25 april 2007

doing phonology

I have made some revisions to the Web site. The most important revision is that I have begun posting my phonological work. Go to the Phonology page. It's all very tentative - especially the vowels. I don't plan to update this News page any more.

5 november 2006

labeling words

I recently completed a couple long-overdue project, freeing up some psychological space for me to start work on Jarai again. The first order of business was to finish labeling my Jarai sound files: one mp3 per Jarai word (organized in iTunes). I recorded about 1700 individual sound files in Cambodia, and when I got back to the U.S., there may have been as many as 500 that were still unlabeled. So this past week, I finally buckled down and finished labeling them. Now, when I'm typing and checking my transcriptions, I can quickly locate my recording of any word by using iTunes' search feature. (By the way, I've found that the iTunes search bar is much faster on a Mac. I suspect it's because Windows doesn't have a very good indexing system for iTunes to take advantage of. Apple, on the other hand, has outstanding search capabilities built into its file structure.)

Although I've finished labeling my own recordings, I still have a few unlabeled recordings made by a U.S. anthropologist I met who is doing work among the Jarai. The researcher was kind enough to copy his sessions for me, giving me about 20 recorded words in a dialect that was inaccessible to me because of its distance from the area where I was working. (I'll call this dialect AM.) Whereas I made my recordings by doing each word separately, the recordings from AM were continuous, one word after another in the same file. So I'm now breaking those files up by word and labeling them, so that they're easily accessible for comparison.

a little comparison

I personally heard and recorded Jarai words from at least 4 different villages, and I chose one of those villages (STC) as my main dialect for study. All four villages resembled each other, but each had a few distinctives in vocabulary and pronunciation. However, the recordings I was given from AM revealed a dialect with more differences from STC than any others I heard.

So that you can hear one particular difference, I'm linking to the word 'wind, air' in both dialects. 'Wind, air' in the STC dialect (my main dialect for study) is pronounced /ʔa'ŋɪn/ (a'ngin). 'Wind, air' in the AM dialect is pronounced /ɲɪn/ (nyin).

The difference is interesting to me. In both cases, you have a nasal, but for some reason it migrated to the front of the mouth in AM's /ɲɪn/ ('nyin'). (I say that the AM realization of the word is the one that changed because the reconstructed ancestor of the word in Proto-Chamic is */ʔaŋin/, almost identical to the word in STC Jarai.) You'll notice in the recording of AM's 'wind, air', the speaker has a little lapse repeating the word, so he fills in with an 'aah'. But he still begins the word with /ɲ/ (ny) rather than /ŋ/ (ng). So it doesn't appear to be the presence of the presyllable (the /ʔa/), though historically the consonant may have changed after the presyllable dropped out.

The Proto-Chamic word (Proto-Chamic is a reconstructed ancestor language to Jarai) */ʔaŋin/ is itself descended from the Proto-Malayopolynesian */haŋin/. Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines, still pronounces the word that way. Here is a native Tagalog speaker saying the Tagalog word for 'wind'.

(I have recordings of three different AM speakers, and I've not worked through all three. I may discover that the /ɲɪn/ pronunciation reflects an idiolect - a single speaker's pronunciation not generally produced by the rest of the group. I'm also not certain yet that the STC transcription is actually /ʔa'ŋɪn/. It may well be /ʔa'ŋin/. I haven't discovered yet whether [i] and [ɪ] are in complementary distribution, in which case I would represent both as the phoneme /i/.)

2 november 2006

phơ 99

I work across the street from a Vietnamese restaurant called the Phơ 99. (Notice the whisker on the 'ơ'. If your web browser doesn't render Unicode characters correctly, you should download a real Web browser and stop using Internet Explorer.) In Cambodia, I found out that 'phơ' is the Vietnamese word for noodle soup, and it's pronounced 'fuh' (as in 'fun'), not 'foe'. (The tone is rising.)

I was labeling my Jarai sound files this week, and when I got to the Jarai word for noodle soup, I found that it's a clear borrowing from the Vietnamese. Here it is.

If you clicked on the link, you heard one of my Jarai informants saying /pʰə/ ('puh'). Because the Jarai alphabet is related to the Vietnamese one, the Jarai would also spell the word as 'phơ'. However, because Jarai lacks the labio-dental fricative /f/, the 'ph' becomes an aspirated 'p' (/pʰ/). Thrilling, isn't it?

8 june 2006

home again

I returned home safely on Friday, June 2. Jet lag didn't last long at all. I started back at Carolina Hope Christian Adoption Agency on Monday, June 5.

It's my plan to compose a final update summarizing my last month in Cambodia. So far, I haven't made the time.

short video

Ethan Crowley joined his family in the middle of May, and he took video footage as I did my research. Over the next week, he put together a short video (1 minute, 18 seconds) for me to post on the Web site. (Ethan is a junior cinema major at university.)

You can watch the 1.8 megabyte video here. The video is in QuickTime format, so you will need a recent version of QuickTime to view it. QuickTime is bundled with iTunes (a marvelous, free program for organizing the music files on your computer). You can download QuickTime (with iTunes) from Apple's Web site.

Thank you all for your interest in my project.

8 may 2006

It's been a while since my last update, partly because I've been busy - but also because when I've had time, I haven't been highly motivated. In addition, it's less convenient to make updates without my own computer. Which leads me to my first topic.

my computer: a sad conclusion

A few weeks ago, my computer (a Dell Inspiron 1100) made its way to Dell's Cambodia distributer, Deam Computers. A Dell representative in Malaysia told me that Deam could troubleshoot but couldn't fix any hardware problems. (Deam typically works only on Dell's other laptop model, the Latitude.)

Deam confirmed that the problem was the motherboard, and Dell doesn't ship Inspiron motherboards to Cambodia. Thankfully, my Dell warrantee doesn't expire until June 14, so I get back to the States just in the nick of time to get a new motherboard at no cost (well, not entirely without cost: I paid for the warrantee three years ago).

I continue to do all my work on the Crowleys' iMac. I hope I can get all the fonts and files to work on my Dell when I get home. Otherwise, a lot of my work may have to be retyped. (Or I'll have to buy a Mac!)

my tickets

When Jonathan Farmer and I were traveling to Cambodia in February, we would check with each other every few hours: "Do you have your passport? Do you have your tickets?" We continued to be conscientious when we arrived, since passport and tickets are essential for a (legal) return to the United States.

About two weeks into my stay here, I began to feel uneasy about my tickets, not recalling having seen them for some time. I did a quick search, and they didn't turn up. I wasn't too concerned; after all, there were (surely) only a limited number of places they could be.

Over the next week, my unease increased. "Where did you put them last?" one of the Crowley kids helpfully asked. I made a thorough search of my room, emptying every drawer, going through every bag and every folded piece of clothing. No luck. About the same time I realized that my return ticket to Phnom Penh - purchased and stored separately - was also missing.

I'll pause for a moment to validate your incredulity. "Of all things to be careful about, wouldn't a person be most conscientious about his tickets? Losing an umbrella is one thing (a thing that, incidentally, I do rather often). But losing airline tickets is quite another." These are the thoughts I would have if someone told me he had misplaced international airline tickets. These were, in fact, the very thoughts I had when I realized that I had lost my tickets.

One place I hadn't looked in my first search was my luggage. I vaguely remembered that when I'd first arrived, I had thought, "I won't need these tickets till I leave, and I won't need my luggage till I leave. So I'll leave my tickets in my luggage." So I went downstairs to the storage room and searched my luggage. Again, no luck.

On three separate occasions I made a thorough search of my room and my luggage. During one of these searches I located my ticket for returning to Phnom Penh, tucked between two place mats I'd bought in Phnom Penh. On another search I turned up a piece of luggage that I'd forgotten about, a mauve carry-on. Still no luck with the big tickets. (The mauve carry-on, incidentally, is very tasteful.)

I began to entertain the theory that maybe large rats had found my tickets and taken them off to their nest. (The Crowleys don't have large rats, but I didn't let that upset my theory.) So I went up into the attic space - not really an attic, but space between the ceiling and roof, enough to stand up under the roof's peak - and I looked about. You'll be surprised to hear that I didn't find them there, either.

I finally admitted defeat. Last week I went to Phnom Penh for business (more about that later), and while there I visited the EVA Airline office to secure new tickets home ($100). Unfortunately (as I thought), EVA couldn't do an immediate re-issue, but would hold the tickets for me to pick up when I came back through to go home in late May.

Two days later, back in Ban Lung, JD was reorganizing the storage room. "Josh," he called upstairs, "Did EVA re-issue your tickets yet? Because I found them." Tucked into a remote corner of the room, my black-side carry-on had been stowed, tickets inside (hiding among the baggage, not unlike Saul). How - and why - the Crowleys' rats opened my luggage and put the tickets inside I do not know.

Next day, I called EVA. My new tickets hadn't been reissued, and the request was cancelled (at no cost). A happy ending.

another happy ending

My just-mentioned Phnom Penh trip was a one-weekend jaunt, April 29 (Friday) through May 1 (Monday). My purposes were (1) to visit a particular orphanage and (2) to conduct an interview with a missionary couple adopting from China through Carolina Hope, the agency I work for in the States.

As soon as I arrived in Phnom Penh, I bought a return ticket to Ban Lung with PMT, the only commercial carrier that flies the Phnom Penh - Ban Lung route.

Monday morning about 15 passengers bound for Ban Lung boarded the PMT flight. (You can see a picture of the plane near the bottom of the page: it's a twin-engine prop plane, capacity about 48.) During pre-flight diagnostics, there seemed to be something funny happening with the right engine. After a longish wait, the stewardess asked us to return to the terminal for half an hour to wait for weather conditions to improve in Ban Lung.

Back in the terminal, I text-messaged JD to tell him about the delay. JD replied, "They lied to you. The weather here is beautiful." When we re-boarded, I wondered about the engine, but was reassured knowing that pilots don't want to crash any more than passengers do.

About 30 or 40 minutes into our 55-minute flight, the pilot emerged from the cockpit to look out the windows at the right engine. Almost immediately, an alarm sounded in the cockpit, and he returned. Naturally, I looked out the windows, too. The propellor had stopped.

A few moments later the stewardess announced that we were returning to Phnom Penh because of "weather conditions in Ban Lung." Another passenger told the stewardess that the weather in Ban Lung was just fine. She replied that the runway was wet from rain the previous night.

We arrived safely in Phnom Penh, a smooth flight and a smooth landing. A few days later I learned that a Phnom Penh paper reported the incident on the front page, and Cambodia's aviation authority launched an investigation. (PMT didn't report the engine problem or the aborted flight to the aviation oversight administration. In fact, PMT fixed the engine and took a full flight to Siem Reap later that day.)

PMT refunded the cost of my ticket, and the next day I took a taxi to Ban Lung, a seven- or eight-hour drive from Phnom Penh.

jarai update

Since I last wrote, I've done work with 4 dialects of Jarai. My April 2 update tells about my plans just before my first day of fieldwork.

My first set of informants (April 3) comprised three men, each from a different village. For each word elicited, I would transcribe each man's pronunciation separately (on a three-column page). The first day we worked for a few hours in the village. Mid-afternoon we took the men from the village to the Crowley home for a couple more days of work. (We had driven to the village in JD's old but usually reliable Land Cruiser - or Rover, whichever is made by Toyota - so there was plenty of room for three extra men in addition to JD, Rith, and me.)

For the next two days, we worked through the 281 word list (281-word list? 281 word-list?). Unfortunately, I had time to make recordings of only about 100 of the words, and the recorder I had planned to use didn't seem to be working (I later discovered that it was fine), so I used an older piece of equipment that records at much lower quality.

Of my three informants, one was a village head and another a commune head. (A commune is a set of villages.) The third man, a farmer, was about 20 or 30 year younger than the others, in his thirties. One of the older men was also a former Khmer Rouge foot soldier (many of the Jarai were Khmer Rouge soldiers).

My next informant, about a week later, was a 19-year-old living in Ban Lung town. After a couple sessions he disappeared in some incriminating circumstances. He returned to town a few days later, but he was too embarrassed to be around people who knew about the situation. So about that time - April 19, I think - my assistant Rith and I went by motorcycle to another Jarai village, where we found a new informant who could return to JD's with us.

This new informant was the best I'd worked with yet. He was literate and very good-natured (and patient!). We got about 350 words transcribed and recorded with good equipment before he had to return to his village. Working with him cleared up a few problems, but it created many more, particularly questions about the vowels.

This past week Rith went to the same village to find another informant; I wanted to build on my current 350 words with an informant who spoke the same dialect as the previous man. I ended up with two informants from the same village, and we worked Thursday through Saturday morning. Over the weekend they returned to their village (about two-and-a-half hours away) to hire replacements for their farms, and they returned Sunday evening to work until the end of this week.

It's my hope to get up to 1000 Jarai words - transcribed and recorded - by week's end. We'll have to pick up the pace a bit, but I think it's doable. We're probably at 575 words right now (Monday afternoon), though about 350 of those we'll need to verify because I got them from the previous informant. After this week I hope to spend time doing analysis. If there's more time, I'd like to re-record my first three informants.

In a previous entry I mentioned an anthropologist working with the Jarai in a different region. He's graciously taken my 281 word list to record in the village where he lives. I understand that the Jarai in that region speak quite differently from the Jarai varieties I've heard so far. These additional recordings will be a great addition to my data.

informants and miscellany

A few friends have commented on the word informants. Traditionally anthropologists and linguists have used this term for a native of a culture who gives cultural information to a researcher (no connotations of covertness!). However, many people now use the term language helper to avoid the suggestion of spying. I prefer the older term so as to distinguish my Jarai helpers from my Khmer assistant (who is both my teacher and interpreter).

I anticipate that the next three weeks will be busy. If I don't make any more updates before I leave, I still intend to write a bit once I'm home.

2 april 2006

first day of fieldwork

After a month of Khmer study, it's time for me to begin gathering data on the Jarai language. My Khmer isn't good enough for me to work alone, and I will be assisted by my language teacher, Rith.

My first day in the field is this Monday, April 3. JD will drive Rith and me to a village several miles out of town, and we'll spend most of the day talking to Jarai speakers about their language and eliciting words.

We will begin by gathering information about the varieties of Jarai spoken in the province, asking speakers in the village we visit to identify other villages or regions that speak with a different "accent" or that use different vocabulary. We also hope to find out whether any one of the varieties is considered standard by the rest of Cambodia's Jarai speakers.

Most of the day April 3 we will elicit words based on a Southeast Asia word list we have in English and Khmer. The basic list is 281 words, and another researcher has provided me with an additional 250 words that she used in a recent study on Kuy, a language spoken in Cambodia and Thailand. Of course, we won't come close to eliciting these 500 words in one day! We'd be lucky to get 250, I think. The first few hundred will be arduous, as we try to sort out what sounds we're hearing - consequently asking for each word to be repeated over and over. I don't know whether I'll make any recordings this first day.

We haven't decided yet whether I should do most of my work in the Jarai villages (traveling out for a day or two at a time), or whether we will bring Jarai speakers to the Crowleys' house for a week or two at a time and work here. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

other things jarai

A couple of weeks ago, another researcher doing work with the Jarai gave me PDF copies of two Jarai dictionaries. The apparently better of the two (at least the most readable!) is a French-Jarai-Vietnamese dictionary: unfortunately, these are three languages I don't know. But even without knowledge of French, the lexicon was valuable in that it showed the basic shape of a Jarai word - how many syllables a word can have, how many consonants can cluster at the beginning and end of a syllable, what the diphthongs are, and similar information. (If you're interested in some of what I've found, see below.)

Yesterday morning, a local expatriate couple provided me with a computerized French-English dictionary. I spent most of the day typing in the French, the English translation of the French, and the Jarai (see picture of me working above). Because this dictionary was done fifty years ago among Jarai speakers in Vietnam, the data will be useful for comparisons and to suggest potentially fruitful lines of elicitation. If you click here, you can see an example page of what I've been doing. (I'm hoping that the fonts embedded properly. Otherwise, you'll see a lot of gibberish.) The computerized French-English dictionary I'm using is pretty limited, so I'm doing a fair amount of guessing.

a sad story: my dell

Last week, my Dell laptop stopped working - it won't even turn on, and no lights shine when it's plugged in. I don't know what brought on the problem. When we opened up the bottom (where the RAM is installed), we found a screw that was knocking around in there. Maybe something shorted out because of the loose screw.

When I bought my computer, I got the very best warrantee offered by Dell: any problem (even one caused by the user) will be repaired the next day - and the repair guy comes to you! And the warrantee, a 3-year deal, doesn't expire till June of this year.

Unfortunately, Dell's 3rd-party distributor and repair company in Cambodia doesn't service my model (!), so I can either send it to Malaysia or wait till I return to the States. I can have Dell's 3rd-party distributor look at it, but if it's a problem that requires a replacement part, he can't do anything. (No doubt he could fix it, but it wouldn't be warrantee work.) JD will be in Phnom Penh later this week, and he'll take my computer with him for it to be looked at.

So you'll see in the picture above that I'm not working at a PC. Through no fault of my own, I'm now doing all my work on an iMac. I'm not a convert, but I appreciate the use of the family computer. Please pray that we'll find some solution for my computer - mainly for the convenience of portability and the ease of continuing my work when I'm in the States working on a PC. (The more work I do on a Mac, the more potential compatibility problems in the future.)

another sad story: my haircut

I think I've previously made reference to the fifty-cent haircuts available here in Ban Lung. Fifty cents is cheap, I hear, but I've gotten free haircuts for my whole life from my mom. My first haircut here was fine (not great), but I quickly decided that I wanted much shorter hair because it's so warm here.

So I went back and asked for a very short haircut. I was very dissatisfied with this new haircut, so a few weeks later, I decided to go at it myself with my beard trimmer. You can see the results in the picture above - perhaps you already wondered what happened. My success was nicely summarized the next day at breakfast when one of the Crowley children explained the previous night's storm by suggesting that the heavens were weeping over my barbering attempts. (A fine example of the Pathetic Fallacy so eschewed by the Neoclassicists!)

things linguistic

[NOTE :: 25 JUNE 2007 :: It's more than a year since I made these speculations. Some have turned out to be wrong. Some of the information is linguistically imprecise (calling /y/ and /w/ liquids, for example. However, I'm leaving this material as it stands. For my more recent conclusions, based on my fieldwork, see the Jarai Phonology page.]

Here are a few items for those interested in the technical aspects of the work. I hope you'll forgive my imprecision and lapses in proper use of terminology! (I'm also adding explanations for people with no linguistic training in case they venture into this section.)

the history
Jarai is one of ten Chamic languages, all of them spoken in Vietnam and Cambodia. The Chamic languages are in the Malayic group (70 languages), which are in the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian languages (a family of about 1270). (All this data is from SIL's Ethnologue, available online.)

The dominant language family in this part of the world is Mon-Khmer, part of the Austroasiatic family (in distinction to the Austronesian family, which Jarai is part of). When Chamic speakers came to this region about 2000 years ago, the Mon-Khmer languages exerted a strong influence on Chamic, and the 10 Chamic languages have exhibited, to varying degrees, characteristics of their Mon-Khmer neighbors. (Of course, each language followed its own path of development constrained by its inherent qualities. But it has been argued - I think very well - that significant changes were set in motion by external linguistic pressures.)

the word
Under the influence of Mon-Khmer, words in Chamic languages became dissyllabic with the stress on the second syllable. In at least one Chamic language, the trend continued until it became a monosyllabic language. In Jarai, almost all vowel distinctions have been lost in the initial syllable. The Jarai word seems to be composed this way:

(C)(V)-C(liq.)V(V)(C).

In other words, every word consists at least of a consonant and a vowel (the "C" and "V" not in parentheses). The consonant may be a glottal stop (the release of air at the beginning of the English word "ah"), resulting in a lexical form as simple as 'ia', which is almost surely a diphthong.

Sometimes a 'w', 'r', 'y', or 'l' (liquid consonants, specified above as liq.) will come between the consonant and vowel, but no other consonants are allowed in that space. The main syllable can have two vowels (always forming a diphthong?), and it sometimes ends with another consonant. Some lexical forms show up with three consecutive vowels, but one of those is probably an on-glide or off-glide, not a true vowel.

If the word has two syllables, the first syllable consists of only a consonant and a schwa (the "neutral" vowel we pronounce in English in unstressed syllables: for example, the way we pronounce the 'a' in "about" when we're not trying to sound out the 'a'). Alternatively, the initial syllable may be a full vowel (not a shewa), but only if it's alone (i.e., preceded only by a glottal stop). This is an area for close attention when I begin eliciting words.

There are occasional 3-syllable words, but these are probably loan words.

I should add that much of this information is somewhat speculative and based only on looking at a dictionary made in Vietnam over 50 years ago. Perhaps I'll have to revise my understanding of Jarai words based on what I find in the field. And it's certain that things will be somewhat different in 21st-century Jarai spoken in Cambodia (in distinction to the 1950s lexicon made in Vietnam).

questions
The preliminary data already suggest some questions about Jarai phonology. For example, are there phonemic vowel length distinctions? The researcher who put together the French-Jarai-Vietnamese lexicon distinguishes short, long, and very long. But a three-way distinction is surely overkill, and it's possible that there's no phonemic length distinction at all (though such a distinction is likely, since other Chamic languages have this distinction, probably because of Mon-Khmer's influence).

Is Jarai a register language? In other words, does it have two vowel registers (one tense, the other lax and breathy)? At least one Chamic language has two registers (Western Cham), one has a "restructured register" (Haroi), and at least one Chamic language has become tonal following a stage as a register language (Tsat).

Are "ai" and "ui" preceding word-final "h" true diphthongs, or is the "h" actually a palatal that conditions a "y" off-glide? Alternatively, have these "ai" and "ui" diphthongs developed from what was once an off-glide before the final consonant in the proto-form changed from being a palatal to being a laryngeal? (In a 1959 article in Asian Culture, Richard Pittman showed that word-final [probably palatal] -*s in Proto-Malayo-Polynesian became -h in Jarai.)

Are the distinctions between simple voiceless stops and simple voiced stops disappearing? Jarai apparently has (or had) pre-glottalized (or imploded) voiced stops that were distinguished from simple voiced stops and simple voiceless stops. There's some evidence that the phonology is moving away from a three-way distinction toward a system with only voiceless stops and glottalized voiced stops. (This is the path that Khmer took.)

No doubt there are a thousand questions I should be asking, but these are enough for the time being.

Some of the information in the previous section comes from the following sources (in addition to SIL's Ethnologue and private conversations and emails):

Lafont, Pierre-Bernard. Lexique Francais-Jarai-Vietnamien (Parler de la Province de Plei Ku). Ecole Francaise D'Extreme-Orient, 1968.

Pittman, Richard S. "Jarai as a Member of the Malayo-Polynesian Family of Language." Asian Culture 1: 59-66.

Thurgood, Graham. "Language Contact and the Directionality of Internal Drift: The Development of Tones and Registers in Chamic." Language 71.1: 1-31.

(Former teachers and former students, please forgive my bibliographic form; I failed to bring CW to Cambodia with me. Furthermore, if you've been trying to figure out some rhyme or reason to my interchange between single quotes and double quotes, you should know that I haven't been following any kind of norm. I decided not to use brackets for sounds, slashes for phonemes, or italics for naming letters, with the result that my notation is sometimes random - but easily deduced from the context, I hope. Just think of the distinctions as being in free variation.)

14 march 2006

bung yeak laom

Lake Yeak Loam is perhaps Ban Lung's major claim to fame as a tourist attraction. The lake (bung, rhymes with sung) has formed in the crater of an old volcano, and the water is quite clear. Since no streams flow into Yeak Laom, I'm not certain where the water comes from. It may be rain water, or perhaps there is an underground stream. ("It has outlets, but no inlets," says one of the Crowley kids. "If a lake has inlets but no outlets [the opposite of Yeak Laom], it becomes a salt lake." The Enyclopaedia Britannica articles on the Great Salt Lake and Dead Sea bear out this observation.)

Some of the villages near the lake are Tampuan, and Yat Laom (or something like that) is the Tampuan name for the lake. (Yat rhymes with cat and the vowel sound in Laom is fairly close to the vowel sound in gown.) Yat in Tampuan means grandmother, as I recall. Yeak, the Khmer name, means giant or ogre. Yeak almost rhymes with yak, a variety of large ox that lives in Tibet.

I don't know the Tampuan legend explaining the name "Grandmother" (Yat), but my language teacher, Rith, recently told the Khmers' etiological tale explaining the name Yeak. The Khmer legend tells the story of a Giant (Once upon a Time, to be sure) whose Beautiful Daughter fell in love with an Interloper and ran away. The very-much-in-love couple were pursued by the very Angry Giant, and they (the couple) hid in a Forest that blanketed a Tall Hill. The Giant tore the trees from the top of the Hill and then started to dig, searching for his Daughter and the Ne'er-Do-Well. He never found them, but the great hole on the top of the Hill filled with water and became a lake. The story doesn't tell where the water came from - I suspect that it was the Giant's tears over losing his daughter (though I'm no expert on the psychology of mythical oversized men). The story also fails to relate whether anyone Lives Happily Ever After, but certainly everyone who goes to the lake is happy for an hour or two.

Every Saturday we walk or drive to Yeak Laom for a few hours of swimming, jumping out of trees, throwing one another off of an inner tube, and eating the sausages and pastries from the "snack stand" at the first dock. The picture at right shows Jonathan Farmer jumping from the First Jumping Tree, by the Second Dock. There are three Jumping Trees total. When Jonathan was here, we visited only the First. Last week we went on to the Second (which has ants) and the Third (which is the best for climbing and which has the highest Jumping Branches). I've jumped my obligatory jumps from each of the trees, each time minimizing the water displacement by taking in substantial amounts of water through my nose.

new study plan

During our week in Phnom Penh (Feb. 28 - Mar. 3), J.D. talked with me about my progress with Khmer study. He recommended that instead of eliciting statements and transcribing them - as I described in my last post - I should start using the grammar drills from Franklin Huffman's Modern Spoken Cambodian.

Grammar drills come in a number of varieties, but each is designed to reinforce a very narrow grammatical point. For example, someone using grammar drills to learn English might begin with a drill in which he substitutes various nouns into a simple sentence. The teacher would give the form sentence, perhaps "The computer is on the table." The teacher then states other words to substitute for computer, say, bowl, rice, pencil, hammer, and oyster. When the teacher gives each new word, the student forms the new sentence. There are many varieties of grammar drills; not all are so simple; not all involve substitution. But each requires the student to apply a grammatical principle in the sorts of sentences one would actually use in the language.

The second part of my new study plan (also recommended by J.D.) is an hour each day playing with the neighbor kids. Every day between three and half-past-three in the afternoon, a group of kids assembles in the Crowleys' yard to play. The games they like are typical of the games American kids play: "Ready or Not" (hide-and-seek), "Slap Didally-Oso" (I think this one was imported by the Crowleys), basketball (usually played with a soccer ball), a game that involves a circle and a lot of running (I haven't figured this one out yet, despite paying very close attention to the two kids trying to explain it), and many others.

Playing with kids presents a wonderful supplement to formal language study. Unlike most adults, kids will repeat the same thing over and over again, and they're not reluctant to critique foreigners' pronunciation. Last week I had a word shouted into my ear ten times - I don't think I got it right until a few days later, though. Kids also have time to talk, and there's no need to have anything to say.

The third aspect of my new learning regime is transcribing and memorizing short speeches in Khmer. My first short speech is two sentences and runs roughly like this: som kat aoy khley klang, teang pii-mok ning khanglii; kom kaw tngah ning pok-moat ("Please cut my hair very short, even in front and on top; don't shave my forehead or my beard ['father of the mouth'].") I should mention that my forehead doesn't need shaving, but it's common practice for a Khmer barber to run the razor over the client's forehead. This service doesn't interest me.

the alphabet

This week I made an attempt at beginning the Khmer alphabet (written alphabet). After Rith had written out all the vowels, I quickly abandoned that learning project. But there's still value in my now having all the vowels written out (along with my phonetic transcription of the sounds): with new words that I can't figure out, I can ask Rith to point to the vowel(s) I should be pronouncing. In our Field Methods class at BJ we found this to be helpful in transcribing Tigrinya, the language spoken in Eritrea. As I recall, Tigrinya, a relative of Hebrew and Arabic, has about 5 or 7 written vowels (and about the same number of vowel sounds). English has 5 written vowels and roughly 16 vowels and diphthongs (I don't recall the exact number; if someone emails it to me, I'll fix this post!). Khmer has more than 20 vowel letters and probably about 40 vowels and diphthongs.

I wrote a bit more about the Khmer alphabet here. I can't vouch for the accuracy of everything I said, but I think that in general it's on target.

reshaping of jarai plans

Shape is probably too bold a word for describing my Jarai plans at present. But there's been one interesting development recently. A couple Saturdays ago, I was talking with one of the missionaries in Ban Lung about my goals with Jarai, and he suggested that I email a man who spent most of his life working with Southeast Asian languages (I'll call him - the man I emailed - G.K. since I don't suppose it would be polite to name him on a Web site without his permission). Though he's now in retirement, I met G.K. and his wife when I was in Cambodia in 2002, and he has given valuable linguistic guidance to J.D. in J.D.'s work with Tampuan.

So I sent an email to G.K. asking whether he knew of any linguistic resources for Jarai. Within a few days, he'd emailed me back with some reading recommendations. (Please pray that I can get my hands on some of these books and articles.) He also told me that right now there's a graduate student doing anthropological research among the Jarai nearby, and this student is presently focusing on the linguistic aspects of his ethnographic work. G.K. recommended that if possible, I collaborate with this researcher to maximize the value of our respective studies.

If I take this path, I may end up doing word lists in 3 or 4 different villages, each list comprising about 200 or 300 words. The lists could then be compared to uncover differences in how separate groups of Jarai in Cambodia pronounce the same words - and also uncover differences in terms used for common objects or activities.

Let my try to make this plan a little clearer: If research like this were done to compare American English with British English, the resulting word lists would uncover both phonetic differences (for example, the pronunciation of r ) and vocabulary differences (an American's French fries are an Englishman's chips).

This sort of study helps establish the boundaries for future research, and it also contributes to the work of linguists who trace the changes in a language over time or across geographical boundaries. Because J.D. is teaching in Egypt this week (and won't be home until the 20th or 22nd), I won't make any plans yet. But these next couple weeks are critical as we chart a course for my Jarai study.

and to close...

G.K. Chesterton wrote in the preface to All Things Considered, "These articles have [a] disadvantage arising from the scurry in which they were written; they are too long-winded and elaborate....I feel frightfully annoyed with myself for not getting to the point more quickly; but I had not enough leisure to be quick." If I took more time with these posts, they would cover more ground and be shorter. Lacking the leisure to linger, I leave these entries as they stand.

2 march 2006

I plan to make periodic updates, labeled according to the day that I finish typing an entry. Items probably won't be posted until several days after they have been written. Each entry will be subdivided by topic. New entries (labeled with new dates) will be added at the top of the page - before the previous entry - much like a Weblog.

traveling

Jonathan's and my travel experience was in no way out of the ordinary: our Dallas/Fort Worth leg was cancelled out of the Greenville/Spartanburg Airport, and American put us on a Delta flight down to Atlanta and then on to Los Angeles. We missed the flight to LA, but Delta put us on the next flight - in bulkhead seats! - and there was plenty of time before our plane took off from LA to Taipei.

This was all Sunday, Feb. 21. Our LA to Taipei flight left around midnight (Pacific Time), and we had a couple of hours to work through security again and to eat late-night hamburgers at the airport MacDonald's; we needed fortification for the 14 hours of flight time ahead of us. I was blessed with good sleep on the flight and (when not sleeping) C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, brought by Jonathan.

Taipei's airport was a bit changed from when Brian Kane, Jeremy Farmer, and I flew through to Cambodia in 2002. Gone were the signs that said "Trafficking drugs is a capital offense in Taiwan." The airport itself appeared more pleasant and better maintained. We didn't meet any drug traffickers, notwithstanding the lack of signs.

In Taipei we called our families with an AT&T card, and I used the rest of our two or three hours to begin learning GIMP (2.2.10), the open source photo editing software that I acquired for this trip. GIMP is an impressively powerful program, and I've used it for all the graphical changes to the site (the "News" navigation buttons and banner, along with all the photo editing). For what it's worth, I'm using (X)HTML-Kit (build 292), also open source, for the actual site editing.

The final leg was from Taipei to Phnom Penh, and we arrived about an hour late at 1 p.m., Feb. 21 (Tues) - that's 1 in the morning (Tues.) by U.S. Eastern Time. We were picked up by a gracious missionary couple, the Stephenses (Tim and Alison).

in phnom penh

The Stephens family is composed of father, mother, and four children, the oldest of whom abandoned her room for the night to make way for Jonathan and me. After lugging our luggage up to the third floor (Phnom Penh houses are often tall and narrow), we changed, sent off a couple emails to family, and headed out with Mrs. Stephens into Phnom Penh to run some errands.

First on the agenda was the acquisition of a cell phone and SIM card. J.D. Crowley had instructed me to get a Mobitel SIM card, since Mobitel has good reception up in Ban Lung and the surrounding region. The plan was to buy a used phone at a street shop, then trek to the Mobitel office to buy the card that activates the phone and gives it a phone number.

We found a street phone shop and discovered that we could buy a phone number SIM card along with the phone without going to the Mobitel office. Mrs. Stephens made all the arrangements, and I walked away with a relatively inexpensive used cell phone (pictured at right) and number, also used. The number came with 110 free text messages, many of which I've used already text messaging friends and family in the States (though they can't text back).

The next stop was J.D.'s travel agent in Phnom Penh, who had reserved tickets for Jonathan and me up to Ban Lung town. The air conditioning was a nice break from the very hot day. Once we had our tickets, we took a short walk down by the river. We passed a row of large trees that many Cambodians suppose to have spiritual significance. Jonathan snapped a photo of man getting advice from a fortune teller (pictured to right).

The rest of the afternoon I spent making my first adoption home visit with an American couple living in Phnom Penh who are (is?) adopting from China. To be approved by Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly INS) to adopt from overseas, the couple has to be evaluated by a certified adoption home study investigator. I received my certification this month so that I could perform the home study on behalf of the adoption agency I work for. We had a wonderful visit, and I enjoyed getting to know this missionary couple.

Jonathan and I turned in early after dinner and a game of Catch Phrase. Next day, Wednesday, we left for the Phnom Penh airport for our 10:15 morning flight up to Ban Lung. Check-in was smooth, and the airport tax was only $6 a person. In the souvenir shop we learned some Khmer from the register keeper, then sat to wait for our plane. Boarding was about 40 minutes before scheduled departure, and we took off 20 minutes ahead of schedule. The prop plane seated 48, and there were 21 passengers (all but 3 appeared to be European or American). Take off was a little shaky (small plane!), but the flight was smooth, and we were served very yummy single-serving pizzas, but no peanuts. The dirt-strip landing was smoother than some asphalt landings I've experienced in the States.

in ban lung

Ban Lung is the capital of Ratanakiri province. Think of it as a capital town, not capital city. J.D. told me that Ratana means "gem," and kiri, "mountain." Pronounce it RAH-tuh-NAH-kuh-REE and you'll be close. The airport is a small affair. The picture at right shows you the luggage handlers, giving you perhaps a sense of airport's sophistication. J.D. picked us up in his early-90s Camry (old Camrys are ubiquitous in Cambodia: they're hardy and efficient).

The Crowleys live only a few moments' drive from the airport (all of Ban Lung is only a few minute's drive from the airport), and we were warmly received by the family. After a little furniture moving, Jonathan and I were settled into the room previously occupied by Ethan, before him Charis, and 8 years ago by my sister Charity, who lived here for six months to teach the Crowley kids. The room is said to be the warmest in the house, but we don't spend much time there during the day, and evenings are quite cool (low 70s lately) and very windy.

Rather than give an hourly blow-by-blow for the rest of my remarks about the trip, I'll divide the entries into topics. I lack the gift of narrative, and my attempts at chronologically-arranged stories magnify this deficiency.

rith, my language helper

The evening of Feb. 24, Wednesday (the day I arrived), J.D. arranged for his friend Rith to have dinner with us. Rith (pronounced a lot like "rut," rhymes with "cut"), is a Khmer man who has frequently worked for J.D. in the past. Rith has computer skills, he knows basic IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), and he speaks English.

After supper, J.D., Rith, and I sat around the table and discussed the possibility of Rith's being my language teacher. We reached an agreement, and Rith will be teaching me every morning from 8 until 11:30 for the month of March (we started the next day, Thursday, and had lessons Friday and Saturday, too). Because I'm in Phnom Penh from Feb. 28 (Mon.) till Mar. 3 (Fri.), I took a week off, and I'll start back Mar. 6 (Mon.).

Rith is a 25-year-old business student from Ban Lung. He's a very reliable man. I've already enjoyed learning with him. These lessons will also be an opportunity for Rith to improve his English.

khmer lessons

My first lessons have consisted of my asking how to say certain words or expressions, with Rith's responding with the Khmer. He repeats everything multiple times, and I try to replicate what he's saying until he's satisfied with the sounds coming out of my mouth. I then transcribe the sounds I think I'm hearing. You can see a sample of my (I'm afraid rather bad) transcription below.

Everything I do right about transcription I learned from Dr. Hargis in Field Methods class at BJU. All the transcription is done with pencil (a concession to human weakness) on eight-and-a-half by eleven inch lined paper (yellow note pads are what I use - I just restocked in Phnom Penh). I divide each page in half with a light vertical line: on the left goes the transcription of the Khmer, and on the right goes the English equivalent along with other notes.

The letters represent "letter" sounds (much like writing English with English letters, except I'm writing Khmer with IPA), and the lines under two of the sentences mark the rising and falling inflections. Khmer is not a tonal language as Chinese is, but, like English, Khmer uses rising and falling and flat voice for different types of utterances. The inflection is often similar to English.

The progression of the four utterances here reflects my sometimes haphazard method. I start with "I talk on the phone," then wonder what changes when I say "to Jonathan" instead of "on the phone." The next logical utterance is "I talk with Jonathan on the phone" to see which prepositional phrase comes first and to find out whether anything else changes. But before I get there, I hear nice music coming from the next room, so I try saying "This music is beautiful" using words I've already learned. But I find out that the word for beautiful-sounding is different from the word for beautiful-looking (the word I've already learned), so I go ahead and transcribe the sentence before getting back to the phone.

(Incidentally, during this hour of transcription, I learned how to open a meeting: "Please turn off your phones.")

Friday, Feb. 24, Rith took Jonathan and me to the Ban Lung Market for the second half of my language lesson. This trip reinforced a couple phrases and some of the numbers - and also the fact that hearing Khmer people speak at normal speed is a different experience from listening to a native language teacher. We had fun, though, and ended the outing with coconut juice (Jonathan) and a Fanta (me) down by a nearby lake ("Towel Lake"). I've never before had - or known of - Fruit Punch Fanta. Quite good. (I had coconut juice last time I was in Cambodia, and I found that I prefer synthetic sweet drinks.)

slow going

I've had only 3 lessons so far, not enough for deciding whether or not to be discouraged yet. But frankly, I feel my slowness. We've spent a good deal of time drilling numbers, but as I said, once I'm in the market, I have a very difficult time hearing and processing the prices that I'm told. One problem is that I haven't been studying in the afternoons. I think that once I'm back in Ban Lung on March 3, it will be simpler (though perhaps not easier) to arrange my afternoons to good effect.

I'm told that after hearing Khmer for a while, the "Khmer file" in my brain will be easier to store things in and pull things out of. But with only 3 months in country, I can't set unreasonable expectations for language-learning progress.

According to linguists, language learning is a combination of three things: motivation, aptitude, and something that I can't remember. I'm a fine student, but my language-acquisition aptitude doesn't seem to be exceptional in any way. I learned in Language Learning class, though, that motivation is the key to success. God willing, I'll work hard to set goals and keep myself motivated by my purpose here.

jarai plans

Nothing is set in stone. At present, it appears that I can work with the Jarai. But we haven't ruled out the possibility of my finding a different linguistic project in the area. Whatever the case, I will probably hire Rith to be my full-time assistant in April. He would help me communicate in Khmer (the national language) and also assist me in actual recording of data.

miscellany

As I glance over what I've written, I see that this entry has stretched on for a while. Congratulations if you made it to this point. (Hi, Mom. I know that at least you read this much.) I had a lot more topics and experiences that I wanted to cover, but I'll save some for future entries and pass over others entirely. I hope to tell you about Yeak Laom, the local lake in a volcanic crater; about a typical day's routine; about cold showers; and about a conversation that included the marvelous phrase "mechanical removal of oral debris."

I don't know when I'll make another entry. It's taken me over a week to work this up. But maybe I can crank out future entries faster now that I've made the necessary layout changes to the Web site.