How many hours of recorded speech?

[Evan Gardner]

Evan from Where Are Your Keys? here...

What a wonderful question! I instantly started dreaming of the
possibilities and if I could go back in time and record fluent
speakers for the purpose of using the recordings to make new
speakers...

My wish would be recordings of people making arrangements to have a
party, gathering, get together... lots of back and forth, question and
answer, present/simple tense dialog.

Ex:
When do you want to have a party?
Who should we invite? why?
Who should we not invite? Why?
Will all my ex-girlfriends be there? Will all your ex-girlfriends be there?
What is the purpose of the party? Why are we having this gathering?
1st birthday? 100th? funeral? wedding? language night? movie?
What will we eat?
Who is bringing what dish? is that a good idea?
How is everyone getting there? Do they need rides?
Which?
Where?
How often?
How many people?
Why? Why not?

This kind of back and forth will give better examples of entry level
conversation. There is a tendency to record word lists (too basic) and
high level story telling (too advanced).  There is seldom enough
simple but complete "get 'r' done" language which shows the simple and
elegant structures and patterns of living languages.  I hope for
enough of these conversations to write appropriate level children's
books... See Spot Run. and then 1st grade 2nd grade 3rd grade through
7th grade readers. Scaffold grammar to get people speaking using
conversations and not word lists.

Another area I would like to see more of is real joking, teasing,
arguing in the language... how do fluent elders rip on each other?
Respect each other? Love each other? Get mad at each other?...
irreverent, bold, loving, but real.  Retelling of actual events by the
participants in those events.

"Can you guys remember a time when you had a fight? What was it about?
Who won?" of course there must be a lot of trust in the room for this
kind of interaction.  But I remember my Grandma wouldn't hold back
when she talked about the wonderful things, and stupid adventures my
Grampa had put her through. I wish the tape player was going then.
Like the time he wrecked their model T in down town New York because
he wanted to see how many red lights he could run without having to
stop...4... the garbage truck suffered minor damage... no-one was
harmed... Model T towed away at Gradma's expense! Now there is a kids'
book using the grammar extrapolated from a documentation exercise! HOW
MANY?...


On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 2:37 PM, Lindsay Marean <lmarean at bensay.org> wrote:
> I'm helping to document a language with few first-language speakers living.
> We want to record them speaking naturally (and transcribe and translate the
> recordings), and we hope to use this documentation as the basis for more
> language description in the future.
>
> I'm looking for people's opinions, experiences, and citations - how many
> hours of recorded speech are minimally "enough" to most likely represent the
> grammar of the language?  Are there particular discourse types that we
> should be certain to record, besides narratives and conversations?
>
> Best regards,
> Lindsay