Back to Blighty

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

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

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

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

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’.

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

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...