"Dialogues"
I’ve had an excellent few days of work. I was a bit worried about it after my being kicked out of the guest house - that episode meant I had to cut short a great session and stop the first conversation I’d recorded with three fluent speakers in a good mood. That’s not something I’ll be able to forgive in a hurry.
But it’s turned out ok. We’ve been doing ‘fake’ phone conversations. Since Yan-nhangu isn’t spoken much outside these sort of language sessions, I’ve make making up little situations for people to act out. It’s a lot of fun and interesting language stuff comes out of it too. It’s not ‘real’ conversational Yan-nhangu, of course, but it has still let us record what people say when they answer the telephone, for example.
Today one person pretended they were sick and the other person was a nurse and had to find out what was wrong with her. That was a riot, with complaints of ‘I’m going to die’ greeted with laughter. We eneded up putting her on the plane to Darwin with an escot for a headache.
