My fieldwork on Nara

Two days ago I talked to the referent person of the tiny Nara community in Addis Ababa, where I will conduct my fieldwork. I normally have been preferring to do data collection in the place where the language is spoken. However, in this case, for logistic, organisational and safety reason this is not possible. Doing fieldwork in Nara locations in Eritrea is complicated in four weeks and in Sudan military actions are going on. Thanks to my contacts in Addis Ababa, favoured also by the enormous help by Moreno Vergari in Bozen, I will find in the proper conditions to do my job on Nara in the Ethiopian capital, which I know very well. Acknowledgements will also go to Widcliffe Ethiopia, who agreed in supporting in my fieldwork with the Nara team.

The plan is to work almost four weeks, from Monday to Friday, maximum five hours a day with the Nara consultant, which will be two, probably men. The working language will be English and Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia (Savà 2023). I will spend the rest of the working hours to check the at a and make new research questions.

Logistically I will be living in a guesthouse, furnished with a separate room in which the consultants and I can work. The Università di Napoli l'Orientale is providing me not only funds but also the necessary recording tools and a notebook. For this, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Alessandra Gallo, head secretary of the Department of Asian, African and Mediterranean Studied, and Professor Giancarlo Schirru, responsible for my research.

In my free time, I will join the several friends, mainly Italian, I have in Addis. In particular, Rodolfo and Silvia, who, with her very young daughter Clara, will travel with me from Rome to Addis Abeba. 

27 of November, 27 days to go. It's getting exciting!

That's all for now, folk! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Basic info in the Nara language (from Banti and Savà (2021). Nara phonology. Rassegna di Studi Etiopici - 3^ Serie - Vol. 5: 235-268).

Nara (ISO code nrb), is a Nilo-Saharan language regarded as belonging to the Northern East Sudanic family together with the Nubian, Tama and Nyimang groups (Güldemann, 2018: 235-309; Dimmendaal  et al. , 2019: 326 ff.). Rilly (2010) has shown that also the ancient Meroitic language probably belonged to this family. The language and its speech community are also known with the older name Barya ( ባርያ , Baria, Barea), which already occurs as an ethnic name in inscriptions of the Axumite king  c Ezana who reigned from 330 to 365-370 CE ca. In Eritrea this name has been replaced by Nara (also Nera), in order to avoid the derogatory meaning “slave”, “one who is in service of a demon”, which  barya  acquired in major Ethiosemitic languages such as Ge’ez, Amharic and Tigrinya, because the Nara-speaking communities were frequently raided for capturing slaves by their more powerful neighbours  [1] . In Sudan, however,  Bāryā  or  al-Bāryā  (  البا...
Read more

Real first day of work

Eventually yesterday I could meet only one of my collaborators and only in the headquarter of the Wycliffe Ethiopia Foundation. Here they are active in translating the Bible in several languages of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. I met the responsible for the translation of the Bible in Nara, who is not a linguist and does not know Nara, but speaks the languages needed to communicate with the Nara experts. He asked me to help him to find the right solutions to represent tone in the orthography that they will adopt, something that perfectly fits with what I wanted to do first, an analysis of tone. We started this morning, and also the second collaborator was there. He resulted to have a better linguistic capacity than the other one. He is a Koya dialect speaker by birth and we worked with the variant. We went through a book on elementary teaching of Nara, as I had planned, worked on nouns asking plurals and tones, and I gave suggestions on when and where marking high tone in order to d...
Read more

Habesha k'etero (Ethiopian appointment)

Waiting for my two Nara collaborators who should have been here fifty minutes ago to start working. I met the main one yesterday for the first time. It is a lovely person that is committed to help me in all possible ways to make this research a success. He speaks the Mogoreeb Nara dialect, while the second consultant can help be with Higir, Kyota and Santoorta. I am, therefore, in the ideal position to make a comparative description of all four Nara varieties. On the other hand, I must be careful not to mix the replies and make sure we are talking about this or that dialect. I will start showing a pedagogical book for teaching Nara published by the Eritrean Ministry of education. There are words associated to images and some grammatical structures and pronouns. I plan to ask for the translation, the plural of nouns and the tones, without recording for the first day for not impressing them immediately with the technological equipment. I need first of all to train my hear with tones. The...
Read more