This new article gives a basic overview of the grammar of the Yolmo language. I’m excited to share it, because it’s the first time I’ve systematically drawn together resources on the different dialects of the language, including those worked on by other people (Hari’s work on the Melamchi variety) and my own work on the Lamjung and Ilam varieties as well as the closely related Syuba language. I’m also excited because it’s one of the first articles in the new WikiJournal of the Humanities.
I’ve been slowly improving the Yolmo Language Wikipedia page for years, because Wikipedia is still one of the most read websites on the internet, and the place most people are likely to learn about a language. This meant that I already had the basis of a good encyclopedic article, the kind of thing you might find in The Sino-Tibetan Languages handbook or something similar (without the $420 price tag).
WikiJournals are set up as part of the larger WikiMedia family, which includes Wikipedia. There are a number of benefits to publishing an article in a WikiJournal:
It motivated me to to one final push to round out some sections of the article I’d been putting off
It creates a ‘version of record’, which can still be updated but is easier to cite because the content is stable
Because it’s a journal article, not an encyclopedia, there is more scope for speculation, and a bit of original research
It’s a peer-reviewed journal article, and so I get some academic credit for my time spent improving Wikipedia
I decided to essentially draft the document on the Wikipedia page. Once I was happy with it, I created a Wikiversity account for myself, and copied the content across to submit as a pre-print. There were a few changes to make, such as writing an abstract, and adding some more speculative thoughts about the relationship between the dialects for which there aren’t any good citable sources (yet… I’m working on it). Some lessons learnt in this process: set up your account 24-28 hours before editing, otherwise they tend to think you’re a bot. I had some trouble editing the template myself, but I’ve been told they’ve fixed that. Also, the visual editor that makes editing Wikipedia such a breeze is not turned on automatically - you have to go into your settings and in the ‘beta’ section choose the visual editor as an option.
Overall, I found the peer review experience very positive, as I was fortunate enough to have reviewers who understood the grammar overview genre, and were familiar with Wikipedia style. The whole peer review process is run on the Wikipedia model, where everything is documented publically. You can see the reviewer comments and my responses by going to the Discuss tab on the article.
Abstract
Yolmo is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal. Also known as Helambu Sherpa, it is a Tibetic
language. This article gives an overview of the language, including
information about the dialects spoken, history of documentation, and a
grammatical overview. The grammatical overview brings together work on
different dialects, providing an outline of the sound system, noun
phrase, verb phrase and clause structure.
A popular expression in Nepal is a fatalistically resigned ke garne? ‘what to do?’ The government office is closed, ke garne? The bus is running late, ke garne? When people say this, they also bring their palms up and rotate them inwards, with their thumb and index finger extended and the other fingers bunched in.
This gesture doesn’t just occur with this phrase, it turns up in all kinds of question-asking contexts, across the wider region of India-Nepal-Pakistan and beyond. This has been noted anecdotally before, and in this new paper for the journal Gesture, I look at the gesture and its use in detail for the first time. I’m very excited about this publication because it’s my first publication on gesture in Syuba, and my first publication in Gesture (if the name alone doesn’t give it away, it’s the journal in this field!).
(GIF from SUY-141022-03, Sangbu Syuba gesturing while he says ‘what do we say?’)
The data are archived with Paradisec, and I made the clips specifically with the rotated palms tokens available through FigShare.
You can view the abstract on the journal website, and download the full text if you have institutional access. If you don’t, but you’d like to read the article, you can contact me for a pre-publication copy.
I’m also very excited that the paper has been included in a major review paper Kensy Cooperrider by Natasha Abner and Susan
Goldin-Meadow on ‘the palm up puzzle’.
Abstract
In this paper I examine the use of
the ‘rotated palms’ gesture family among speakers of Syuba (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal),
as recorded in a video corpus
documenting this language. In this family of gestures one or both forearms are rotated to a supine
(‘palm up’) position, each hand with thumb and forefinger extended and the
other fingers, in varying degrees, flexed toward the palm. When used
independently of speech this gesture tends to be performed in a relatively
consistent manner, and is recognised as an interrogative gesture throughout
India and Nepal. In this use it can be considered an emblem. When used with
speech it shows more variation, but can still be used to indicate the interrogative
nature of what is said, even when the speech may not indicate interrogativity
in its linguistic construction. I analyse the form and function of this
gesture in Syuba and argue that there are a number distinct functions relating
to interrogativity. This can therefore be considered as a family of gestures.
This research lays the groundwork for better understand of this common family
of gestures across the South Asian area, and beyond.
Reference
Gawne, Lauren. 2018. Contexts of use of a rotated palms gesture among Syuba (Kagate) speakers in Nepal. Gesture 17(1): 37–64. [Abstract]
Cooperrider, Kensy, Natasha Abner & Susan
Goldin-Meadow. 2018. The palm-up puzzle: Meanings and origins of a
widespread form in gesture and sign. Frontiers in Communication 3: 23.
doi: 10.3389/fcomm.
For the last four years one of my main projects has been the documentation of Syuba, and the development of an online Open Access archive of those materials. The corpus has been online for a year. I’ve now published a definitive guide to the collection in Language Documentation and Conservation.
The article includes an overview of the history of the project, the conventions used in the collection, and what the online corpus contains. This is part of my own believe that linguists should care about the data on which their research in based. This article is also part of a growing trend in transparency in language documentation, which in part aims to acknowledge that the development of corpora is an underacknowledged academic activity (see this recent LSA draft resolution on the evaluation of language documentation corpora for hiring, tenure and promotion).
Writing this article was a very useful exercise for me. It made me consider what was in the corpus and add a few more things (like the academic articles written), and make a few more things open access (you can now download the FLEx file including the dictionary). It also meant that I created a definitive summary of what is in the corpus.
The collection contains the following:
video recordings (114 MTS recordings, approx. 14.6
hours)
I can strongly recommend this activity to anyone who has built a language documentation corpus. It helps you have a go-to summary (I will now cite the heck out of this), and makes it easier for others to access your materials and use all the hard work you’ve done (while also saying “hey, I’m working on these topics at the moment” to prevent research scooping).
Abstract
This article provides an overview of the collection “Kagate (Syuba)”,
archived with both the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources
in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) and the Endangered Language Archive
(ELAR). It provides an overview of the materials that have been
archived, as well as details of the workflow, conventions used, and
structure of the collection. It also provides context for the content of
the collection, including an overview of the language context, and some
of the motivations behind the documentation project. This article thus
provides an entry point to the collection. The future plans for the
collection – from the perspectives of both the researcher and Syuba
speakers – are also outlined, but with the overwhelming majority of
items in the collection available to others, it is hoped that this
article will encourage use of the materials by other researchers.
Reference
Gawne, Lauren. 2018. A Guide to the Syuba (Kagate) Language Documentation Corpus. Language Documentation & Conservation 12: 204-234. [Open Access PDF]
Stories and
Songs from Kagate - illustrated picture book
This book is an illustrated collection of stories from the documentation of Syuba (Tibetic, Nepal). The illustrations were made by Ng Xiao Yan as part of an ongoing project at NTU Singapore to connect students in the School of Art, Design and Media with people working on language documentation. The illustrations are beautiful, I’m still in awe of how well she captured features of Syuba life.
From the introduction:
This book contains stories and songs om Kagate speakers.
The original recordings were made in 2014 with a number of Kagate
people. Some of these stories are traditional folk tales, and you will
see that many of them involve animal characters. Some of the stories
are personal experience stories. We also have the texts of some songs
written by Kagate people. Kagate people want to share their language
and their culture with the world.
The recordings of songs and stories were made as part of a project
by Joan Kelly and Lauren Gawne, funded by Nanyang Technological
University for “the development of artistic and participatory means
of recording, writing and transmitting the stories and knowledge of
Kagate, an endangered language of Nepal”. This project also funded the
illustrations by Ng Xiao Yan, transcription work and other production
costs. Further work on the volume, including Nepali translations
by Rinchen A. Lama, was funded by the project “Documenting and
describing Kagate, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal”
run by Lauren Gawne and funded by the Endangered Languages
Documentation Project. The original recordings can be found online
at The Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS. Thank you to Ningmar
Tamang, who worked on the nal text. Thank you also to Emily Gref
for editorial and technical assistance and The Firebird Foundation,
Awesome Foundation and Stack Exchange for funding an initial period
of work with the Kagate community.
Two beautiful documentary shorts made from my Syuba archive collections
The ELAR archive teamed up with Anna and Remy Sowa at Chouette Films to make shorts from the open access materials in the collection. These two films was created from footage from my Kagate (Syuba) deposit at ELAR.
The video above shows Dawa Lama harvesting honey and talking about the process. The video below features people talking about their experiences of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal. It was an interesting experience working with other people on my data, but it’s made me all the more happy that it’s open access and available for people to use. I’ve also been blown away by how beautiful the archive footage looks when it’s left in the hands of professional editors!
The ELAR blog will be featuring other videos made by Chouette over the coming weeks. It’s also just a great blog about language documentation.
I’m very excited that the Syuba language materials I’ve been working on over the last few years (and am continuing to work on right now) are available through the Endangered Langauge ARchive (ELAR). I wanted to share it with you, and also share my thanks to the many enthusiastic Syuba people who participated in the recordings and shared their stories.
From the ELAR collection page:
This collection includes audio-video recordings of Syuba, spoken in the
Ramechhap district of Nepal. It also contains a smaller collection of
audio-video recordings of Ilam Yolmo, a mutually intelligible variety
spoken in a different district of Nepal. These collections have been
archived together because of their similarities and because they were
recorded as part of the same research project. Many of the recordings
are monologues, interviews or conversations. ELAN transcriptions are
available for a subset of the collection, and will continue to be added
as work on the collection progresses. There are also some experimental
and elicited data, as well as supplementary materials including scanned
notes, FLEx files, GPS data and publications about the language. This
project is still in active development until June 2017.This collection
includes audio-video recordings of Syuba, spoken in the Ramechhap
district of Nepal. It also contains a smaller collection of audio-video
recordings of Ilam Yolmo, a mutually intelligible variety spoken in a
different district of Nepal. These collections have been archived
together because of their similarities and because they were recorded as
part of the same research project. Many of the recordings are
monologues, interviews or conversations. ELAN transcriptions are
available for a subset of the collection, and will continue to be added
as work on the collection progresses. There are also some experimental
and elicited data, as well as supplementary materials including scanned
notes, FLEx files, GPS data and publications about the language. This
project is still in active development until June 2017.
Lauren Gawne (collector), 2017; Kagate (Syuba), an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal (0388), Digital collection managed by ELAR. [Open Access]: https://elar.soas.ac.uk/Collection/MPI971098
This paper came out of a workshop about Yolmo in November 2014.
Academic publishing is never the quickest venture, but I’m glad that
after a couple of years I can finally share this paper with you. The Yolmo communities that I work with are all smaller groups
that migrated in the last century or two away from the ‘homelands’. In
this paper I argue that this makes them diaspora communities, even
though traditional definitions of diaspora involve people moving to a
different country. I’m just trying to change the definition of a word in
this paper so it’s NO BIG DEAL. I also spend a lot of time talking
about cultural practice and history of the Lamjung Yolmo and Ramechhap
Kagate (AKA Syuba) groups. This makes it complementary to the 2013 paper which gave an overview of the linguistic features of these varieties.
The paper is published in a special issue of the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, which includes a couple of other papers that are also about Yolmo (including one on shamanic practices and one on women’s migration experiences). This is my first time publishing with EBHR. They only do a paper volume, which will eventually be uploaded to Digital Himalaya, but for now I’ve made the pre-publication version available.
Abstract
Hyolmo communities have resided in the
Lamjung and Ramechhap districts of Nepal for at least a century, and are part
of a historical trend of group migration away from the Hyolmo homelands. These
communities have taken different approaches to constructing their identities as
belonging to the Hyolmo diaspora; in Lamjung, people readily identify as
Hyolmo, while in Ramechhap people accept their Hyolmo history, but have also
developed an identity as Kagate (and now Syuba). In this paper I trace these
groups’ migration histories. I then look at the variety of names used in
reference to these communities, which helps us to understand their historical
and contemporary relationships with Hyolmo. Finally, I examine contemporary
cultural and linguistic practices in Ramechhap and Lamjung, to see how
communities perform their identity as Kagate or Hyolmo, and as modern Buddhists
of Tibetan origin in Nepal.
Reference
Gawne, Lauren. 2016. ‘My name is Maya Lama/Hyolmo/Syuba’: Negotiating
identity in Hyolmo diaspora communities. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research
47: 40-68. [Pre-publication PDF]
Just in time for my return home, I have a new article about mapmaking, which you’ll know is something I’ve been getting more and more involved with over the last few years. The article is an introduction to mapmaking, particularly with regards to minority and endangered languages. It provides an introduction to some of the theory of mapmaking, and provides walk-throughs of making maps with Google Maps, TileMill and CartoDB (fun disclosure fact - I’m a CartoDB ambassador).
I wrote this article with Hiram Ring. When I was at NTU as a postdoc in 2014-2015 Hiram was finishing his PhD, this paper came out of a whole bunch of discussions we had about the best way of mapping languages for academic and non-academic publications. We even include a couple of data sets so you can work though the paper and make pretty maps like this:
LD&C is an Open Access publisher, so you can download the article and dataset directly from their website: https://hdl.handle.net/10125/24692
Abstract
This paper introduces readers to mapmaking as part of language documentation.
We discuss some of the benefts and ethical challenges in producing good maps,
drawing on linguistic geography and GIS literature. We then describe current
tools and practices that are useful when creating maps of linguistic data, particularly using locations of field sites to identify language areas/boundaries. We
demonstrate a basic work ow that uses CartoDB, before demonstrating a more
complex work ow involving Google Maps and TileMill. We also discuss presentation and archiving of mapping products. The majority of the tools identified
and used are open source or free to use.
Reference
Gawne, Lauren, & Ring, Hiram. (2016). Mapmaking for Language Documentation and Description. Language Documentation and Conservation, 10, 188–242. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/24692
I’m back in the UK after a four month visit to Nepal. It was, on the whole, a productive four months, even with getting ill a record-breaking number of times in the first couple of months. Here are some of the highlights:
Getting to see everyone again, for the first time since the earthquakes in 2015. My last fieldtrip was scheduled for a week after the April 12th earthquake last year, and promptly cancelled, so it had been over a year since I’d seen people, and how they were going.
Taking colleagues from NTU’s School of Art, Design & Media to the Syuba community to make art with the kids.
Returning copies of a book that one of my NTU students made about basket weaving in Lamjung.
Finally going to Ilam, the only major population of Yolmo speakers I hadn’t yet spent any time with.
Introducing speakers of Syuba, Lamjung Yolmo and Ilam Yolmo to each other - and watching as they discovered the similarities in their languages and histories.
Running a set of experiments, including a tone perception test (more info soon).
Starting to work with the Langtang language. I’m helping archive a language documentation project from Langtang (more info soon) and have become involved with the Langtang Memory Project. I didn’t make it to Langtang this time, but that’s why there’s always another fieldtrip planned, right?
Coming Up!
Now that I’m back from Nepal and, in the world of reliable internet and electricity, I’ll return to posting twice a week here.
Just because fieldwork is over doesn’t mean I’m keeping still for long - in a couple of weeks I’ll be in Alaska for CoLang, a two week summer school for Language Documentation and Revitalisation. I’ll be teaching a one week course on Wikipedia with Gretchen McCulloch and a one hour seminar on including children in language documentation and revitalisation with Barb Kelly.
In July I’ll be heading to the International Conference for Gesture Studies in Paris. The preliminary schedule looks great, and I’ll definitely be live tweeting.
For now though, I’m enjoying a bit of London summer, and quite a bit of bread and cheese.
Dictionaries are never the quickest things to write. The Oxford English Dictionary was originally expected to take 10 years, and instead took almost 50 years to complete, and it is still under constant revision. In December last year, 40 or so speakers of Kagate assembled for 2 weeks in Kathmandu to attempt to collect enough words in the language to assemble a dictionary.
The method they used is known as Rapid Word Collection, where small groups are given short questionnaires grouped by semantic domains. One group may be sitting there attempting to list all of the features of the human face, while another might be wracking their brains for all the words relating to weddings, or theft, or trees.
Each words for each domain are listed on a separate piece of paper, and grouped by folders. this leads to a great deal of paper-shuffling. Not every speaker of the language is literate, and the orthography is still in its trial phase (problems that I’m sure the OED editor never had to ponder), so scribes had to be carefully chosen. Also, older speakers are repositories of information and half-forgotten words, and so were distributed around groups.
In 10 days the half-a-dozen groups of speakers collected over 10,000 words. Some of these are repeats, for example the word for fire is likely to show up in the cooking domain as well as the forestry domain and a dozen others, but given that the previous Kagate word list had only 1500-odd entries, this is certainly an improvement. Also, all of the entries were typed during the workshop, and so the editing and refining stage can be undertaken much more efficiently.
They worked with a couple of local language and literacy NGOs, including SIL-Nepal, and I was very kindly invited along. There was also a similar workshop being run with the Thulung community in the same building, so there was a pleasant hum of activity the whole time I was there.
The dictionary is, at this stage, more technically a translated wordlist. Each word is given in Kagate with the Nepali translation. The small team of editors will now need to check for words that are missing, or mistranslated. Eventually English glosses will be added, and even definitions in Kagate itself.
I feel very lucky to have been able to see the great work done by the Kagate team, and the amazing training and support that they received. I’ll be sure to keep you up to date with any future developments!
While you’ve perhaps been reading about my language adventures in Singapore, I’ve been in Nepal working once again with speakers of Kagate on documenting their language and traditional narratives and practices.
Above are the obligatory photos of cute animals. The baby buffalo was only a few hours old when I met her, and the poor dog had been decorated with marigold petals by the kids - to think he was just a puppy when we met earlier in the year!
Of the two other photos, one is Larkel watching the recording he just made and the other is me in full fieldwork glamour (the jacket is essentially my mobile lang doc lab, at all times it contains a notebook, pens, camera, mobile phone, and any number of small items).
This trip we spent a lot of time going over transcriptions of existing recordings, so I’m getting a good feel for how Kagate really differs from related language that have been described. I also recorded some more stories and practices in the villages, including how to ferment alcohol, the protocols for marriage, and running sheep, which was apparently a major economic focus of Kagate life until as recently as 5-6 years ago, when the government curbed forest grazing. I also know now that certain jungle fruit will make you very ill, that a bear’s footprints can look like a human’s, and that jackals will dig up a body no matter how well you bury it. I also left a phone with Aikuma on it in Nepal, so hopefully there will be even more stories in our collection soon.
Hopefully in the next year or so we’ll start sharing these recordings online. There’s so much great stuff happening at the moment, which I’ll be sharing in the next few months!
I had a great time at the Australex conference last year, and it’s exciting that proceedings are now available as open access download from the conference website (via link above).
There are lots of great papers here, and the nice thing about lexicography is that the ideas and stories behind peoples’ work are often quite accessible even if you don’t work in this area (which is probably why I enjoyed the conference so much).
Particularly interesting is the work by Rob Amery & Mary-Anne Gale tracing the work of the missionary linguists who came over from Germany over 175 years ago and provided documentation of the Indigenous languages of the South Australia area. I also partcularly like David Nash’s paper, which suggests that the modern scientific naming conventions are a great way to incorporate endangered words into a new domain of knowledge.
As a dictionary dabbler, I feel very lucky to have a paper in this collection as well. In it I discuss the workflow and social experience of the lexicography work I’ve done with the Yolmo and Kagate communities to date. It is rather chatty as far as my academic writing is concerned, so if you’re at all interested in the type of work a field linguist occasionally finds herself doing you can read all about it.
Thanks to Jasmin Morley. Julia Miller and Ghil‘ad Zuckermann for their work on the volume, and the conference, and thanks to the University of Adelaide for hosting the proceedings online and making them open and easily accessible!
Gerald Roche and others are celebrating #DiverseTibet throughout May on Twitter. Tibet is large place, and people who identify as Tibetan are more linguistically, culturally and geographically diverse than I ever realised before I started working in the field of Tibeto-Burman studies for my PhD.
I thought I’d contribute to the celebration of the diversity within Tibetan with this recording of a song in Kagate - a Tibetan variety that is spoken in Nepal. Many people don’t realise than the mountains of Nepal are predominantly inhabited by people of Tibetan origin.
If you know any Tibetan of the Classical or Lhasa variety then some words in this song will be familiar. I don’t have a complete translation yet, but I’m working on one. The singer is Pasang Maya, and she also wrote the words. We recorded this during my visit in January, and we’re sitting in a field that’s recently been cleared for farming. She called this song Lama-wa, and it is about community, family and being Tibetan. I think it fits nicely with the theme of Diverse Tibet for this month.
