Day 9  Koorete Rapid Word Collection  Nov. 20

Today is a day for “firsts.” This is the first day that the hotel where I am staying has had electricity since arriving in Amaaro 16 days ago. According to what I’ve heard, a transformer that serves the section of town where Shalom Pension, this hotel, is located burned out just prior to our arrival and has not yet been replaced. Since the situation was taking so long to be resolved, the owner of Shalom Pension hired some men to string a wire across the street in order to tap into the electric lines in that part of town where there is electricity (when anyone at all has any). So now there are some wires stretched across the road some 15 feet above the ground, and we have electricity tonight. The implication for you is that I am able to use an electric light to see to type on my non-backlit keyboard, so I can type this tonight instead of waiting until tomorrow morning.

Today was also the first time I’ve ever led a Rapid Word workshop where only four word-collection groups managed to get through all of the semantic domains that need to be treated. We didn’t do the last of the nine sections because that deals with grammatical terms and really needs to be done by a linguist who speaks the language. But in only 8½ days, four groups of Koorete speakers plowed through all of the questionnaire that I had expected that they might get through, and then kept on going. By noon today, they had completed the 8th section, which I did not expect them to get to at all. Unfortunately, because of all the power outages we’ve experienced these two weeks, we are way behind on the data entry and glossing. So now all of the word-collection groups are busy writing glosses onto the sheets containing Koorete data, and the typists are working as hard as they can to type everything into the database. If they can find a generator to provide power for the times when the electricity goes off next week, they might be able to finish entering all of the words and their meanings in Amharic by the end of the week.

Today was also the first time that I was able to connect with my wife Anita by Skype since I left the U.S. nearly three weeks ago. We enjoyed connecting by some means other than email for a change; it was an encouragement to each of us.

So that’s at least three “firsts” for today.

In other news about the Koorete workshop, we ended up with just over 12,000 words. Considering that we had only four groups working on the word collection, I think that is a very satisfying result. In the next blog entry, I plan to share with you some of the more interesting idioms that came out during the word collection. These are some of the expressions that add character and flavor to a language because they don’t mean literally what they say and so invoke the imagination of both speaker and hearer. Some English examples are “to let the cat out of the bag” and “to pull the wool over someone’s eyes.”

One of the interesting innovations that Lydia came up with for this workshop was the inclusion of word games. The first one she introduced required each word-collection group to present two words that they had thought of that day and which they found interesting in some way. They did this each day from Day 2 through Day 8. By Day 4, it had evolved into a “Stump the Experts” venture, with groups picking words that they thought most of the others would not know. They would present their words and then see if anyone could give the meaning. They seemed to have a lot of fun with this “game,” though I couldn’t understand any of what was said.

Next, Lydia introduced the idea of puzzles. She put together a very basic crossword puzzle with clues and answers in Koorete, as well as a word search puzzle containing a dozen or so Koorete words. The crossword puzzle was a big hit with a few of the participants. The word search puzzle seemed to be something new to all of them, so they were a bit slower to interact with that one. (No one has yet found the words that go from bottom to top, from right to left, or diagonally.) These are ideas that I think I will take to other RWC workshops I lead in the future.

Kevin Warfel