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 [...]
My first experience of the ‘intervention’ was pretty positive. The team worked well together and all had remote experience (and experience with communicating with Aboriginal people). They were friendly people on top of it
This bunch are, shall we say, different. My first real experience of them was negotiating sharing a key. There were problems about having [...]
[This is not a fieldwork post; it's a real time one]
I’ve just succeeded in getting the Yan-nhaŋu dictionary from Toolbox into TshwaneLex. Why did I spend about 10 hours on this, you ask? For two reasons. One is because it is clear that the Toolbox version needed huge amounts of work on it still in [...]
It’s the end of my second week, and almost the halfway point (not quite). I’ve been working for two sessions a day and it’s really tiring. In the past when I’ve done this it’s been checking transcriptions in one session, which is much less tiring. This is full on new stuff for 3-4 hours a [...]
I’m not usually a great fan of Britney Spears, but she served a useful purpose yesterday: her picture (along with some others of unidentifiable stuffy animals) was the focus of a multilingual conversation where I wasn’t present. This isn’t a big deal for most fieldworkers but I’ve had a lot of trouble convincing people in [...]
Things are picking up nicely. My yapa is out of hospital (although she went back to check things out, which produced much teasing from me about her affair with a handsome doctor, to which she replied ‘he’s like a mosquito, drawing blood all the time’).
Last time I tried to get at language games, without much [...]
A new morpheme came up today! It’s great. I have absolutely no idea what it does or what its distribution is, and I’ve never seen anything like it in other Yolŋu languages.
Hmm, well, it’s not quite true that I know nothing about it, although what I do know doesn’t help. I know that it has [...]
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