Finding Dory

Having found ‘nimo’ in the Kope language, I thought I would see if ‘dori’ was hiding somewhere too.

First I searched through the database on my computer. This is stored in a programme called Flex, or Fieldworks Language Explorer. This is where I enter, gloss and analyse the Kope language. As my collection of texts builds, so does my concordance of words, but Dory was not hiding there.

Next I looked at the dictionary which we have under construction. These words were collected from various literacy workshops my colleague Robbie has run. There are a few of us, scattered across the world, attempting to get the first edition of this dictionary edited and published online, but for me it has been a low priority with everything else that is going on. As I continue learning, recording and translating Kope, I have more and more words that ‘one day’ need to find their way into the dictionary. Dory was not hiding in the dictionary, but maybe one day she will be.

My third place to look was with a friend in our language family, which as the Dory movie is about family, seemed an appropriate move. Language families are those languages which have a common ancestry. The picture below gives a graphic sense of the family English belongs to.

http://www.sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=196

Our Kiwaian language family is much smaller in both numbers of languages and speakers of those languages, but at least we have relatives. I have heard local Kope speakers say that they can understand Kerewo people if they try really hard, and when in Daru, they understand words, but can’t really talk to people. They also know that their people once migrated from the Daru area. One day I hope to hear and record the traditional story of that migration to better understand who the Kope are and how they got to where they are now.

Small language families are a feature of PNG, a country which is home to more than 10% of the world’s languages. Some of them, like our neighbours in the Ipiko tribe, have no close linguistic family. Add to that the fact Ipiko is only two villages and maybe 500 speakers, and you get a sense of the complexity of our linguistic situation.

The Kiwaian family member I consulted did not know of Dory in Bamu, but said that they had “the same 'lousey us' combo”. Word play is an occupational hazard among linguists. We then got sidetracked into a discussion of where Bamu has a paucal (pronoun meaning ‘few’), Kope uses the same pronoun as a trial* (affix meaning ‘three’). Paucals are rare linguistically, but trials are even rarer. It’s nice to know our family is special, even if we don’t have Dory!

*trials: said like ‘tree-alls’, rather than sounding like a court appearance.

Finding Nimo

Earlier this year I was able to work alongside the sociolinguistic survey team to find out more about the language situation in my corner of Gulf Province. What this means in lay terms is that I was able to travel* about with people good at finding out about how languages are the same or different, and how people perceive their languages, so that we can better plan how to work with the people around me.

One part of language survey is getting wordlists. We would do this by sitting with people in the village, discussing the list and then recording their responses. The survey team would transcribe this using IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet). Before transcription we would always have to explain to people that we were using a special alphabet, otherwise they would correct us for using the wrong spelling for their normal alphabet. Sometimes it was good to also write down their suggestion, as it gave us insight into how they understood their language.

 Collecting word lists in Ipiko with the survey team. (H. Schulz)

How people understand their language is an important part of survey, and in each place we visited we would try to understand this. Sometimes we did this through large group activities, where we got people to write labels for villages and tribes, grouping them together as same or different. Other times we would learn from a small group discussion of how they saw themselves and who they communicated with in the region.

The question ‘Who are you?’ is a philosophers playground, but it was a question we would ask to try and understand how they defined and named their language, clan, tribe and identity. We often collected overlapping or conflicting definitions as different people saw things different ways. Our job was to listen and record this information and to collate it later.

Once our travels and data collection were done, the survey team writes up an extensive report. This report compares the wordlists for mutual intelligibility as well as listing and discussing the social information we found out. It is a report that then informs the practicalities of work decisions as we try to meet the linguistic, translation and literacy needs of the region.

Travelling between language areas as we did our work had its moments. One of these was the confusing word ‘ni’. It occurred in all three linguistic areas we worked in, and in each place it was a pronoun, but in each place a different pronoun. In one area it meant ‘we’, in another it meant ‘you(sg)’ and in a third it meant ‘them’. Apparently it is also a Swedish pronoun!

An amusing thing we uncovered in my language was that there are two meanings of the word ‘nimo’, which is said like ‘Nemo’ from the movie. The first meaning of ‘nimo’ is ‘we’ and the second is ‘lice’. This means that ‘finding nimo’ is either the search for ourselves, or a hunt for lice. Ever since then when I see a mother picking through her child’s hair for lice, I smile and think ‘Finding Nimo!’

 Finding nimo (H. Schulz)

*travel: as readers of my blog would know, travel is a major challenge for me in Gulf Province. This survey trip was done in partnership with the YWAM medical ship. We were based on the ship and each day as the YWAM health care teams went out to villages, we would go with and collect words and information. While they provided glasses, immunisations and health checks, we would sit nearby and collect language data. Well, we couldn’t sit too close by, as babies receiving immunisations tend to yell a lot and we had to be out of earshot for the sake of our recordings! Thanks YWAM for making this trip possible.

Birthday

This week was my ‘US birthday’, meaning that when friends from the US read my birthday as month/day when I have written it day/month, they think I have a birthday in August. This oddity of dates has prompted me to finally write about my birthday in the village many months ago.

Birthdays are not a big deal in the PNG villages I've been in. Although a child’s health book will list their date of birth, most village kids do not know when their birthday is without checking what the book says. Many adults do not know the exact date of their birth at all. This is quite a contrast to Aussie kids who know exactly how old they are and count down the days until their next birthday. I’ve moved on from the countdown, but I still enjoy celebrating birthdays as I see them as an annual reminder to be thankful for the gift of life.

Spending my birthday in the village this year meant that it was a quiet day, and much like any other village day. I had one gift, as I’d pre-arranged for my parents to send a parcel to me with a YWAM friend a few weeks earlier. Even now that I’ve lived out of home as long as I lived at home, it is still fun to have a parcel on my birthday. It was also fun to eat all of the chocolates in the box over the next day or two, rather than carefully rationing them as I usually do with village supplies.

The best gift was not wrapped, but was the enthusiasm of one of the Kope translators for the work we are doing. In conversation I had been emphasising that this is their translation programme, not mine, and that I am there to equip, train and support them in their work, but that they need to take ownership of what we are doing. Well, this message must have sunk in, as in our conversation this translator had clearly taken ownership and was enthusiastic about the next steps of translation and how to engage the community.

No translation happened on my birthday, due to the translation team having other commitments. Instead, I spent the day thinking of the monks of old as I hand-wrote two chapters of the Bible. I’m yet to buy a printer for the village, so hand copying was the only way to get the good copy that I needed. The temptation to stop writing and do some colouring in gave me a cheeky insight into one possibility of how illuminated manuscripts happened: bored monks with some creativity to let loose.

My birthday in the village may have been a quiet affair, but I was (and am) thankful for the gift of another year of life, for the Kope community around me, for the enthusiasm of the translators …and for chocolate.

The notebook

In a world that has largely moved on to electronic communications I continue to cart piles of paper about with me. Journal, Bible, novel, diary and a notebook are my companions. Sometimes I carry a sketch book too, as I believe that creating is part of what it means to be made in the image of the Creator.

My notebook is my external memory device. It is where I note things to deal with later, be that things to purchase, people to contact, thoughts to contemplate, books to read or events to write about. When I worked on sailing ships as mate, it was an essential part of my functioning in a complex and responsible role. As I move between places and tasks in my current work, it is the item which helps to keep the right things happening at the right time and in the right place. It is of particular use when in the village as with limited access to the internet, and to the outside world in general, I cannot follow many things up immediately, but most stockpile tasks for later.

One page in my current notebook is labelled 'Aus' and is a long list of things to do while in the land of plenty. There are a few other pages of shopping lists for specific stores (hardware, stationary, grocery). There are numerous notes for future blog posts, noting events and reflections in a few dot points so that they can later grow into prose. There are notes for a meeting and from a meeting, as well as addresses to add to my database.

The page that makes me smile though, is the one that gives evidence of my need to wean myself off social media when I go to the village, as it is labelled 'Life as fb posts.' This page started as I realised I was thinking of events in brief and interesting ways that under normal circumstances I would post for the world to see. So, months later, here are some thoughts from my first weeks in the village when I was still writing such notes to myself.

• Jan 25: We started drafting the Kope NT today!!!!!!!! It took six hours for 13 verses, but it is a good team, good to be started and good to be... thorough.
• Jan 26: Sitting on the verandah contemplating vowel length, tone, stress and their relationship to tense. Feeling like a real linguist.
• Jan 27: Because functioning in English, Kope and Greek was not confusing enough, we've added Hiri Motu to the mix. 
• Jan 28: You know it's a hot day when the chickens all find a cool place to nap at 10am and they're still there at 3pm.
• Jan 29: My ankle callouses are back after spending hours sitting on the floor each day.
• Jan 30: Half an hour to download a few emails to my phone. It's no wonder I've resorted to writing fb posts in my notebook!

…and Tide

 Village wharf as a spring tide comes in.

Time and tide wait for no one.

This is a maxim I thought I understood from my days sailing, but it has taken on new meaning as I live in the tidal delta area of Gulf Province PNG. Tides in our area average 2-3m, with spring tides sometimes going over 4m and neap tides having less than a metre variation at times.

This daily breathing in and out of the river system is part of life. It defines when and where you can travel, as some short cuts only work at high tide, and some routes are best followed with the flow of the tide, rather than travelling against it. The tide defines what people can catch and eat, as the greater the tidal variation in a day, the more the water is stirred up. I’m still learning which things are easier to catch in clear water, and which are more likely in muddy water.

 Same wharf when the spring tide went out.

Although the daily tide dictates life, it does not come into the village, but keeps within the river banks. It is king tides that cause flooding.

King tides occur due to a number of factors, growing bigger when some things align, such as when the partial solar eclipse occurred in January. Rain upstream from us also raises the water level, and although not a king tide, the flooding is similar.  This is when the water comes through the village, making life a little more interesting, as these photos show.

 

 Note the drain in this picture,
it is nearly a metre deep…

 …and vanishes in a king tide, so watch your step!

 Having avoided swimming in the drain with a mis-step,
I reached the bridge, only to find that it was floating,
which made crossing to the other side …’interesting’.

Time…

In Papua New Guinea we talk about ‘PNG time.’ By this we mean that things will happen when they happen, and that clocks and schedules are not the driving force, but relationships and other matters are. For me, who comes into this from a sailing background where five minutes early to watch (duty) was considered on time, it can be quite challenging. Often, I find life has become a case of hurry-up-and-wait, especially when something is happening ‘soon’.

Now that we have started drafting Scripture in Kope, I will have a language learning session with one of the village ladies in the morning, then return to my house and get ready for the translation team to arrive ‘soon’. I will get everything ready for a stated time, and then wait for people to actually arrive. Sometimes they dribble in over the next hour or so, our start point being that once there are three translators, we can start. Other times everyone arrives at once and we get straight to work. Occasionally no one comes at all and I eventually receive a message that they’re all busy with something else. On one occasion I turned up and they’d arrived before me and were waiting for me!

Part of living with PNG time is that I always have a back up or interim plan. While I wait for translators, transport and other such things, I usually have with some reading material, a letter to write, my language learning recordings to listen to or my vocabulary flashcards to go over. If a plan is cancelled, I have back up options in place, which usually means catching up on typing up notes into my computer or preparing for a text we’ll be working on soon.

Interestingly, while I am learning patience for PNG time, some PNGns have learnt impatience with whiteskins not keeping to whiteskin time. While waiting for locals to arrive is normal, there was one episode of are-they-here-yet when waiting for whiteskins to arrive at an appointed time that they did not keep. I guess when my culture has spent so long emphasising the important of being on time, I should not be surprised that we are then expected to be on time.

Being home in Australia at the moment, I realise that I have absorbed more of the PNG time frame than I thought. I am now more likely to be five minutes late than five minutes early, as was my habit before. I make meeting times with an ‘–ish’ at the end to emphasise that I might not be as exact as before. When I have a more important meeting, I’ve been turning up extra early, as in recognising the importance, I’ve become over cautious with timing.

The timing of things in PNG can require the flexibility of a gymnast, as plans are made, remade and dropped. How to read the timing of events, and when I need to be somewhere, is a skill I’m very much still working on, and one that is undergoing some readjustments now that I am back in the land of clocks and schedules.

Apologies and some links

At the moment I'm on furlough/home assignment in Australia, and although I've got plenty of notes for things to write about, I've not made the time to sit down and write about them. I've made it a priority for this week though, so hopefully this blog returns to normal scheduling from the 15th.

In the meantime, here is a video about the dedication of the Kope Jesus Film last year.

(You can watch the whole film too, if you want to hear what Kope sounds like!)