Approaching the end

February 14 1012

It's Tuesday. I'm leaving Saturday. Tucker is leaving two weeks later
or sooner. The solar panels and wifi station are still elsewhere -the
inverter and the wifi station somewhere unknown, supposedly on the way
to Freetown from the US. Tucker has been gone almost two weeks now,
waiting for the equipment to arrive. So I've pretty much been on my
own in the field, working with the kids in school and with other
villagers at the house, transcribing songs and stories recorded in
2005-2009.

Transcribing a few minutes of a recording can take hours. Different
languages will pose more or less issues during transcription,
particularly in relation to the transcribers own mother tongue and
acquired languages, which shape the way he or she can hear the sounds
of other languages. Mani tonal system is quite simple and there are
hardly any tonal minimal pairs, so I stopped writing down tones a long
time ago, so I no longer worry about it. I find that, in general,
transcribing spoken utterances can be particularly hard when speakers
drop and assimilate sounds, and in Mani that often happens involving
nasal sounds, which the language has a lot of! Ranging from nasalized
vowels to n, m, ŋ, ny, there is variation in pronunciation among
speakers, although each speaker is usually quite consistent. For
example, one of the adults I've been working with quite consistently
says [nya] for the third person plural pronoun, while a younger
speaker collaborating always says [ŋa]. The hard part comes when
several sounds of a word like hun drop to become a single sound like
[ŋ] as a result of lenition, a very common language process that
happens when a word becomes very frequent. In the case of hun 'to
come', a full verb has become something like an auxiliary, in which
function it is highly used and speakers have generally stopped
pronouncing it fully.

(I need to go to school now)