Chapman Texts

This recording project was Kari's idea. And it was a good one. Speakers were very interested in the content of the texts. But if you have never done this kind of thing, it is very difficult. Here are some of the reasons:

re-elicitation method

Most of the speakers couldn't read the Deg Xinag writing system, so I had to read Kari's transcription to them. (I did not consult Chapman until later.) Sometimes speakers started repeating before I finished the sentence or phrase if they recognized what I was saying. If you have never worked with sound files, you may not realize that the voices cannot be separated by software. I tried to rerecord the phrase or sentence whenever that happened, but was not successful 100% of the time.

language of the texts

Some Deg Xinag words existed in Chapman's day which were not used 100 years later, at the time these recordings were made. Sometimes words could not be recognized even in Kari's version from their spelling or translation. Substitutions had to be made on the fly. Some of these were relatively easy, such as tr'eyh yozr for Chapman's tr'iyozr 'canoe'. Some words were much more puzzling, even to the extent that they just had to be skipped. I could have spent all my field time on one story alone. But the goal was to get some kind of audio record of all the stories.

The early 20th century texts transcribed by Chapman may also reflect a different style of story-telling than was common in the late 20th century, for the generation of speakers that were recorded here.

transcription

Words are transcribed according to speaker idiolect, not according to say the way they were transcribed in previous dictionaries of Deg Xinag. Even within the same story a speaker might have various pronunciations of the same word. Here are some examples:

yixgitsiy, yuxgitsiy 'raven' nuq'oɬonh, nq'oɬonh 'woman' traɬtth'et, sraɬtth'et 'kashim'

recording environment

We used a table top mic attached to a portable CD recorder. It was hard to control microphone placement, as speakers sometimes leaned forward to look at the page or back in the chair to be more comfortable. In general, the microphone was too close to Hannah, so some big puffs of air accompany certain sounds. (I was trying to avoid background noise in her house. The heater was making a fair bit of noise, and Hannah didn't want to turn it down further.)