Friday, July 7 - End of Training Phase

After a wonderful breakfast of an omelet, freshly baked bread, and a bowl of tea, I walked the quarter-mile or so to the church for the final day of training for our word collection workshop. We started off by having Matthieu educate everyone on the topic of idiomatic expressions and the importance of including them in the dictionary. Then he talked about which form of the verb should be used as the citation form in the dictionary so that our scribes will all write the same form these next two weeks. The rest of the day was spent doing exercises, giving the participants opportunity to repeatedly put into practice what they had been taught.

Matthieu teaching the group about idiomatic expressions

One of the word-collection groups at work

Writing the words collected on the chalkboard for everyone to see

For most of the exercises, I allowed the practice word-collection groups to take as much time as they needed to collect words in their assigned semantic domains. But for the final exercise, I imposed a time limit, explaining that, in order for us to get through all of the 1800 domains in the two weeks we have together, we will need to spend an average of only 10 minutes per semantic domain. So I gave them 10 minutes to collect words in the last exercise so that they would get a sense for how little time they would really have to deal with each domain. The following is the illustration that I used to help them understand the need for speed:

Suppose you have only one hour to pick as many mangoes from a grove of 100 mango trees. What strategy would you use? Would you try to get every last one of the mangoes from the first tree you come to? No, you’d grab just those you could reach easily, then move on to the next tree and snatch those that were within easy reach, then move on to the next tree. That is what we aim to do in this workshop. Our objective is not to collect every Djimini word that exists. Rather, we want to collect all the words that are “easy pickings” in each semantic domain, then move on to the next one. Otherwise, we’ll have spent a lot of time collecting a few hard-to-reach words and will run out of time for collecting others that would have been a lot easier to get. So, recognizing that we will not be getting every word that exists in the language, we will collect as many as we can in the short time that we have to focus on this task. After the workshop is over, people can take time to think of those “hard-to-reach” words, and they can be added to the dictionary database later. The participants seemed to understand this principle, and I sensed that they are quite looking forward to getting on with the actual word collection next week.

Most of the afternoon was spent preparing the typists and their computers for data entry on Monday. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get all of the technical problems solved quite yet today. At least one of the computers has defied our most valiant efforts to get it to recognize the system for typing special characters (e.g., ɔ, ɛ, ŋ ). This is a subject for prayer—that one of us would receive divine inspiration about what to try in order to get it to do our bidding. Otherwise, it’s hard to imagine how we’ll be able to use that computer for data entry. We are extremely grateful for the two new computers, as they are working beautifully!