I don’t think I like having a TV on fieldwork, it means I can accidentally stumble on cooking shows. The veggie offerings are better here than at Milingimbi, and I have both capcisum and celery in my fridge at the moment, but porcini barley soup is a little beyond my abilities at present. See what happens when you get spoiled by your accommodation?
Anyway, now that I’m starting to go through the Laves texts I’m getting a better idea of some of the differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Bardi. One of the problems we have is that it’s hard to tell what differences are just errors, and what are genuine differences. A set of standardised tags will make it easier to see what are one-off differences (and therefore perhaps errors) and what are recurring and systematic difference. I have some sense of them now but I don’t want to rely on my inuitions.
Here are some examples of the codes I’m using so far (explanation follows the – ):
- verb transitivity difference – change in the transitivity of a verb
- missing ergative – ergative case marker added
- lexical difference – a difference in the lexical choice
- IO added – an oblique marker is added
- vowel difference/ retroflection[or other difference]
- interpretation – phrase changed to make sense more plausible
Anggarrgoon 