Linguistics
Project Takes Adventurous Grad Student to Bhutan
 |
An
endangered language is being documented, thanks to new technologies
and the dedication of a few UO researchers and native speakers
Vickie Nelson
vmn@uoregon.edu
Linguistic graduate student Gwen Lowes was looking for a language to
work on. Professor Spike Gildea was looking for a native speaker for
his field methods class. Bhutan native Pema Chhophyel was looking for
a job and a way to make sure his language didn't disappear. When
the three came together in Gildea's field methods class in September
2005, good things began to happen for Kurtöp, a language spoken
by fewer than 10,000 people in northeastern Bhutan on the southeast slope
of the Himalayan Mountains.
When Bhutanese children go to school, they learn Dzongkha, the national
language, and English. Dzongkha is a written language spoken by about
130,000 people, most of them in Bhutan. Kurtöp, however, is what
linguists call an almost completely undocumented language. Before the
field methods class began its work, Kurtöp had no alphabet, no dictionary,
no written grammar, no texts at all. Without texts and an alphabet to
produce more texts, a language is in danger of disappearing without leaving
a record. If it disappears, so will the stories, myths, songs, poetry,
and history of its speakers--the entire culture and worldview of
a people.
Gildea hired Chhophyel as a language consultant and the class got to
work. With the support of the Department of Linguistics, the Center for
Asian and Pacific Studies, the Associate Dean of Humanities, and the
Vice Provost's Office, Chhophyel traveled to Bhutan over winter
break to collect samples of spoken Kurtöp, carrying with him videos
of the students in the class speaking in Kurtöp. The class developed
a system for writing Kurtöp using the same Roman letters as the
English alphabet and produced a number of papers, including Lowes' master's
thesis, "Kurtöp Phonetics and Phonology." The Kurtöp
Documentation Project was underway.
Because Gildea is an enthusiastic user of technology for field linguistics,
students in his field methods classes learn to use the latest digital
recorders and specialized linguistic software such as Praat and Transcriber
that allow field linguists to begin acoustical and linguistic analysis
while still in the field. Not all linguists use--or approve of using--this
technology, however. Gildea says he thinks the seismic shift in linguistics
is still several years away.
How would a linguist work without the technology?
Gildea gives a brief history of field linguistics over the past one hundred
years, beginning with a list of the tools a linguist had in the early
20th century. It's a short list containing only three items: ear,
paper, pencil. Linguists working in those days would have needed to ask
subjects to speak slowly and repeat phrases several times. What they
would get would be disconnected sentences--"Utterly unnatural," says
Gildea.
The 40s and 50s brought in reel-to-reel tape recorders and the ability
to collect not just words, phrases, and isolated sentences, but people's
voices engaged in real conversations. Despite the obstacles (bulky equipment,
deteriorating tapes, and unreliable recorders), linguists now had not
just one person's transcription, but a recording of the data itself.
Over the decades, microphones improved and tape recorders got smaller.
By the mid-90s, lightweight laptops and DAT recorders gave linguists
lighter, more reliable tools to take with them.
Fast-forward to the present day. Gwen Lowes, now the primary investigator
and director for the Kurtöp Documentation Project (under the supervision
of her advisor Scott Delancey, an expert in Tibeto-Burman languages),
describes herself as both excited and frantic as she prepares to go into
the field for nearly two years. She lugs a large backpack full of equipment
to campus to demonstrate the technology she will be taking with her when
she travels to Dungkar, a collection of villages that includes Tabi,
the cluster of homes where she will live. The village recently got electricity,
but still lacks phone service and running water.
She opens her pack and begins taking out a variety of cords, headphones,
microphones, and disks, along with a DVD burner, a WAV Marantz PMD 660
recorder, a tiny video recorder, an extra laptop battery, a tripod, and
a surge protector. A new laptop, a Toshiba Satellite with Vista operating
system, comes out of its own separate pack.
She casually mentions that depending on the condition of the road, she
may have to hike 40 kilometers with all this equipment from the village
where "the good road ends," to Tabi, where she will be doing
her field work. She appears cheerful at the prospect.
Lowes has been to Bhutan twice already. In order to travel there she
needed the permission of the Royal Government of Bhutan, and to work
on the Kurtöp language she needed the blessing of the Dzongkha Development
Commission. The commission will be an active collaborator in the Kurtöp
project, making suggestions and offering advice.
While in Tabi, Lowes will live with a family whose oldest son is already
working as her assistant. She will be immersed in Kurtöp as she
engages in the daily life of her host family and the other villagers,
who are, she reports, thrilled to have outsiders interested in Kurtöp.
She will begin documenting Kurtöp by using her WAV digital recorder
to collect language samples, including stories, songs, and natural conversations,
which she plans to capture by setting up her recorder on the tripod among
a group of Kurtöp speakers and leaving them alone. She will then
transfer the data to her laptop and her assistant will begin the process
of converting speech into writing using Transcriber, a free program with
a user-friendly GUI (graphical user interface) that lets the linguist
break a recording up into what Lowes calls "analyzable chunks." The
linguist sees a visual representation of the sound as he or she listens
to a language segment.
Once she is comfortable with the transcription, she will put it into
Toolbox, a data management and analysis tool for field linguists, and
begin a major part of her Ph.D. work, producing a grammar of Kurtöp.
In addition to the grammar, she and a collaborator, Karma Tshering,
will develop a Kurtöp/English/Dzongkha dictionary. The dictionary
will have around 10,000 words and include such extras as pictures, etymologies,
sound files, synonyms and antonyms.
She will also use a linguistic program called Élan, which combines
video with sound, adding gesture and facial expression to the context
of the language sample. She has discovered that Élan's audio
unfortunately doesn't function under Vista, an incompatibility
she hopes she can troubleshoot from the field.
As the dictionary and grammar of Kurtöp come together, Lowes will
burn DVDs and send them to her advisor. She can send email from the capital
of Bhutan, Thimphu, about a three days' journey away, but will
have to keep her messages short because the dialup connection is unreliable.
She recalls trying--and failing--to send corrections to her
master's thesis as an attachment when she was in Bhutan a couple
of years ago.
She'll also send DVDs of her work to the Hans Rausing Endangered
Languages Documentation Project (HRELDP) in London, where they will be
archived. HRELDP, which is supporting her work with a grant, is one of
the driving forces in the language documentation movement. According
to the HRELDP website, half of the approximately 6500 languages in the
world today are in danger of disappearing within the next century, "a
social, cultural, and scientific disaster." HRELDP credits the
maturing of technology with the growth of language documentation and
states, "Digital archives allow possibilities never before imagined."
When Gwen Lowes and the Kurtöp documentation team have completed
their work, Kurtöp will be a documented language complete with dictionary,
grammar, and texts. Linguists, researchers, and students all over the
world will be able to listen to Kurtöp and watch people speaking
it. The language will no longer be in danger of disappearing without
a trace.
Read more about the Kurtöp Documentation Project at http://www.uoregon.edu/~glow/Kurtoep_Summary.htm and
about the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Documentation Project at http://www.hrelp.org/.