#kagate

This new article gives a basic overview of the grammar of the Yolmo language. I’m excited to share it, because it’s the first time I’ve systematically drawn together resources on the different dialects of the language, including those worked on by other people (Hari’s work on the Melamchi variety) and my own work on the Lamjung and Ilam varieties as well as the closely related Syuba language. I’m also excited because it’s one of the first articles in the new WikiJournal of the Humanities.

I’ve been slowly improving the Yolmo Language Wikipedia page for years, because Wikipedia is still one of the most read websites on the internet, and the place most people are likely to learn about a language. This meant that I already had the basis of a good encyclopedic article, the kind of thing you might find in The Sino-Tibetan Languages handbook or something similar (without the $420 price tag).

WikiJournals are set up as part of the larger WikiMedia family, which includes Wikipedia. There are a number of benefits to publishing an article in a WikiJournal:

It motivated me to to one final push to round out some sections of the article I’d been putting off

It creates a ‘version of record’, which can still be updated but is easier to cite because the content is stable

Because it’s a journal article, not an encyclopedia, there is more scope for speculation, and a bit of original research

It’s a peer-reviewed journal article, and so I get some academic credit for my time spent improving Wikipedia

I decided to essentially draft the document on the Wikipedia page. Once I was happy with it, I created a Wikiversity account for myself, and copied the content across to submit as a pre-print. There were a few changes to make, such as writing an abstract, and adding some more speculative thoughts about the relationship between the dialects for which there aren’t any good citable sources (yet... I’m working on it). Some lessons learnt in this process: set up your account 24-28 hours before editing, otherwise they tend to think you’re a bot. I had some trouble editing the template myself, but I’ve been told they’ve fixed that. Also, the visual editor that makes editing Wikipedia such a breeze is not turned on automatically - you have to go into your settings and in the ‘beta’ section choose the visual editor as an option.

Overall, I found the peer review experience very positive, as I was fortunate enough to have reviewers who understood the grammar overview genre, and were familiar with Wikipedia style. The whole peer review process is run on the Wikipedia model, where everything is documented publically. You can see the reviewer comments and my responses by going to the Discuss tab on the article.

Abstract

Yolmo is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal. Also known as Helambu Sherpa, it is a Tibetic language. This article gives an overview of the language, including information about the dialects spoken, history of documentation, and a grammatical overview. The grammatical overview brings together work on different dialects, providing an outline of the sound system, noun phrase, verb phrase and clause structure.

Stories and Songs from Kagate - illustrated picture book

This book is an illustrated collection of stories from the documentation of Syuba (Tibetic, Nepal). The illustrations were made by Ng Xiao Yan as part of an ongoing project at NTU Singapore to connect students in the School of Art, Design and Media with people working on language documentation. The illustrations are beautiful, I’m still in awe of how well she captured features of Syuba life.

From the introduction:

This book contains stories and songs  om Kagate speakers. The original recordings were made in 2014 with a number of Kagate people. Some of these stories are traditional folk tales, and you will see that many of them involve animal characters. Some of the stories are personal experience stories. We also have the texts of some songs written by Kagate people. Kagate people want to share their language and their culture with the world.

The recordings of songs and stories were made as part of a project by Joan Kelly and Lauren Gawne, funded by Nanyang Technological University for “the development of artistic and participatory means of recording, writing and transmitting the stories and knowledge of Kagate, an endangered language of Nepal”. This project also funded the illustrations by Ng Xiao Yan, transcription work and other production costs. Further work on the volume, including Nepali translations by Rinchen A. Lama, was funded by the project “Documenting and describing Kagate, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal” run by Lauren Gawne and funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Project. The original recordings can be found online at The Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS. Thank you to Ningmar Tamang, who worked on the  nal text. Thank you also to Emily Gref for editorial and technical assistance and The Firebird Foundation, Awesome Foundation and Stack Exchange for funding an initial period of work with the Kagate community.

View a digital copy of the book 

Purchase a print-on-demand copy (each copy purchased pays for a copy to be printed for)

Stories and Songs from Kagate. 2017. Publisher: Lauren Gawne, Illustrator: Ng Xiao Yan,  Editor: Ningmar Tamang. ISBN-13: 978-1546846475

The original tellings of the stories, and the illustrated book, are also available through the Syuba archive at Paradisec:

Original recordings:

Tiger and Jackal SUY1-140127-13

http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/SUY1/items/140127

Misunderstood Children SUY1-140126-09

http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/SUY1/items/140126

Kabire’s Song SUY1-140127-04

http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/SUY1/items/140127

Crows SUY1-140128-02

http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/SUY1/items/140128

Jackal SUY1-140128-03

http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/SUY1/items/140128

Travelling Song SUY1-140128-05

http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/SUY1/items/140128

Bear Stories SUY1-140129-02

http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/SUY1/items/140129

Family Song SUY1-140128-04

http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/SUY1/items/140128

Picture book:

Two beautiful documentary shorts made from my Syuba archive collections

The ELAR archive teamed up with Anna and Remy Sowa at Chouette Films to make shorts from the open access materials in the collection. These two films was created from footage from my Kagate (Syuba) deposit at ELAR.

The video above shows Dawa Lama harvesting honey and talking about the process. The video below features people talking about their experiences of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal. It was an interesting experience working with other people on my data, but it’s made me all the more happy that it’s open access and available for people to use. I’ve also been blown away by how beautiful the archive footage looks when it’s left in the hands of professional editors!

The ELAR blog will be featuring other videos made by Chouette over the coming weeks. It’s also just a great blog about language documentation.

See also on Superlinguo: Syuba language Open Access collection now available through ELAR

I’m very excited that the Syuba language materials I’ve been working on over the last few years (and am continuing to work on right now) are available through the Endangered Langauge ARchive (ELAR). I wanted to share it with you, and also share my thanks to the many enthusiastic Syuba people who participated in the recordings and shared their stories.

From the ELAR collection page:

This collection includes audio-video recordings of Syuba, spoken in the Ramechhap district of Nepal. It also contains a smaller collection of audio-video recordings of Ilam Yolmo, a mutually intelligible variety spoken in a different district of Nepal. These collections have been archived together because of their similarities and because they were recorded as part of the same research project. Many of the recordings are monologues, interviews or conversations. ELAN transcriptions are available for a subset of the collection, and will continue to be added as work on the collection progresses. There are also some experimental and elicited data, as well as supplementary materials including scanned notes, FLEx files, GPS data and publications about the language. This project is still in active development until June 2017.This collection includes audio-video recordings of Syuba, spoken in the Ramechhap district of Nepal. It also contains a smaller collection of audio-video recordings of Ilam Yolmo, a mutually intelligible variety spoken in a different district of Nepal. These collections have been archived together because of their similarities and because they were recorded as part of the same research project. Many of the recordings are monologues, interviews or conversations. ELAN transcriptions are available for a subset of the collection, and will continue to be added as work on the collection progresses. There are also some experimental and elicited data, as well as supplementary materials including scanned notes, FLEx files, GPS data and publications about the language. This project is still in active development until June 2017.

Lauren Gawne (collector), 2017; Kagate (Syuba), an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal (0388), Digital collection managed by ELAR. [Open Access]: https://elar.soas.ac.uk/Collection/MPI971098

Dictionaries are never the quickest things to write. The Oxford English Dictionary was originally expected to take 10 years, and instead took almost 50 years to complete, and it is still under constant revision. In December last year, 40 or so speakers of Kagate assembled for 2 weeks in Kathmandu to attempt to collect enough words in the language to assemble a dictionary.

The method they used is known as Rapid Word Collection, where small groups are given short questionnaires grouped by semantic domains. One group may be sitting there attempting to list all of the features of the human face, while another might be wracking their brains for all the words relating to weddings, or theft, or trees. 

Each words for each domain are listed on a separate piece of paper, and grouped by folders. this leads to a great deal of paper-shuffling. Not every speaker of the language is literate, and the orthography is still in its trial phase (problems that I'm sure the OED editor never had to ponder), so scribes had to be carefully chosen. Also, older speakers are repositories of information and half-forgotten words, and so were distributed around groups.

In 10 days the half-a-dozen groups of speakers collected over 10,000 words. Some of these are repeats, for example the word for fire is likely to show up in the cooking domain as well as the forestry domain and a dozen others, but given that the previous Kagate word list had only 1500-odd entries, this is certainly an improvement. Also, all of the entries were typed during the workshop, and so the editing and refining stage can be undertaken much more efficiently.

They worked with a couple of local language and literacy NGOs, including SIL-Nepal, and I was very kindly invited along. There was also a similar workshop being run with the Thulung community in the same building, so there was a pleasant hum of activity the whole time I was there.

The dictionary is, at this stage, more technically a translated wordlist. Each word is given in Kagate with the Nepali translation. The small team of editors will now need to check for words that are missing, or mistranslated. Eventually English glosses will be added, and even definitions in Kagate itself.

Gerald Roche and others are celebrating #DiverseTibet throughout May on Twitter. Tibet is large place, and people who identify as Tibetan are more linguistically, culturally and geographically diverse than I ever realised before I started working in the field of Tibeto-Burman studies for my PhD.

I thought I'd contribute to the celebration of the diversity within Tibetan with this recording of a song in Kagate - a Tibetan variety that is spoken in Nepal. Many people don't realise than the mountains of Nepal are predominantly inhabited by people of Tibetan origin.