No-one doesn't say it

Gone on holiday

2007-09-10T15:55:00.000Z

Nothing to say really, except that there are photos here.

Keep out!

2007-07-02T21:35:00.000Z

Thomas has become obsessed with Doctor Who. He is also starting to want to assert his independence and demand private space. This is manifesting in amusing signs that he writes when he's cross. A few days ago he did this one:

Beware Cybermen! however gosin will be Deleted Exept thomas.

He also made one that says:

go away.
push-off.
Seeya.
remeber that?
yes?
don't you foget it!

And another that says:

Keep out! Espeshely you Natalie!

The last is my favourite, because Natalie can't read yet.

"A fixing mens"

2007-05-23T10:38:00.001Z

"Once upon a time there was a hole in this road. But then one day a mens came, and it was a fixing mens, and they fixed it!"

A question for the ages

2007-05-11T22:48:00.000Z

Is it better to have two slightly weak gin-and-tonics, or one really strong gin-and-tonic?

Again, not so much with the posting

2007-05-10T22:09:00.000Z

This does seem to happen.
I've been spending a lot of time annotating and editing my recordings, trying to make sure that the transcriptions are accurate, and fixing up the first-pass translations I did ages ago. This takes up an unbelievable amount of time.
And there's a bunch of papers I've been working on.
And my thesis which needs to be bookified.
And a conference I'm organizing.
And, you know, the kids, and stuff.
And generally dicking around.
You know how it is.

Mad Dog Morgan

2007-04-29T21:02:00.000Z

I quite often cycle late at night, usually back from Cambridge but occasionally from Foxton (for a change). A few weeks ago a deer burst out of some bushes in front of me on a particularly dark stretch between Fowlmere and Newton, which was nice though somewhat surprising.
However, although I am usually three sheets to the wind, I've noticed that this section of road (Shelford Rd), between Newton and Little Shelford and just next to St Margaret's Mount, is for no apparent reason unaccountably creepy.
It is my opinion that this is because it is haunted by the ghost of either Mad Dog Morgan, Mad Dog McGraw, Mad Dog Maguire, Mad Dog Munro, or Mad Dog Morris. Whichever one it is, he makes it downright unpleasant. As soon as I turn onto that stretch of road I have the distinct feeling that something scary is chasing me, all the way along and under the M11, and until I actually get into the village.
Perhaps I shall choose to go a different way.

Airport

2007-03-26T15:44:00.000Z

I am spending the night in Singapore Changi Airport waiting for a flight to London in the morning. There are certainly worse airports to spend the night, although I must admit I have spent a lot of time in Changi over the last couple of years and it is starting to get a little dull.

Yesterday was my last day in Wioi, which also coincided with the villages 155th birthday, so there was quite a knees-up. I was called up on stage to say some incoherent words, and then Om Bert got up and gave a stirring speech in Toratán about how important the language is, and if I could go to all that effort of coming from England to learn about it, then young people in Wioi could too. It was a nice speech and the old people nodded in agreement. The young people didn't understand a word, of course. Oh well.

Anyway, it was a productive fieldtrip, I think. I got several good long conversations and stories recorded and got some way to transcribing them before leaving, and managed to follow up some things I thought might be interesting.

I also had plans to do a few other non-work things - climb one of the volcanoes, go to the beach, do a dive course. I didn't do any of those. I did (today, just before it was too late) manage to catch up with our old neighbours in Woloan and see how our anak baptisan is going (fine). He is 17 months old now. He liked the toffees I gave him and smeared sticky handprints on everything, then threw a ball at my head several times.

'You want to eat Batman?'

2007-03-25T00:53:00.000Z

People eat bats here. And in plenty of other places too, I guess. Bat is not the worst of the festive meats (that honour I think shared between dog and snake), but it's interesting that Indonesians generally believe that the English word for 'bat' is 'Batman'.
He's not my favourite superhero, but I don't think he should be butchered, chopped into irregular lumps and served in a spicy sauce.

Lokakarya

2007-03-24T13:30:00.000Z

On Friday I ran a workshop on language documentation at UNIMA in Tondano (it was supposed to be at UKIT in Tomohon but there's an ongoing 'situation' there, so we moved it). 30 people came from UNIMA, UNSRAT and UKIT. I talked a lot and got tired. And in the end everyone got a certificate. They seemed pretty happy, and I guess so was I.
Today we went all the way down the terrible road to Wongkai, and went off to find the village head on his vanilla/coconut/clove etc plantation. Had a chat, did some filming, learnt some rude words, then came all the way back.
Tomorrow is Wioi's 155th birthday. Happy Birthday Wioi! I am invited to the party - I have an intuition that speeches and lots of sitting around will be involved.

Hey there shaky shaky

2007-03-18T11:11:00.000Z

A nice little earthquake last night, which I enjoyed from the comfort of my bed.

No, I'm really not hungry.

2007-03-17T10:22:00.000Z

So, I am back in Manado for the afternoon, to pick up the video camera which still isn't ready, although they like to say on the phone that it is.
What else can I say?
I recorded a really old guy whose false teeth rattled a lot and kept almost falling out.
I did some recording using MPI cut & break movies for elicitation. I had mixed results. With one guy, I repeatedly explained what to do, showed an example of someone else's responses, and started the movies. He sat there in total silence. So I stopped, explained again, started again. Total silence. So I tried again, asking him each time what he had seen. He just said "there was someone, a man or a woman. Looked Dutch". What did he or she do? "Don't know".
I was bitten repeatedly by some kind of insect while out in the hills near Wioi, and now I have itchy lumps on my legs.
I have been trying to organize a workshop on language documentation tools and techniques for local language workers for next Friday, and this necessitates many discussions about whether we should opt for the 12500 or 17500 rupiah lunch packet. 70p or £1? Let's go crazy!
I bought a bag of rambutans from a stall on the street, and while I walked along ants swarmed out of the bag and up my arm. I was tempted to drop the bag and shriek, but instead I brushed them off in a dignified manner.
I've gone on a semi-hunger strike. In whichever house I'm staying in, in both Tomohon and Wioi , whenever anyone sees me they make me eat. I don't have the chance to actually get hungry. So I have had to put a stop to that by simply refusing to eat half the time, and if necessary, running away. I'll show em!
And that will do for now.

Interesting facts about birds

2007-03-12T06:25:00.001Z

If a scrub turkey crosses your path from west to east, it is enough to stop briefly and then continue. But if it goes from east to west, you have to have a cigarette. Well, you have to inhale some smoke.

Naik

2007-03-12T06:18:00.000Z

Any discussion of Toratan vocabulary seems to require that someone make the observation that whereas Indonesian has one word naik, Toratan has different verbs for entering a vehicle or house (rumasoh), climbing a tree (maawit), climbing a mountain (I forget), etc. I've heard this at least 20 times now. Eventually I had to say that this was something weird about Indonesian, and other languages also have special words for the different meanings of naik. Dudes, there are plenty of interesting things about Toratan, but this isn't particularly one of them.

Field report

2007-03-12T05:44:00.000Z

I'm in Manado, the provincial capital, for R and R. Which includes some time on a moderately fast internet connection.
So, I have been here 10 days already. I've spent most of that time in the village (Wioi), recording old people and generally asking a lot of questions and making a nuisance of myself.

Can you watch these silly movies on my computer and say what is happening?
Can you tell me what this word means?
Can you say this sentence a different way?
Can you tell me about birds?
Here's someone from another village, can you have a conversation with him in front of this camera?

Also a lot of time waiting for people to turn up, or waiting to see if the rain will stop so we can go out, or if the power will come back on so I can charge the camera and laptop.

Saturday was fairly typical. I'd arranged to go to the village of Tatengesan (30 mins away) and collect Om Willem from there so he could work with the other guys in Wioi - my plan was that I'd split the guys into two groups and try to do some lexical brainstorming and beef up the dictionary a bit. But Om Willem had bathed at the wrong time the previous day and given himself a headache (this is a legitimate way to acquire a headache or other malady in Indonesia, as is eating something at the wrong time. But probably he was just nervous about leaving the village). So he couldn't come. He said ask Om Wawo, he's from Wongkai and speaks really well. Om Wawo is sent for, but he can't get in a car or cross a bridge because his wife died recently. So I arranged to come back the next day and record them. (Which I did, they had a splendid time talking about the Permesta rebellion and other matters of local history for about 3 hours.)
I didn't have much success with the brainstorming in the end. Well, it went OK, but there weren't enough participants, and only Om Bert got the idea, so it was just like working with him on his own, which is what we usually do. I'd brought along a student to work with the putative second group, but I had to find other chores for him to do. No shortage of them.

I suspect not

2007-03-06T12:23:00.000Z

Will it be anything other than incredibly frustrating to blog via dial-up in North Sulawesi?

slippery

2007-02-22T17:24:00.000Z

Both the kids enjoyed sliding on this patch of ice, on the path up to the Holmenkollen ski jump.

a natural

2007-02-22T17:21:00.001Z

Thomas had a ski lesson.

skijumping

2007-02-22T12:03:00.000Z

Thomas wanted to do this.

down the hill

2007-02-22T11:56:00.000Z

By the way, we went to Norway last week, which was very cold but fun. This is Thomas sliding down the slope outside the youth hostel in Oslo.

Woolly batter

2007-02-21T11:46:00.000Z

I spent nearly 2 hrs at Kings Cross last night, much of that sitting on a train which then turned out to be broken. The replacement one was very slow and too full and I ended up sitting with 4 middle-aged skinhead cockney chappies who farted a lot and incessantly repeated the phrase 'woolly batter', which they found incredibly funny but it all just reminded me that sometimes I want to punch England in the face really hard. And then I cycled home in the rain, arriving at 2.30 am. Anyway, I shall never again leave my house.

I'm not a pheasant plucker

2007-02-01T01:43:00.000Z

A strange thing happened this afternoon. I was sitting at the computer when I heard a loud thud, as if something heavy had fallen down in another room. I had a look around, couldn't see anything, then looked out the bedroom window and saw a large female pheasant (like the one in the picture) lying in the front yard. It must have crashed right into the window at high speed.

It blinked for a while, then tried to get up. And then it died.
A friend suggested plucking it and roasting it, but (a) see the title of the post, and (b) given Mad Bird Flu Disease and whatnot I'm not really game (ha!) to start chowing down on a bird which was clearly Not of Sound Mind.
That said I gather pheasants are not the Einsteins of birds at the best of times. But still.

Watt?

2007-02-01T00:35:00.000Z

This article about Japanese food from the Guardian is nice enough, but I was particularly struck by these two sentences:

We make cucumber maki rolls, coWattal hand rolls...

I vow to take the time to prepare it properly, forsaking MSG (discovered, trivia fans, by a Japanese chemist analysing what made kombu taste Watte) for the real thing.

CoWattal? Watte? What's with the Watt?

The article is about a chef called Nic Watt. I suppose the author originally referred to him as 'Nic', then one of the Grauniad's eagle-eyed sub-editors all-changed 'Nic' to 'Watt'.
Watte work.

More snow (same snow)

2007-01-29T02:48:00.000Z

A movie of a snowball fight (Google video)

Snow!

2007-01-24T12:33:00.001Z

snow in the backyard
Originally uploaded by nakku.

We woke up this morning to find a nice white blanket over everything. The kids were very excited and managed to have a snowball fight, though for some reason they couldn't get the hang of actually making snowballs and I had to do that.

More snow fell while they walked to school.
It stayed for a couple of hours. More photos at Flickr

We last saw snow in August of 2004 when we went to ... where? Mt Beauty? Somewhere in Victoria anyway. Thomas remembers it (he says), Natalie doesn't of course.

Trains. Boring.

2007-01-17T02:49:00.000Z

I take the train into London a few times a week. I quite like it for the most part, barring the occasional miss-of-the-last-train-back and resulting epic wanders/hitchhikes around Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire. Actually, even those aren't so bad really. But there are a few really annoying things.
The most obvious being that the train is too damned expensive. Avoiding peak times and shelling out for a Network Card has brought the price down to merely horribly unreasonable (from incomprehensibly, stupidly, disgustingly unreasonable). It still rankles. But there's more...

The fastest way from Shelford to London is via Cambridge to Kings Cross. I can get a train from Shelford to Cambridge which takes 5 minutes and usually arrives just in time to connect with an express to Kings Cross, from where I can cycle to work in 5 mins. If all goes well, this way I can get from home to office in just over an hour.

But.

Although I can buy a ticket from Shelford to London, which says it is valid via any route (and although nationalrail.co.uk consistently show Shelford-Cambridge-Kings Cross as an option), I am not allowed to use this ticket on the Kings Cross train, but only on the Liverpool St train. Confused? I was. I found this out one day by being fined £20 by a particularly unpleasant conductor called Barry (Hi Barry! You suck!). Later I appealed and got the money back, as there was no way I could have known, but I Learnt My Lesson. So instead I have to buy a ticket for the 5 min journey Shelford-Cambridge, then go to the ticket office in Cambridge and buy another ticket there, meanwhile missing the conveniently-timed train so I have to wait for the next one. Suddenly my commute is 30 mins longer.
(On the bright side, I can wander up and down Cambridge station and dream of going to exotic destinations such as Birmingham, Peterborough, and Kings Lynn).

The alternative to the Cambridge-Kings Cross route is to take the slow train from Shelford to Liverpool St. The advantage is that I can buy the right ticket at Shelford and don't have to change trains, and it's a bit cheaper. The disadvantage is that I have to get the Tube or cycle from Liverpool St to Bloomsbury. The whole process is nearly 2 hrs each way. Bah, I say.
And there is another pitfall for the unwary. At Shelford station, to get to the platform towards Liverpool St one has to cross the train tracks at a level crossing. But as much as 10 minutes before the train goes, the barriers can inexplicably come down and all you can do is watch impotently as (1) nothing happens for a while, and then (2) your train arrives and leaves without you, with an hour to wait for the next one. Note that this does not happen every time, you get lulled into thinking 5 minutes early will be time enough, and then it gets you.

This was the scene today.
Get to the station, wait behind the barrier while the train leaves. Bugger. Get the train to Cambridge, miss the Kings Cross express while buying a ticket. Bugger. Wait 30 mins, catch the next train, go to work, go to a seminar and out to dinner. Back to Kings Cross to catch the scheduled 2315 train. Cancelled. All cancelled. Bugger. To get to Cambridge, you have to go to Stevenage then do some complicated thing involving a bus. Can I take my bike on the bus? No. Bugger. Better go to Liverpool St then. No time to cycle, better get the Tube. Can I take my bike? Maybe. I take that as yes, get to Liverpool St, get stuck in a barrier with my bike and get told off by a station worker. Released, I sprint for the last train, making it with 20 seconds to spare! The listless bunch of passengers care little for my triumph.

Dude

2007-01-09T01:23:00.000Z

I went to a pub in Islington for a friend's birthday, then caught a late train home.
Cycling through the village, three dogs slunk onto the road in front of me, causing me to slow down. One looked at me. "Dude", I said, and they all ran away.
So I rode the rest of the way. When I walked into the house I said "dude" again. But everyone was asleep.

Too much stilton

2007-01-03T00:04:00.001Z

stilton
Originally uploaded by nakku.

I do like Stilton. But given that no-one else in my family will touch it, two large mouldy cheeses just for me seems a bit excessive.
The first was bought for Christmas with my cousin, but wasn't eaten so I took it home. Sonia bought the second for me because it was on special. A thoughtful act, or an attempt at slow assassination by cheese? You decide.

Lack of activity

2006-12-22T03:08:00.000Z

My observant non-readers will have noticed I don't write much. This is because I usually think that if I am sitting at the computer I should be working. Which is not to say that I always end up doing that, because I do tend to read the entire internet before getting down to work. This is largely because at the moment I find checking Toratán transcriptions and translations (which is what I need to be doing) a mind-numbingly tedious activity, interspersed with lengthy patches of pure bafflement.

But now I'm starting to think I should write more, on the rationale that writing (even on a blog) bears a resemblance to work — at least it does rather more than reading other people's blogs, not to mention generally looking stuff up on the internet (with the aim of finding stuff out, which might turn out to be useful).

Who knows, maybe if I get into the habit of writing, I'll write some papers.

A day in London

2006-12-22T02:22:00.001Z

Wednesday was an absolutely freezing day, fost and frog everywhere. Seeing as school is now on Christmas break we thought we might as well all head off to London for the day.
We took the train from Whittlesford to Liverpool St and walked down to see the Monument.

Thomas has been learning about the Great Fire of London so was very excited and was not disappointed. Uncharacteristically both kids walked the whole way up without complaining. Thomas was also very interested in Samuel Pepys, though wasn't really too sure how he fit into the story (did he live in the Monument?)
We looked at other London stuff, like the Tower (not as interesting for kids as one might think), walked over Tower Bridge, took lots of buses. The real highlight for Thomas was going down Carsten Holler's slides at the Tate Modern, even though he only got to go down one of the smallest ones.

Natalie went down too. She loved it the first time, cried the second time.
After a detour to Russell Square to pick up stuff from work we went to a friend's house for potato latkes and a fine time was had by all. Not too many things were destroyed by our children (though Natalie did yell right in the face of an old long-suffering cat a few times).

When we got to Liverpool St it turned out that the trains were running late for a change. It was almost 11 by the time we got home.

Ready for winter

2006-11-16T14:43:00.001Z

DSCF0224.JPG
Originally uploaded by nakku.

It got quite cold, quite quickly. Here are the kids in their winter clothes.

No-one doesn't say it

2006-11-16T10:58:00.000Z

This is one of my favourite Makassarese idioms: tena tau tampaui “no-one doesn’t say it” (ie. everyone says it). They are big fans of the double negatives.

So, a new place.

2006-11-16T10:48:00.000Z

I found iWeb too unstable and somewhat annoying, so I'm moving here.

Back to Blighty

2006-08-04T16:20:00.000Z

Between general busyness and iWeb frankly being an unreliable heap of crap which wouldn’t let me upload for several weeks, events have overtaken this blog and left it by the side of the track, gasping pathetically.
I am now in England - in fact I am sitting on a train which I hope will take me from Cambridge to London (though it shows no signs of going anywhere right now).
And I will have to begin the rather daunting task of annotating many hours of recordings which have so far only had a first-pass transcription and translation.

Bali

2006-07-18T15:13:00.000Z

I am in Bali with a bunch of linguists, helping to train other linguists in techniques and tools for language documentation. It is fun but rather tiring and I shall leave it at that...

A rainy day on the road

2006-06-29T16:47:00.000Z

On Tuesday Tartius and I headed off on his motorcycle to Wioi. It rained all day. We got wet and muddy. In Kawangkoan we stopped (as is the custom) for coffee and pork buns (pictured). When we got to Wioi it was still raining — too noisy to do any recording. Then it got dark and the power went off (as is also the custom). So we wandered around for a bit, went to visit Om Bert and stayed chatting for a while.

When we got back to Tartius’s parents’ house, the power was back on and Tartius’s father Anes wanted to watch the recording we made last week in Tatengesan. So we put it on the laptop for him, and for an hour Om Anes sat there, with headphones on, re-enacting his part of the conversation just as if he were right there again, occasionally overcome with laughter. Very funny to watch and also nice to see someone enjoying the stuff I’m recording.

My birthday

2006-06-29T16:35:00.000Z

This was Monday. I celebrated with an extra long day of transcribing and annotating data. Tartius brought me pork buns for breakfast. My neighbour cooked me a tasty fish with just a little sambal on it (pictured), which we ate for lunch. And in the evening a friend invited me over to a dinner of pork, dog, and a stew consisting of ‘some kind of bird’ and snails. Most of it was very tasty but as usual I felt obliged to eat the dog, which tasted particularly doggy and later made me feel quite ill. On the way home I wanted to get some saguer to drink, but Tartius wouldn’t let me, saying that if I drank saguer we wouldn’t be able to travel to the village the next day because I’d have an upset stomach. (Though the dog had already sorted that out for me).
But we found a bottle of warm beer and drank that.

A banana tree for a hat

2006-06-29T16:13:00.000Z

On Wednesday morning we went out into the hills to get some more video of palm sugar production — the guys climbing up the tress to collect the bamboo tubes full of saguer from the night and so forth.
I got a little bit before the stupid camera decided to flash ”DEW ALERT” and shut down for an hour. This has happened just about every time I’ve tried to use the camera in the early morning, and there isn’t really anything I can do about it. It’s chilly at night, then it gets warmer in the morning and is quite steamy — it’s just how it is.
This meant that I missed a few important steps of the process, and also when a woman came past carrying a young banana tree (for replanting) in a basket on her head I couldn’t get a photo of her. I swear it was a metre tall. A hat that would be the envy of every marquee at the Melbourne Cup. She stayed chatting for about 10 minutes, didn’t take her tree off.

I spent most of the rest of the day at Om Bert’s house. We’d invited a notoriously funny storyteller, Om Niklas, down from his hut in the hills, so I shot a couple of hours of video of a bunch of guys collapsing in giggles. I foresee heavy use of the @ character (laughter) when transcribing.

I also got them to show me the directional system (again), with associated gestures. The one in the picture is taná ‘west and/or downhill’.

2006-06-25T16:43:00.000Z

So, the big day that I didn’t blog about last Tuesday.

I went down to Wioi with the aim of getting some video of some of the local cottage industries in order to elicit explanations and narratives from the films later.

Hula watu (Indonesian: gula batu) is palm sugar (pictured), and sopi (Indonesian: cap tikus) is a spirit distilled from the fermented palm sap or saguer.

I also went with Bert and Anes (two of the old Toratán guys) to Tatengesan, a village nearer the coast, where they used to speak Toratán but not any more. But we did find one old guy who still spoke it and he was very happy to sit down with the Wioi gang and use the language for the first time in ages. They talked for 2 hours straight and I recorded some good natural conversation.

Since then I’ve been working transcribing and annotating. Now that’s what I call exciting! I’ve got a little crew of people who come to my house to help with typing and translating. But next week I’ll need to spend the whole time in Wioi trying to get consensus on orthographic conventions, and working on the lexical database. As well as making more recordings.

I’m painfully aware that I only really have a few weeks left here and I want to make the most of them.

awun

2006-06-18T16:38:00.000Z

I can’t seem to get away from the porky theme of this blog. My Toratán word for the day is awun: the sound a wild pig makes when it smells a human.

The pigs in the photo used to belong to my landlord Rudy. They lived in his yard in Manado, which backs onto the Malalayang river. During some floods a couple of months ago the river rose up, washed away the wall and one of the pigs headed downstream into Manado Bay, never to be seen again. Rudy managed to save the other pig, but because its pen was wrecked he sent it to the slaughterhouse.
And on that cheery note...

Porky goodness 3

2006-06-14T16:03:00.000Z

The smoking went quite well, I think. Basically I cooked the pork on the same kind of coconut shell fire that would be used for sate, but tried to keep the temperature down and the smoke up. And trapped the smoke by putting an upside down wok on top. I cooked two batches, for about 2 hours each. And I ended up with lumps of rather tasty smoked pork. I ate quite a lot of it yesterday and it hasn’t killed me. Actually, it is well-cooked right to the middle, so I’m not too worried about that.

matuhou

2006-06-14T15:07:00.000Z

My Toratán word for the day is matuhou. It means roughly ‘wake up in an unexpected place’. For example, of a child who went to sleep in one place, was carried while sleeping, and woke up in a different place.

In other news, I am somewhat baffled by this story, which says that future = forward and past = back has been claimed to be a cognitive universal, but that one (and only one) language, Aymara has been found to show that this is not the case:

Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world – from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on – have not only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model," said Nunez.

Well, perhaps Nunez and Sweetser have been misrepresented in the story (which is not at all unlikely). Or maybe the cognitive science people haven’t been looking very hard (I confess I am not up to speed on the cog sci literature, because I am not only a Bad Linguist, but also an Awful Person). But I have to point out that Makassarese and the other South Sulawesi languages also refer to the past as in front of ego and so forth — minggu ri olo <week PREP front> ‘last week’, minggu ri boko <week PREP back> ‘next week’. And while I haven’t really looked into this, I get the impression that this is not that unusual in Austronesian languages. I’ve been told that Sasak does it the same way, for instance, and there are traces of a past = front viewpoint in Malay as well.

Anyway, I have downloaded the actual paper, and I shall read it and see what the claim really is.

Porky goodness 2

2006-06-12T16:29:00.000Z

So the pork has spent 4 days in the fridge with salt and palm sugar on it, and I think that is probably long enough. I was worried that it would smell bad, but actually it smells fine. I gave it a wash (in rainwater, given the absence of town water at the moment), and I’ll let it dry for a while as recommended. Meanwhile I’ll venture out into the rain to find the coconut shells and clove wood for smoking.
This will give me a break from preparing recordings for transcription and analysis which is starting to get little dull. I have video of quite a long and interesting discussion about wedding customs, but unfortunately the radio lapel mic feeding to the video camera wasn’t working, so I have had to use my backup recording for the audio. This was recorded with a little t-mic sitting on a table, and features a lot of chicken noise.

Also unfortunately whenever the subject matter got particularly interesting, Bert (the main speaker) would turn completely away from the mic and speak really quietly to Tartius (who was doing the interviewing), while Sepus (Bert’s brother) would decide to explain things to me in Manado Malay at the same time. The result being that there are long sections where the explanation in Toratán can hardly be heard, with a parallel explanation in Manado Malay drowning it out.

Still, at least I had a backup recording, or I wouldn’t have anything useable at all.

Water water everywhere

2006-06-11T16:22:00.000Z

For some reason the water supply to my house has been off for the last few days, and it’s a bit hard to work out who is supposed to fix it. Anyway, whoever it might be, they are unlikely to do it on the weekend so I might as well just get used to it. Luckily it is the rainy season again (already!), so instead of taking a shower I can just go and stand outside for a bit.
The picture is of Cutie, one of the kittens my son begged off Fice the neighbour, just before going back to Australia. Cutie has fleas, and worms, and he meows incessantly. The same is true of his brother Fluffy. So, having ascertained that it is not possible to get worm medicine for cats either in Tomohon or Manado, I got some worm pills intended for people, crushed up about an 8th of a tablet each and gave it to them mixed with some condensed milk. And tomorrow, weather and water situation permitting, I shall give them a bath and wash them with flea shampoo. Perhaps after that they will be ready to join polite society.

Porky goodness

2006-06-09T16:32:00.000Z

As discussed elsewhere, I am attempting to make, if not bacon, at least some smoked pork kind of thing. To this end, I bought several lumps of belly pork from the less-than-completely-hygienic Tomohon market, and I have smeared them with a combination of salt and palm sugar, and they shall stay in the fridge for a while. How exactly I am going to smoke them has not yet been determined, but it will involve coconut shells and clove wood.

Everyone has the misapprehension that what I want to make is ragey (lumps of pork grilled on a skewer). Many times I have explained that actually, no, nice though it is, ragey is not what I want to make, and I explain about how I want to smoke the pork over a period of at least several hours so that it has a nice smoky flavour. That’s not how you make ragey, they say.

(The picture is of course of a different porky event — this was the roast pig my landlord’s family brought us at Christmas, nicely wrapped in brown paper.)

The voices of frogs

2006-06-05T16:25:00.000Z

It’s not the most interesting story in the world, but here goes.

While doing fieldwork on the Makassarese language for my PhD, one night the frogs outside my room were so loud I couldn’t sleep. In the morning I told my friend Udin taena kutinro ri bangngi nasaba’ tumpanga ‘I didn’t sleep because of the frogs’. He looked surprised and said apa napare’ tumpanga? ‘what were the frogs doing?’

Were they in my room? Were they climbing on me? Had I eaten too many? Was I having frog-related dreams?

It turned out I had to be specific and say ... nasaba’ sa’rana tumpanga ‘because of the voices of the frogs’.
It tickled me for two reasons. One is that Makassarese is generally very tolerant of ambiguity — people will work out from context what the intended meaning is. And innumerable times I had found myself as a listener or reader, mid-story, having lost track completely of who was doing what. But when I try out a rather innocuous seeming sentence? No, that contains an intolerable ambiguity, which must be spelled out precisely.
The other reason is of course that it would take a lot more than (the voices of) frogs to keep most Indonesians awake, so fair enough, Udin wouldn’t immediately jump to that conclusion.

There aren’t any frogs right outside my window these days, but I hear their voices every evening, in the field out the back. Unless they are drowned out by karaoke from drunken neighbours.