How many hours of recorded speech? - more context

[Susan Penfield]

Compiling this information could be very valuable for many folks on all of
these lists -- thank you for raising the question and for offering to do
that.
As to the Master-Apprentice -- I concur -- a great way to get samples of
every-day speech -- However, even more valuable might be a documentation of
the whole Master-Apprentice process, including the speech --

Just my two cents,
Susan

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 7:31 AM, Lindsay Marean <lmarean at bensay.org> wrote:

> I'm grateful for the many responses I'm receiving to my questions, which
> I've posted to three different listservs that deal with endangered language
> documentation and revitalization.  In a few days I'll compile the responses
> from all three lists (ILAT, RNLD, and ENDANGERED-LANGUAGES) and make them
> available to others who may be interested in reading them.
>
> Meanwhile, although I think the question of "what is sufficient?" is
> broadly relevant to language documentation, I'd like to provide a little
> more information about my own situation.
>
> I have an MA in linguistics, a few years of fieldwork experience, and some
> additional training in language documentation.  I'm working on my own
> heritage language, a North American indigenous language that I've been
> studying for 13 years.  Our few remaining fluent speakers are in high
> demand as teachers and consultants for summer language camps,
> master-apprentice programs, community and distance language classes, and
> research and documentation projects.  Recently we have decided to make
> documentation of natural speech one of our priorities.  However, "as much
> as you possibly can for as long as you possibly can" seems too naive an
> approach for us to take, because our documentation time comes at the
> expense of other projects that are also important.  We also don't want to
> leave our language underdocumented by neglecting a particular area of
> language use or by simply not recording enough.
>
> If you write a descriptive grammar or compile a dictionary, there's a
> point where you can say that you are "finished enough" to publish (of
> course there will be aspects of the grammar the you didn't touch on or
> fully account for, and your dictionary will be missing lots of words) and
> move on to a new project.  We won't stop recording our elders once our
> documentation project is over, but we'd like an idea of when we can
> consider our collection "big enough" to shift our focus to other priorities.
>
> Again, thank you for your many and carefully considered responses to my
> questions!
>
> Lindsay
>
> On 8/27/12 12:39 PM, Lindsay Marean 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
>>
>


-- 
**********************************************************************************************
*Susan D. Penfield, Ph.D.
*
Research Coordinator,
CERCLL,  Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy
CONFLUENCE, Center for Creative Inquiry
University of Arizona
Fax: (520) 626-3313
Websites:
CERCLL: cercll.arizona.edu
Confluence Center:  www.confluencecenter.arizona.edu
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