Kusunda Language: Is Not An Extinct Langauge

[Chester Graham]

 >... if you're thinking of a grammar or phonology of the language ...

  A few minutes' recorded speech should be enough to give a trad IPA broad
description, which is of great use for any morphological analysis, and
useful for many syntactic analyses. Detailed phonological description is
then just a matter of motivation and time.

  Samples for syntactic analysis itself have to be much longer, but depend
equally on a variety of contexts of situation. With luck, a sample large
enough for syntactic analysis might be only one hour in length; i.e., both
sides of a C 30 cassette tape.

  Aiming lower, a useful typing of a language should be achievable from
twenty minutes or so, if the contexts of situation are varied enough; SOV
order, left-branching, ergative, agglutinating, &c.

  This is not the most warmly-human fieldwork, and would have an air of
desperation about it, but people have been doing it for quite some time
with languages that they saw dying within the contemporary generation.

  There's a description I read somewhere of a missionary, obviously modeled
on the SIL crusaders, who was busily concluding his translation of the
Bible into a language whose last speakers were gasping their last all
around him.

  Your Kusunda seems to be dying, but you still have time to describe it,
or tune previous descriptions of it, before it is extinct.

  Who knows, if your fieldwork is conspicuous enough, you might get a
change of attitude from the local great and mighty, and bring back the
language, as has happened with Hebrew, Norwegian, is maybe happening with
Welsh and, who knows, Cornish. We need to save all we can.

  All the best

Chester Graham