that munanga linguist

Nga-gin.garra ! Jawayiga! :)

Today was a fairly average day for my fieldwork in Ngukurr. Average, yet remarkable. Me and the Marra mob I work here with did two sessions today and did some good work on Marra. But just in those two short sessions, we spanned a 45-year period, exemplifying that the Marra language is actually being remarkably resilient given the sociocultural situation it finds itself in. This morning BR, JJ and FR worked with me and I encouraged them to continue some Marra literacy and transcription practice. So we used an archived recording made in 1966 by Margaret Sharpe and Stanley Roberts. It's a great recording to listen to and use for transcription training. The words and sentences aren't too fast and complex and we get to chuckle and Margaret and Old Stanley's not-quite-perfect Marra and English skills. It's also great that such an old recording is lively again. In the afternoon session, I had a go at doing my own elicitation session with FR and MT. BR and GB where there...

I'm still finding out new Kriol words and constructions even though I've been learning Kriol since 2004. This is exciting for me and a constant reminder of just how intricate and complex Kriol can be. It's so easy to just see the English-related surface of Kriol and miss all the juicy stuff going on behind the scenes. So today two young guys DR and KM were starting to transcribe a recording we'd made of them and I learned a couple of things. A new word: medrim . I'd listened to it on the recording but had no clue what the word was. The example sentence: Kriol: Ai garra medri im tha'n Gloss: I FUT beat+Tr him/her "that one" English: I'll flog her. Don't ask me where the word medrim comes from. I have no idea as of yet. Note also the contractions and dropping of sounds that happen all the time in the normal speech of your average Roper Kriol speaker. In the above sentence, medrim gets shortened to medri and tha'n is actually a cont...