How many hours of recorded speech?

[Troike, Rudolph C - (rtroike)]

Great suggestions from Evan! Add how to play games,  how to bet 
on stickball games, making puns (especially great when it involves 
grammatical patterns -- Mary Willie notes that all of the Navajo 
grammatical descriptions list different verb forms for movement of 
different shapes, as though these were fixed, but speakers can make 
jokes by switching categories), how to prepare traditional dishes, 
descriptions of any rituals that may be remembered and are not 
exclusive, songs (one man I met many years ago remembered that 
his father was the last member of the Medicine Bean Society, and 
recalled his father singing the society's song, which he sang for 
me), 

Evan's examples evoke many kinds of 'who-what-when-where' etc. 
questions and the way(s) they can be answered. Languages often 
have ways of focusing on actors/events/places/means etc. that 
don't always show up in straight stories, and need to be elicited in 
the kind of give-and-take that he showed. Varying that naturally 
with a single sentence is useful for this -- 'Mary's bringing a cake 
this afternoon for Susie's party at the community center'. Can you 
ask more than one question at a time: 'Who's bringing what when?' 
Or 'No, it's not MARY who's bringing the cake, it's Jennie.' and 
'Mary's not bringing a CAKE, she's bringing something to drink.' 
Particularly useful are sentences with negation, since odd things 
often happen in them. "Bill doesn't eat sweets, so he didn't eat 
any cake, but I did.' 'Not everybody came, but most people did.' 
'Nobody ate any of the salad.' 'None of the salad was eaten by 
anyone.' (You can see some of the weirdness even in the English.)
And following up on Evan's suggestions, asking and giving 
directions to places is good, since people use different points 
of reference instead of just 'North-South-East-West', e.g., 'up-
river', 'down-river', etc. , as well as different ways of referring 
to time. An exchange with Wayne Leman awhile back also 
showed that there are very different ways to talk about whether 
you 'catch a cold' or 'a cold catches you'.  

   Rudy
________________________________________
From: Evan Gardner [evan at WHEREAREYOURKEYS.ORG]
Sent: Monday, August 27, 2012 6:13 PM
Subject: Re: How many hours of recorded speech?

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