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First Contact Language Survival · Acedra
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First Contact Language Survival
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0:00
You're alone, far from home, face to face with a dozen people who can't make out a word you say. How in the world can you go from here to knowing their language? Well, with my first contact survival kit!
0:19
You know the scenario: you're on an island, or in a rainforest, or up in the mountains, staring at unfamiliar faces. They don't know your language, you don't know theirs. Where do you even start? It's a scene we have romanticized and reimagined from history to sci-fi. The ultimate fish-out-of-water tale. And now you're that fish. Well, I once claimed "we're like insurance for your linguistic emergencies"; time to make good on that.
0:47
Not like how to build a fire or a boat out of here, look I don't know how you got stuck here. I don't know why there's no internet, no mobile, and I don't know why all you have is this one little device to play this prerecorded video before it self-destructs. Yeah, you're in the deep end. Ask some experts though, and you just stumbled into the ideal way to learn! You're not outnumbered and alone. Instead, you are a "participant observer" about to "elicit" a lot of "monolingual data".
1:16
In fact, one linguist famously showed off figuring out a language monolingually in front of an audience in about an hour. Haha! If this all goes well, you could even end up like the field worker heard sleep-talking with grammar they didn't know they knew. Ideally, there's homework you should've already done, right? You studied up on any shred of the language, including languages in the same area or the same family? You certainly brought tools: microphone, computer, notecards?
1:44
And you would never, ever show up unannounced! At end we'll see ethical issues around you even being here doing this in the first place, b-but seems like you skipped that stuff. So, a start: smile. Sounds simple, but there's a chance it'll help... Or it could make you look like a fool, which, hey, maybe that could help? Pull out paper and a pen, and fashion yourself a makeshift clipboard. You will be on canoes, in forests, life may get leaky and muddy.
2:13
They say real linguists get a bout of malaria, a ripped toenail and a boil. Anyone in the Amazon might add: and a tarantula on your lap. Cultivate trust. This will take time. One seasoned fieldworker says expect to spend more time on "interpersonal relations" than on learning the language. In some cases, trust-building can go too well. Many videos ago I told you about a Spaniard in the 1500s, who after getting shipwrecked ended up living with and becoming part of a Maya community.
2:43
Oh, do accept food and drinks, and share yours. Apparently a westerner in the Amazon gained the first interest of the Pirahã by cooking strong coffee nearby over a fire. Hopefully now people trust you enough to speak. Time to make your move. Point! Seriously, point to get nouns for things around you. (What is this? And this? And this and this and this!?) Point to props, like sticks and leaves of different sizes. Use your body to get words for simple actions you can do with those props.
3:17
Now for that handy clipboard. Write the sounds they say however you can. You don't need to know the phonetic alphabet, stick to one symbol for each sound. Just record. Don't worry about spelling and pronunciation; that's for later. You won't get everything right at first. Too much detail, too little detail, plus humans speak with false starts and repetitions. (Oh, I know that from recording myself.) It's ok. Can you learn from laughter? People will react when your guesses are wrong.
3:47
Don't aim to impress, try! Make mistakes. Repeat when corrected. Yeah, repeat back what you hear. And confirm. Cross-check with others to avoid simple mistakes, like if you point to your eye and immediately record whatever you hear, you might think "your eye" means "my eye". And you'd be wrong. Or like if you point to an orchid, and then hear the word for "flower" but mistakenly assume it has a narrower definition. Make hypotheses every day. Guess what's going on.
4:20
What sounds does the language have? What do words mean? How does the grammar break down? Risk being wrong, then check yourself against what you already recorded and each new utterance you hear. Make yourself uncomfortable but the community comfortable. You are the outsider. There's so much potential for misunderstanding here. For one example, you might think making decisions means voting. But the Ocholo people in Ethiopia talk and talk and talk... and talk until they can weave
4:52
together a common consensus. So you're working, building a base of what field linguists call "informants" or "consultants". They though are your hosts and teachers during the long time it takes to learn a language. As you piece it together and study everything all at once, there's a sort of "tried-and-true" method. It starts with gathering words and phrases, then figuring out sounds, then how to build words, then sentences, then analyzing meaning, before you go back to sounds and repeat.
5:24
Gather at least a few hundred words and phrases. You can start with the Swadesh list of more-or-less worldwide words and add culturally relevant terms. Come back later to look for pronunciation patterns. One tool is minimal pairs, words that differ by a single sound. So in Great Andamanese you learn /puro/ and /buro/ are different words, but [buro] and [βuro] are two ways of saying the same word. So /p/ and /b/ are different phonemes but [b] and [β] are variants. Grammar will be tough.
5:59
It's tricky to pick apart morphemes, grammatical bits. It requires lots of context, all the context! And unlearning European biases that lead you into expecting grammar you're not actually hearing. And I think I know of a place with hours of linguistic tales of just how different languages can be. By now you're used to getting everyone comfortable. Time to "elicit" data. (That's the technical term.) Use prompts to get sentences and stories going. Stick to realistic words and phrases.
6:30
So no meat-eating kangaroos if you're documenting a Yolngu language in Australia. It can be hard to find a quiet spot for elicitation; everyone is curious and participates. But keep documenting elicited and spontaneous speech. Pace yourself. Avoid fatigue or boredom, especially eliciting grammar. There's only so much run, ran, is running, are running, were... only so much of that a human can take, crucial info though it be. Be polite.
7:01
Formality and taboos and avoidance language can blindside you. A storyteller in Vanuatu is in the middle of sharing when a linguist says: Wait! Repeat! I want to record that. Everything goes quiet, tense – turns out the story's symbolism implicated a local politician's lineage. So you're transcribing, translating and starting to build a corpus of data to check your guesses. When you translate, get the gist, then go word-for-word, then finally pick apart each piece, each morpheme.
7:34
From there, circle back to guessing-and-checking again when you wake up tomorrow. With your tongue ready and head full of strategies, you might have what it takes to survive a language. Flip the survivor in this survival kit, though. How does an indigenous community survive you? If you're the fish out of water, will colonization bring water after the fish? What kind of impact will you have? Normally documenting languages means Ethics Committees to avoid, say, you washing up on
8:05
shore to document Sentinelese, the language of a people who a-n-damantly chase away outsiders. Can you do right by people when they feel over-researched? Can you recognize Native voices and Elders as sources, or will you stamp your name on the language? (Look, saved it!) Is every language owned by all humanity? What about Pueblo nations or Kallawaya speakers who forbid you from sharing their knowledge? There's always a chance that no matter how much trust you build, the people themselves
8:37
may demand you strike out their words from writing and share them with no one. No guarantees. Still, with this survival kit in mind, you have a better shot at going from first contact to actually understanding the language and culture on their terms. Respect, love, stay safe, and stick around and subscribe for language.
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