The Nara documentation project

Yesterday we kept on working one the text recorded by A. He, in particular, provided the transcription while both consultants suggested the translation. I was typing, but, at a certain point, I have suggested that A. did the transcription directly on PRAAT. It was a good choice to speed up work and to do some capacity building. I limited myself in putting boundaries on the tiers of PRAAT textgrid. Today, Saturday, I spent sometimes to transcribe and put boundaries hoping to make the work faster with the consultants. Moreover, next week I can only stay with them on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  

Today the plan was a to keep on working on the text provided by the most skilful of the two Nara consultants. Unfortunately, he fell sick and could not come, so I worked with the other one, who is much less productive. Still slowed down the work a lot. We also tried to process one of texts recorded by the late Issa and things went better, but not as I wanted. Another problem is related to the fact that the two Nara specialists work at Wycliffe Ethiopia as translator of the Bible. The responsible for the translation was not informed by my research and so he has to continue with his work sharing the guys with me, This also causes loss of time. On the other hand, I am getting used to the language and I will reach the point to do a lot in transcribing alone and having the transcription checked, at least.

Today one of my two consultants provided me with a very first complete text of almost 15 minutes. It is about family love. We have started transcription and translation of the first two minutes. I should go quicker the more I know the language, but I will hardly hit my target of one and a half hours. I will do my best. My two consultants revealed to be really great also in this job.

Today I have recorded all the words that I have listed to understand tone. In particular, tonal minimal pairs will be important and interesting. I also wished to record long stories, but my assistants asked to think about them overnight. In fact, I have texts from Issa Adem, a doctoral student in Naples that tragically passed away. I will also work with those.

Now I can classify the nouns in tonal patterns. Today we have also translated a couple of small sentences.

Today it was the first time I worked alone with my two consultants. We continued with defining tone and plurals of nouns collecting words from an unpublished glossary I had builded up about five years ago with material collected by Professor Banti. I still have some uncertainty with some words also bisyllabic, so I decided to write the words classifying them according to their syllable structure. Tomorrow I will submit the lists and ask for tones again and notice the tonal differences of the words with the same structure. I am confident it will 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...

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...