Chapter 3 – Fieldwork and community language work
77
creasingly aware of the tone system of his own language by observing our
errors, thus putting him in a better position to identify and correct our pro-
nunciation mistakes. A German proverb says, “You learn by your mis-
takes.” In fieldwork, your teacher learns through your mistakes and you
will profit from this yourself.
Once you have come across two or three minimal pairs, you can try to
explain to your teacher what a minimal pair is. Avoid any linguistic terms,
work in a playful way, you may even invent games for the children, such as
finding words that nearly sound the same or finding words that rhyme, e.g.
the Teop words [bon] ‘day’, [bo:n] ‘mangrove’, and [vasu] ‘stone’, [tasu]
‘throw’.
5.3. Short clauses
The next step is to ask the native speaker to build short clauses from the
wordlist. If English were the language to be researched and food prepara-
tion chosen as the semantic field, the list would probably contain the words
water, fish, boil, cook, and fry and the teacher would produce clauses such
as boil the water, cook the fish, fry the fish. When the linguist tries out other
combinations like *cook the water, the indigenous teacher will correct her
and, at the same time, become aware of the notion of collocation. In addi-
tion, the existence of functional words (e.g. articles) and the first rules of
word order can be learned from such short clauses. Put differently, while
the linguists learn the first rules of the grammar of this particular language,
the native speakers have their first lesson in grammatical analysis. This
would also include morphology when, for instance, the nouns inflect for
case and the verbs for gender in the imperative. Similar to phonology, the
more the indigenous teacher becomes aware of the grammatical structure of
his or her language and of collocation rules as in the case of boil, cook, and
fry, the easier it is for her to identify mistakes and thus become a better
teacher.
6. Creating a corpus of recordings with transcriptions and translations
The documentation of a language should contain recordings of a large vari-
ety of naturally spoken language. But in the beginning, such recordings
would be much too difficult to transcribe and analyze. Short simple stories
78
Ulrike Mosel
are more suitable for both the linguist as a language learner and the indige-
nous language teacher who is introduced into the techniques of recording,
transcribing, and translating. If the speech community has a tradition of
telling stories to children, these stories may be a good starting point be-
cause their content, sentence structure, and vocabulary will be relatively
easy to understand.
Before starting with the recordings for a corpus, the linguist needs to
discuss the contents of the recordings (see above Section 2.2), and explain
the various tasks and the workflow. Once the teacher knows how to handle
the recorder, he or she can ask other people for such stories and can record
them without the outsider linguist being present. I practice this method
wherever possible because my mere presence creates an unnatural situation
that might influence the way the people talk. At worst, speakers may even
use a kind of foreigner talk (albeit unconsciously) to make sure that I under-
stand them. Or they might speak what they think is the purest or best lan-
guage, even though nobody speaks this way. Furthermore, people just might
feel uncomfortable in the presence of a foreign visitor. Because the record-
ing of people can be felt as intrusive, many linguists and anthropologists
have agreed on certain rules of conduct as further discussed in Chapter 2.
6.1. Recordings
Before advising the local language workers how to operate a recorder, it
will be useful to think about the sequence of steps to be done, e.g. insert the
battery into the recorder or the camera and the microphone, connect the
microphone, etc., and to stick to this sequence whenever you show them
how to do recordings. Explain how to hold the microphone (not too close to
the mouth) and that one should avoid noisy places for the recording. Practice
with them and let them practice with others so that they gain confidence. If
they are not used to dealing with modern technology, they will need some
time to lose their fear of doing anything wrong or breaking the equipment.
6.2. Transcriptions
If the local language workers are literate in any language, they can be asked
to make transcriptions. Even if their spelling is inconsistent or neglects
important distinctions (ones that linguists might consider indispensable),
Chapter 3 – Fieldwork and community language work
79
their transcriptions will be a great help. The most important thing to teach
them is to transcribe what the speaker actually says and not to correct speech
errors and other mistakes, although such editing is certainly legitimate in
later stages of data collection and analysis (see Section 2.3).
In order to allow for a genuine participation of the speech community in
the documentation project, it is imperative that all recordings are tran-
scribed in a practical orthography readily accessible to literate but not lin-
guistically-trained native speakers. For specialists interested in phonetics
and phonology, only a selected corpus needs to be rendered in a phonetic
transcription. The more time spent on narrow phonetic transcriptions, the
smaller and the less useful the corpus of annotated recordings will be for the
speech community and for researchers who are not interested in phonetics
and phonology. For a detailed discussion on transcription and orthography
development, see Chapters 9 –11.
The local language workers may be afraid of “spelling mistakes” in their
work. But as long as the orthography has not been standardized, there is no
such thing as a right or a wrong spelling, and they should be encouraged to
follow their intuitions, which may be relevant for the analysis of the pho-
neme system (Duranti 1997: 170 –172). As discussions on spelling prob-
lems and standardization can be quite emotional and are often guided by
sociopolitical issues, they should be postponed to a later stage when the
linguist is more familiar with the speech community and the local language
workers have gained more experience in writing their language.
However, for the data base of the project, especially for the lexicon, a
consistent working orthography that distinguishes between norms and vari-
ants is a prerequisite, but this does not necessarily imply that the local tran-
scribers have to learn and use it. Later, when the speech community decides
on their own norms, the working orthography can be adjusted to their stan-
dard orthography.
6.3. Translations
The purpose of the translation determines whether a free and idiomatic or a
more literal and, hence, non-idiomatic translation is given preference. For
the linguistic analysis, the latter is more suitable, but bilingual members of
the speech community and readers who are more interested in the content
than the linguistic form will certainly prefer the idiomatic one (see further
Chapters 8 and 9) For our Teop project, we solved this conflict by having
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