March 6: Training Day #3

In this final day of the training phase of this workshop, we talked about compound words and idiomatic expressions, comparing them with other things in the language that look a lot like them. We want compound words (e.g., kɛmin “roof” (literally, “house head”)) in the dictionary, but not sequences of words like bir min “cow’s head” (literally, “cow head”). We want idiomatic expressions (e.g., to run circles around the competition), but not ordinary phrases (e.g., to run laps) or proverbs (e.g., Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.) Helping people with no linguistic training to be able to distinguish between these and choose only the ones that are desired is one of the challenges that I face in my job.

We also showed the typists how they will be doing their job the next two weeks, alerting them to some of the things that they should or shouldn’t do in order to have the best results. That left us with about three hours for some practice exercises.

For the first exercise, we had them divide up into six small groups of three or four people per group. Then we had each group collect words for the same semantic domain. After they worked on that for 20 minutes or so, each group sent their scribe to the blackboard to write the list of the words that they had come up with. Then I asked everyone to comment on what they observed. First we noted that some groups wrote down more or fewer words than other groups. Then we noticed that, while a few words were found in everyone’s list, most were not. I emphasized the fact that, in the context of this workshop, it is not possible to think of all the words in the language that relate to a particular topic. Different groups will find different subsets of the words that belong there, and that is normal and expected.

Next some of the participants pointed out that a few words had been written incorrectly. One or two had been written with a suffix, whereas we had talked about the fact that the form of each word that is to be written down is the one that has no suffix. One of the scribes had learned to write a few years ago, when the digraph ny was used, so he was still writing that, but the rules had changed and the ny was replaced with the symbol ɲ. I emphasized that it was important that everyone do his or her best to use the current alphabet, but that we must be understanding about the fact that people have learned what they know at different times, and it is hard to unlearn a habit and relearn a new one.

For the second exercise, I had the participants go back into their six small groups again. Then I chose three different semantic domains to work on, Two groups worked on the domain for "Beautiful"; two worked on "Show, let someone see"; and two worked on "Strong." They worked for about 20 minutes with no formal help from me or any of the other leaders. The results were written up on the chalkboard again, with the lists arranged on the board so that each pair of groups who worked on the same semantic domain had their lists of words side by side for easy comparison. 

We took 10 minutes to compare each pair of word lists. We noted that there were fewer spelling mistakes than there had been the first time around, but we saw  that there was still some confusion about what constituted a compound word or an idiom. I did my best to highlight the things that they had done right—making fewer mistakes in writing the words and making an effort to include onomatopoeic words (e.g., vroom) and idioms. I also acknowledged that they hadn’t always gotten it quite right in their efforts to include things other than just “ordinary” words. I reminded them that they were being trained to do something that they haven’t ever done before—collect words for a dictionary, and that it is normal for us to make mistakes when we’re learning to do something new. I asked them if any of them had learned to walk without falling down at all, and they all agreed that that was an unrealistic expectation. I told them that they had just taken their first steps today, since everything up til now was “theory” and this was their first opportunity to put it into practice. I assured them that by Monday afternoon, they would be “walking,” and by Tuesday afternoon they would be “running.”

Everyone was glad to go home and have a couple of days to focus on something other than conscious thought about their language, but they seemed to be looking forward to what next week will bring. My weekend will include training the record-keeper, putting the finishing touches on the database that we’ll be using for the workshop, and getting the rooms ready for Monday’s opening ceremony and the word collection that will follow. I do sincerely hope that Sunday will be a day of rest. I’m feeling very healthy, and I am emotionally “up,” but this whole week has been a very busy one and my body is ready for some extra rest. I am very happy that I have been sleeping very well and that my jet lag was not too difficult to overcome. This has allowed me to function quite well during this critical time.