The Nara documentation project

Here I am in Addis Ababa since two days. I am getting used to the atmosphere and the air at 2700 meters of altitude before starting working tomorrow, when I will meet my Nara collaborators. In these three days I am staying by a friend's house. For the rest of the stay I will by lodged at the Silhon Gusthouse in Mekanisa, where I will also work. It is the last day of 2023 and I take advantage to wish a wonderful 2024 to my friends and colleagues. I will spend it in a bit lonely way because my Italian friends are away at home, but I never feel really alone thanks to the socials. I will cook something nice, I have my lovely cake and go to sleep early as tomorrow I start with work! Best wishes everyone!

Hi everyone, already three days ago I should have been flown to Addis Ababa and be there on December 16. Instead, at Catania airport (Sicily), from where I should have reached Rome, from where I should have reached Addis Ababa, they stopped me because wrong validity date appeared on the Visa!  It was my mistake because to get a (3-day Tourist) Visa to Ethiopia one has to apply online and get a pre-visa from the e-visa portal and then they verify the e-visa at the airport in Addis Ababa. The mistake was that I indicated 15 November and not 16 December as arrival date. At Catania airport, I, therefore, had only one-day visa validity and they discouraged me to move to Rome absolutely. I could not fly to Addis Ababa anyway. Fortunately, Ethiopian Airlines policy allows with the payment of some fees the rebooking on another flight of a no-show passenger and with about 260 euros I could book on December 28, with arrival on December 29, first day of validity of the new visa I made. Return...

Yesterday I have been checking my recording equipment. The conclusion is that I will use the Marantz with the binaural NT4 mic and the omni Reporter and the headphone-like mics with the Zoom H4n PRO and the small Zoom H1n for quick, accidental recordings with its internal mic. Everything worked well and efficiently. I only need lots of batteries! No problem for the SD cards, which were provided by l'Orientale...

My documentation activity will heavily rely on the use of software.  For text transcription I will use PRAAT, a speech analysis tool developed by computational linguists and phoneticians at the University of Amsterdam. PRAAT allows time-aligned transcripts contained in tiers with the support of various kind of sound analysis such as wave forms, intensity, tone an formants. This will greatly assist my phonetic transcription, but I will also use it for the orthographic transcription and the translation. I will export whatever is elaborated with PRAAT into ELAN. It is a tool developed at the Max Planck Institute initially for the study of sign language, but that is nowadays widely used for grammatical glossing. The text also in this case is time-aligned with tiers containing various grammatical information, such as morphological glosses and the indication of part of speech. I will probably limit to these two. In particular, I will make use of a special version of ELAN, ELAN-Corpa, dev...

How will I proceed with documentary data collection? Preliminarily, as for phonology, I will refer to the analyses already available (see post on the basic info on Nara), in particular the most recent Banti and Savà (2021). Moreover, an article on the comparative phonology of three Nara dialects is on the way of publication by myself. In order to get a grasp on the phonemes of Nara and its realisation(s), I will have a look with my consultants at didactic texts produced to promote the language. They are written in Nara standard orthography and produced by the Eritrean Ministry of Culture. I acknowledge Professor Banti to provide me some samples.  Getting acquainted with phonology in this way, I will also start understanding on morphology and automatically get an idea of syntax. There are some basic descriptions of these available (see still the introductory post). At a certain point, I will be ready to deal with nominal morphology, in particular plural formation, based nominal clas...