It is so nice to be able to collect new data from an understudied language and share with the world. As Paul Newman (a Professor in Hausa) stated once, one of the most exciting feeling of a fieldworker is that he/she becomes suddenly the world's expert on something and anyone has to refer to him/her to know more on the topic. This is how I feel know. In my files and notebooks there are new thinks, that I am eager to share for the advancement of cultural, linguistics and cognitive research.
The first data come from our first two-month fieldwork of the Bayso and Haro project. It has been a success first of all because
I used all my experience in doing research in Ethiopia. This implies the ease in making contacts with people, which is so
much facilitate by using Amharic.
I did not expect to spend one month
in Addis, but eventually it was needed. All the other members of the
team had a reason to start later, but once we were ready we went. I
was first one once I got my research permit and the necessary
equipment arrived from Germany. I aimed Arba Minch and made my base
there, ready to go and introduce myself to authorities and the people
of the near-by Alge village. Eventually the people I looked and came
to me. The following
description comes from an article that I wrote in the field and that
will be published in the Rassegna di Studi Etiopici.
"I
had the chance to attend a symposium on the linguistic and cultural
diversity of the Zone. In particular, the topic was the celebration
of the Mesqal feast among the five recognised ethnic groups. Even
though this is a Christian Ortodox celebration, remembering the
finding of the True Cross, it has been adopted by several groups,
where it basically corresponds to the pre-christian festivity of the
new year. In the symposium I approached the Head of the Gamo Gofa
Zone and the Office for Tourism, Culture and Governmental
Communication and made an appointment with the head of the Mirab
Abbaya district (Woreda)
where the Bayso and the Haro belong to. Some Bayso were also present
among the groups' delegations invited to the symposium. Thanks to the
help of my contact in Arba Minch, my ex student at Addis Ababa
University Samuel Gondore, I first approached a Bayso person living in
Arba Minch and working at the local multilingual radio station, which
also broadcasts in Bayso. He helped me to introduced myself to the
Bayso group and to their leader, Baallamo Worba. I explained what my
research intentions and he invited me in Alge where he and the other
members of the group present in Arba Minch were living. He would
welcome me and, first of all, guide me to do video recordings of the
slaughtering of cows for the Mesqal celebration, that in Bayso is
called Baala.
Alge
is the only real Bayso village in the coast of the Abbaya Lake.
Ballamo is the carismatic leader of the people living in Alge and the
representative of the whole people in the Alge Qabale.
He is a very knowledgeable and clever person. A great source of
information for the study of Bayso language and culture. Indeed, in
the five following days I spent in Alge I recorded more that half an
hour of text from him and one week later Susanne Epple did all her
anthropological research with his assistance. In Alge I also
translated and transcribed a 4 minute text with the help of
Baallamo's son Abdissa and Baallamo himself. It was a very basic
transcription with association of rough meaning without eliciting and
exploring the grammar. In that stage it is only needed to distinguish
words and their meanings with a transcription made on paper. More
understanding of the morphological and syntactic structures will come
with re-listening to the speech and processing of the text with a
computer transcription tool. This is a kind of methodology applied by
the other member of the project. The first in turn is Lemmi, who
worked with Ballamo in Alge.
While
working with Abdissa, I noticed how good he was in understanding and
doing transcription an translation. He could do it in English
directly from Bayso, while with Baallamo I had Amharic as
intermediate language. So, I proposed Abdissa to come to Gidiccho
with me and do the research together.
For
the trip to the island I have organised a boat, which was not an easy
task. Two months before I had already established contacts with Arba
Minch University, that provides researchers a boat on the lake and a
boat engine. Everything seem to go smoothly, but once I was in Arba
Minch I came to know that the boat needed maintenance. The University
in principle could provide only the engine and introduce as to a
fishers' association that could rent a boat on the Abbaya. I took me
a week to talk to the right person and conclude the process. In the
meantime people of the University were busy with teaching training
and the person responsible for the boat changed his administrative
position. The new responsible made some problems to give the engine
without the boat, since there was no legal procedure for that, but
eventually he understood our vital need for our research and
appointed someone from the University staff to be responsible for the
engine. The promise is that next time the boat will be maintained and
we can use it with the engine under the payment of a rent.
The
trip was costly. We had to hire two drivers and pay a lot for fuel
because we had to leave from Arba Minch, which is six-seven hours
away form Gidiccho. We wished to find a boat in Alge, which is only
one and a half hour away from the island. In fact, there were no
other options since there are no other motor boat operating in the
lake. This is different from the Chamo lakes where one can rent boats
from the tourist guides' and fishers' associations.
Few
homesteads are left on the Gidiccho island. Considering the low
population density we had decided that no more than two researchers
could work in the same village. The problems of getting the boat and
the individual plans of the research member created a situation in
which Lemmi Kebebew and Susanne Epple did their work in Alge, I
worked in Bayso with the assistance of Abdissa Baallamo and Endashaw
Woldemichael and Fabienne Braukmann collaborated in the research in
the Haro village. This was an appropriate distribution to avoid the
impression of a research “invasion”. Once in a while I was
visiting the Haro village, which is thirty minutes walking distance,
and once the three of us met in Shigima.
I
was spontaneously hosted by Anteneh Wogga, nicknamed “Doctor”.
The nickname came from the fact that he was born in Arba Minch from
the hands of a real doctor in the hospital. I stayed with him, his
wife Silt'anu, and their four children. They took care of me, letting
me pitch a tend in their compound, giving me a bed in the house to
rest in the afternoon when in the tent it was too hot and feeding me.
There is no food problem in Gidiccho. People easily find fish, they
eat moringa
leaves and other vegetables, they have chickens and large herds of
cattle for meat and milk. They also have some honey and maize, that
mostly come from the plantations on the coast since the salty soil of
the island is not suitable for agriculture. The fertile land of the
coast is nowadays occupied by the water raised from the lake. I was
invited as least three times a day to have coffee. This is always
accompanied by the “kursi”, that is some maize of bread to eat
before and during drinking.
The
meetings for drinking coffee were the main events in which I got
exposed to the language. I simply stayed there listening and trying
to understand according from what I remembered of the grammatical
sketch of Hayward and catching some Amharic words or sentences from
code-switching, toponyms and personal names. I rarely understood
anything, but I patiently listened and eventually I memorised basic
sentences and expressions that I will not forget and that I started
using.
As
for data collection, I started with recording the speech of Silt'anu.
I thought important to collect texts from a woman since in Alge Lemmi
and Susanne were mostly working with men. She gave me four short
texts, three on cooking (on of which is found in the appendix) and
one on her life. Then I also asked “Doctor” to provide some
speech. He talked about his life and the work of a fisherman. His
texts were longer, one reached four minutes. The third and last
speaker who provided a text is Littu Sherberi. He is a Bayso elder
who has always been living in the island. I asked him to tell a story
of crocodiles attacking people and to reconstruct an event relating
to the building of a boat in Melka during Hayle Sellase's time. I
took advantage to train Abdissa to make the recording.
Abdissa
is also the one who made most of the transcriptions and translations.
After working on the first two texts together, I supervised him for
the following two and he did alone the last ones. I limited myself to
check them after he finished. My aim to to train him in all the
phases of the documentation work, up to the final transcription and
glossing on a computer. He will profit a lot from this in the
perspective of advancing with his studies.
The
first session of Bayso recording, therefore, is not rich in quantity
but very accurate in quality. Moreover, it is important that 80% of
the recoding material is already transcribed and translated. In this
kind of documentation projects it is easy to keep on recording
anything that looks interesting forgetting that the material should
be made available to other people for further study and for the
community itself. A mass of recordings with no transcription and
indication of the meaning is useless. It is better to record less,
with clear and technically high standard sound quality and accompany
the texts with the necessary annotation. On these basis the corpus
will be easily expanded in the following field research. periods.
The
selection of the speech topics were done quite randomly. I expect
that on the basis of her research Susanne Epple will indicated those
important cultural areas from with rich, meaningful and
anthropologically interesting speech samples can be collected.
Backup
of all the material has been done in two places. Besides the recoding
memory cards (we use only solid-state digital recorders), we
transferred the files to an external hard disk and memory cards. Once
in Europe, I will transfer the material on the centralised server of
the general DoBeS archive. This will keep it safe while we work on
editing and annotation.
Each
file has been named in a standard way. The model we follow is
LanguageCode_Date_CodeOfCollector_CodeOfSpeaker_KindOfSpeech_SerialNumber_Topic.
Therefore, the first narrative on fishing recording by me (code 01)
from the Bayso speaker "Doctor" (code DOCT) on the 12th
of October will be contained in the file named
BSW_20121012_01_DOCT_Narr_01_fishing (BSW is the code given by
Ethnologue. We had to create one for Haro). Since it is a an
uncompressed audio file, the final part of the name is the format
code .wav. Other files containing annotations will keep the same
name, but change the format. A written document with comments, for
example, will end with .doc. Following the same file naming standard
for all the researchers is crucial. Otherwise, the risk is to get
lost into to dozen of recordings forgetting the kind of speech
recorded, the topics and the overall quantity".
