The project's second year has started. I am now in Addis Ababa to prepare my next
four-week fieldwork. The OK for the continuation of the project has
been given by the VolkswagenStiftung, the sponsor or the project in
the context of the DoBeS programme for the endangered languages, on
the basis of a certain amount of material that we have promised to
archive in the DoBeS archive. See www.dobes.mpi.nl
and look for the Bayso and Haro project.
The corpus mainly
comprises of speech performances recorded in audio and video. All the
recordings are transcribed and translated, a part of it is annotated
by morphemic segmentation and morpheme by morpheme glossing. There
also video files without speech transcription, ethnographic
explanations of text dealing with certain topics such as religion and
boat building, a first wordlist of Bayso and Haro translated in
English, a first draft of the grammatical sketch and of a
sociolinguistic profile of the two languages. Each archived file is
accompanied by metadata information filled in using Arbil.
This is already rich
material, but it must be revised and adjusted. The transcription is
not homogenised because each team member used a different one. Now we
have an unique system that came ouf from the phonological analysis
contained in the first draft of the sketches. The morphological
annotation should be revised and improved, but it is based on the
existing description of the two languages, that are not bad at all.
The translation is also a bit rough. Someone made both a
literary/imitating translation and a free translation, some file have
only one of the two. The Bayso lexicon, about 700 words, is based on
the collected texts and is being compared with the one by Hayward
(1978 and 1979) that I have digitalised. I have also converted the
Bayso and English columns to get the English index. Also our lexicon
has two indexes. Mechthild Reh has collected all the Haro words,
about 850 words, of the grammar by Hirut (2004) and made comparisons
with the words found in Brenzinger (1999). An additional lexicon of
about 150 cultural terms has been created by Fabienne Braukmann. Also
Endashaw Woldemichael created a 300-item wordlist. However, the
transcription must be revised before archiving. The draft of the
grammatical sketch of Bayso is mostly based on our material, while
the one of Haro is based on Hirut (2004).
I think we are on a good
track. There is a clear and elastic data workflow based on the
creation of material in a first rough version and gradually checked
and revised more precisely. And in next week new fieldwork and a new
start towards and new target to get the OK for the third and final
year!
