lørdag den 19. november 2011

Wrapping up the survey

Getting the last interviews done has proven more difficult than I first anticipated, mainly due to my criterion of geographic representativity - that is, I wanted to go to the outlying communities to interview people there in order to avoid an overrepresentation of people from San Juan, the main speaker community. Theoretically this is a good criterion because there are many differences between people there and the ones in the more remote communities; for instance, in San Juan there is a higher degree of literacy, although the majority of adult are probably largely ilitterate, there are individuals who have gone to do various forms of work in the capital Tegucigalpa and other cities, and they generally have frequent contact with outsiders, both hondurans (ladinos) and North Americans (gringos). In practice, however, interviewing in the outlying population has proven somewhat difficult - in part due to the mere distances to be walked through mountainous and at times slippery terrain, and partly because in many cases, upon arrival at people's houses, they've either fled to avoid their exotic would be visitor because they have little experience with outsiders and because they are affraid of catching desease from outsiders, or they simply will not participate in an interview even knowing that interviews are conducted in their mother tounge, not Spanish, and knowing that they will receive money in return for their time and effort. Some believe that they have nothing to contribute or that they are somehow inadequately equipped for interacting with us, that is, my speaker assistant from San Juan, Federico, and me. Another issue is the same as we have encountered in San Juan, that women who are at home without their husbands or other men when we arrive at the house will not speak to us without the presence and permission of male family members. For these reasons, and due to two cases of the flu, first me and now Federico, it has taken longer than anticipated to finish the remainder of interviews - we now have 27 and need another 30.

Speaking of which, as a note on sampling methodology, the total number of interviews was settled on partly due to a certain time limit for the interviewing part which could not be allowed to take up more than a minor part of the total project, that is somwhere between 1 and 2 months. The other consideration was that, even though the total number of speakers is still yet unknown (hopefully it will not remain so at the end of this survey) I provisionally assumed a total of betwen 200 and 400 speakers based on earlier reports and an estimate made by Jeff Pynes, my North American colleague in Tol linguistics - so, if these numbers are approximately right, then a sample of 30 speakers with some geographic and demographic (age and gender primarily) spreading would in fact be a 10 % sampling rate which would be considered more than adequately representative by any social scientist.

Once we finish the last 3 interviews, Federico and I are going to go over a list of all Tol speaking communities, probably some 20 locations with between 3 and 50 houses, noting any information that Federico has (or other speakers in San Juan that he may consult with) about the number of men, women and children in each house and the language practices of each individual.

Another reason for the delay on the interviews of the outlying communities has been bad weather, which makes paths more difficult and hazardous to walk, but we took the opportunity to start up the second part of the project, the recording, transcription and annotation of various kinds of dialogue and monologue, that is, the language documentation proper. So far we have spent about a week transcribing and glossing a story of about 7 minutes. This sounds like a long time to spend on 7 minutes, but it should be taking into consideration that at this stage, for every new lexical item, that is, for every verb, noun, adverb etc. (the word classes are still not firmly stablished, but I have a hypothesis that there are no adjectives in Tol, or rather, there are no words which modify nouns in the same way adjectives do in Indeeuropean languages; this function rather seems to be carried by either nominal or verbal predicates - so e.g. the words for 'bad' and 'many' are used without the presence of a modified noun and may take affixes which have otherwise been assumed only to occur with nouns. However, much more work needs to be done in order to form a proper analysis.

To return to the transcription process, as the language becomes increasingly familiar to me and the process of glossing and elicitation becomes more familiar to Federico, I expect the pace to pick up so that we might aim at transcribing various hours of speech, depending on the genre, since some genres are more text heavy than others - narrative tends to be heavy whereas small talk or childs play will more silence and repetitions.

Time will tell ...

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Montaña de la Flor

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