on possession, and after that I plan to do a paper on number, and then maybe one on adpositions which are quite complex in Garifuna.