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 disambiguate words. It was a slow but very rewarding job as I already have trained my rear to the H and L pitch variations of Nara. I only still have some difficulty with trisyllable words, but I will concentrate on this tomorrow, when we will do more words and start recording. We will work in the guesthouse where I live because it is more quiet than in the Wycliffe headquarter, where there are some work in progress in their new building. The working environment today anyway was extremely kind and often fun.