Hello, my name is Jeff Heath. I'm going to start in this segment talking about
my biography as a field worker. I was a, one of the very few linguistics
undergraduate majors. I graduated in 1971 from Harvard College I think there were
four linguistics majors in my graduating class I'm quite sure I was the only one
who declared as a major on arrival as a freshman and the first
fieldwork opportunity I had came toward the end of my undergraduate years and
into my first year as a graduate student in linguistics at the University of
Chicago and that's because I happened to run into a gentleman who was from
Mississippi a member of the Mississippi Choctaw tribe and I was interested in
languages and we agreed that I would go down there and do a little bit of work
over the summer this is around 1971 and then into I think 72 and so I took the
bus down there that's a long long way from New England to Philadelphia
Mississippi and I got there I've had very little money I rented a room in the
Old Benwalt hotel there for $15 a week and I hitchhiked every day out to the to
the Choctaw communities which were scattered around the the city itself and
I did what I could as as a fledgling field worker having very little training
in field work but being equipped with the good old UHER
That's U-H-E-R reel-to-reel five inch reel tape recorder which was the the the machine
of a choice at the time and a lot of notebooks and later on I made a lot of
cassette recordings well I only published two short papers
on simple grammatical issues based on the Choctaw work. I did make a lot of
recordings and those are now being archived at the American Philosophical
Society in Philadelphia Pennsylvania which is which was my my funding source
at the time and so that works is of some value but in terms of my biography well
the main thing was that later on a couple years into my graduate work at
University of Chicago as I had been getting ready to pursue my Arabic
studies by going to Egypt for a summer study program having done Arabic as an
undergraduate and into graduate work. The phone rang and turned out that in
Australia they had suddenly had a new Labour government for the first time in
in some decades and they had greatly increased funding for research on
Australian Aboriginals including languages and they desperately needed
field workers to sign up for three-year fellowships
now they preferred people who had graduated so that they would be postdocs
but they were willing to consider someone who was in the middle of
graduate study and I had very little time to think about it or decide but I
decided what the hell I'll do it so I cancelled my my Arabic summer study
program and next thing I knew I was on a plane to Australia to spend three years
doing field research and knowing absolutely nothing about Australian
languages knowing nothing about Aboriginal people and knowing nothing no
anthropology which as it turned out was something that you had to have to work
do any kind of research with with traditional Australian Aboriginals so
and I end up going to Nimblewar Mission which is where they
sent me the the prominent linguist by the way at the time in Australia were
Bob Dixon who was the who was actively organizing a field research by other
people as well as his own and also Michael Silverstein who was my contact
at Chicago the the contact between Dixon and me and also Ken Hale of MIT who was
had done a lot to get people interested in Australian Aboriginal languages
Anyway they they sent me to work on Nunggubuyu which is spoken in Arnhem Land
on the eastern coast of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory now it wasn't
easy to get there there's only one flight a week only way to get it and get
in there at the time was by air and there was one flight a week and you know
I got I got there and it was a mission and very isolated one there was a
trailer there what they call a caravan in Australia and it had been left there
after a previous field worker had used it, an anthropologist and in the three or
four years since he had departed there was a large tree had fallen on it and
then there were a couple of rainy seasons where he had gotten soaked and
very moldy and then eventually they fixed the uh... fixed the roof but it
was still pretty difficult to live in. So I lived in this little box basically for
the better part of three years with all the mold and with the heat and so forth
and I did what I could as as a field worker not knowing much of anything
about those languages or about how to do fieldwork so I did know that you
you want to do texts. I'd had enough exposure to American Indian linguistic research
to know that texts are very important and I started recording text and
doing a regular elicitation with with the native assistant
and after a year of that i was still really in the dark about the language I
really I really had a lot of problems figuring out I've had a very complicated
morphology very complicated morphophonemics so very little was transparent
about the morphology and I had difficulty with vowel length which is
which is very subtle and it isn't what you usually think of as vowel length
and in general I just had a lot of problems so after nine months in the
field I came back to the capital city into the Institute building and did what
I could to organize my material and it went back for another nine months and
during the second year things started to click I started to
figure things out eventually after a lot of marination and
you know it's things started to go pretty well and I started to be able to
transcribe text with a little bit more ease and I ended up with about seven
hours of transcribed texts probably would have done a better job of
eliciting interesting texts if I had to do it over again but I did get a lot of
narrative, myth narratives and so forth and some commentaries on uh...
regular everyday activities, food gathering and so forth so I
ended up with a pretty good corpus and I published a text volume a dictionary
and a grammar I believe in that order. Now I did the text first because I had
decided because I was having so much trouble with elicited material that
really the only way for me to do it was to do it as a corpus analysis that is
put the corpus together publish it and then use that as the as the touchstone
for the grammar and the dictionary so when the the grammar
finally came out - it's a very long grammar - many hundreds of pages and I had to
type type this all myself on the old IBM Selectric
typewriter and if you made a couple mistakes you had to throw that page away
start all over again so that was laborious but I finally finally got it
done now what I decided to do since I had this large textual corpus already
published I decided to make the grammar essentially a concordance based
grammar or a corpus based grammar meaning that instead of making a
statement about grammar and then one or two illustrative of examples I would
make the statement about the grammar and then I would have a long list an
exhaustive list of all the occurrences of that phenomenon or that word or
whatever in the text collection listing them by text number and section number
and I did this so actually if you look at the grammar just open it to a random
page you're probably not going to see any examples you're gonna see just
large lists of textual references by section... by text and section number
similarly the dictionary had rather brief definitions usually with no
examples but with references to multiple textual occurrences now in many ways
this this way of designing a grammar text dictionary collection was ahead of
its time it was something that would be make a lot of sense now you know 40
years later with computers and the ability to go back and forth
between a text and lexicon and grammar in those days it was somewhat
revolutionary and the works didn't really go over too well because for one
thing you had to actually have copies of the text volume and the dictionary
volume and the grammar volume all in front of you and they rather quickly
went out of print and so there were very few people who were ever able to do that
to have a large table in front of them with the things set up but now with the
with all of those works electronically available through language description
heritage library or through my own my own deposits in deep blue at University
of Michigan library all of those are now available online so you can actually put
them up on a computer on a large computer screen or any computer screen
and toggle back and forth between texts and grammar and dictionary so the nice
thing about it is that you can get all of the occurrences of a phenomenon from
the text collection instead of just one or two that were selected by the
grammar writer so that was an interesting experience now I was there
for a total of three years and including one year after I came back and did my
finished my PhD at Chicago so I was there for three out of a four year
period basically from about middle of '72 to middle of '76 I think, or '77 I guess
and I also had a chance to work on some other languages in fact when things
weren't going very well for the for the analysis of Nunggubuyu I would just
drop it put it aside and if there was a speaker had shown up in that mission
from another language I would drop what I was doing
and work with him or her for a month and that's when... I worked on, ended up
working at about five other languages I think it was Warndarang, Marra, Ritharngu,
Dhuwal and Ngandi and a little bit of a couple other languages now of those
Warndarang was one where I worked with the last speaker it was very old man and I
got enough material from him to write a short grammar with a little bit of text
and a decent basic vocabulary and then he died and then that that project was
over but I felt pretty good about salvaging something from one language
the other languages I worked on were not in absolute immediate
danger of extinction but I did do full grammars of Ngandi and an Marra in
particular and and Ritharngu and and a enough on Dhuwal to publish a
volume on kinship text. Alright so I spent a lot of time after I came back from the
field writing these things up especially the new Nunggubuyu grammar which was very
laborious but I when I did come back this time as an assistant professor at
Harvard I went back to my Arabist roots the the work that I had interrupted in
1972 now in order to go to Australia to take that serendipitous opportunity so
summers and the occasional semester off I went to Morocco which is the place of
the the various Arabic speaking countries I'd visited it was the one that
struck me is most interesting so I went there and started working on special
projects I didn't have to do a grammar didn't have to do a dictionary didn't
really have to do text collections because there were works of those types
already available at least for some variety or other of Moroccan Arabic so
I was able for the first time to really do targeted projects. The first one was
language contact so I was interested in how Moroccan Arabic adopts and
historically Spanish and then French and then more recently even some English
borrowings, how they nativize these into fluently spoken Moroccan
Arabic and also how they handle borrowings if that's the correct word
from the diglossic superordinate which is literary Arabic
which is very different from Moroccan Arabic so it was very interesting to
look at the different ways those have... those are brought in
especially the verbs there was some very interesting results in terms of how
French or Spanish verbs are brought in and nativized. The second project I did
was a phonological study of Moroccan Arabic basically just the mainstream
dialect not anything else and that focused on the ablaut system
which I found very interesting how you how you map input forms onto output
templates - so for the nouns it would be the plurals and diminutives and for the
verbs that would be going from perfective to imperfective or
vice-versa and various other various derivational devices so I did a detailed
study about how that works based on a model where the input form is
mapped onto an output template by basically having selected parts of it
particularly consonants sucked out and and copied onto the template so that was
an interesting project with a lot of depth and then the third project which
was the really time-consuming one was going all over Morocco and which has all
kinds of different Arabic dialects of different vintages reflecting different
migrations going back to the eighth century and then some much later
migrations of Arabian Bedouin and so forth so a tremendous variety of
dialects - old urban dialects, dialects spoken up in the mountains, and so forth
so it was it was a big job to just get basic information - a few key
lexical items and some basic grammatical variables and I had to go all over
Morocco to do that. Now unfortunately in those days there was a war going on in
the south of the country or just south of it
between Morocco and the Polisario rebels because Morocco was annexing the
former Western Sahara. So in the southern areas especially the oases of
southern Morocco I didn't go into the Western Sahara but just the traditional
Morocco and but even there it was it was a militarily dangerous area and very
tight security and it was very difficult for an investigator to go in there even
even to gather harmless dialect information from speakers in the
oases and so what I did have permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to
do my research but I did not have all of the province by province permissions
that theoretically you're supposed to have from the Interior Ministry which
they never got around to doing so I would go into one of these places in the
south and get off the bus and go hang out in a in a cafe as a tourist and make
friends with somebody and then see if we could do a one or two hour dialect
questionnaire and I would I would do that just how do you say you know dog
how do you say dogs on and on and various variables that were known to be
dialectly sensitive and usually by the time I'd finished after an hour or two
there was some people that had come around started looking on and I had a
pretty good idea that they were they were spies and so I would wrap things up
have my have my lunch and take a bus out of town and then I would then a few
months later I would come back to the same place and repeat the process so the
idea was to have two or three... material from two or three local speakers for
each for each community. Now it certainly wasn't very sophisticated
sociolinguistic methodology but it was the best that could be done under the circumstances
I also went to Israel. I made contacts with some professors
at a Hebrew University and University of Haifa who were extremely helpful in
arranging for me to make contact with Moroccan Jews who spoke Moroccan Judeo-Arabic
but who had left Morocco in most cases in 1951. So that would have been
about 30 years before my fieldwork and I was able to go for example spend a month
in a settlement community near the Lebanese border called Shlomi where they
had a large number of Moroccans from all all different parts of Morocco speaking
of various Moroccan Judeo-Arabic dialects so that was very interesting
and I got at least basic material you know you know usually about an hour is
what the people the individual people would would would give me but I got some
reasonably useful material and so I was able finally to publish a book on Jewish
and Moroccan dialects of Moroccan... Jewish and Muslim dialects of Moroccan Arabic
which i think is the the only work of its of its kind. Alright - so as
a North African Arabist I was also interested in other varieties outside of Morocco
including especially the Hassaniya Arabic that is one of these Bedouin
represents one of these Bedouin migrations and it was across the
southern part of the Sahara into southern Algeria northern Mali and
especially Mauritania. So I arranged... I got a fellowship that allowed me to do a
month in Mauritania a month in Tunisia and a month in Mali in order to expand
my knowledge of Arabic dialects of the area and the one that of those three
places the one that struck me is a place that I wanted to go back to was Mali
so I went to in 1986 I had that that that month was spent in Timbuktu
and I stayed there - I was working with Arabic speakers but I stayed with a
Songhai family and it turns out that in Timbuktu
about 80% of the people are Songhai and 10% Arab and 10% Tamasheq or Tuareg
and I came back one more time to Malli I think in 1989 to looking to continue my
work on the Hassaniya Arabic but I also started working on the local Songhai
varieties and so I made a transition about that time about '89 or '90 from
studying mostly Maghrebi Arabic to studying Songhai so this is the first
sub-saharan black African languages that I'd ever worked on having had no
training whatever in in sub-saharan African linguistics. So I began coming
back year after year at least for the summer and sometimes
for a free semester to continue work on Songhai languages. Well there are two
main ones along the Niger River in Mali one in Timbuktu and environments one in
Gao and the environment and so I worked on both of those and finished a grammar
text dictionary collections for those I also became interested in the dialect
spoken in Hombori which is on a... isolated mountain well to the south of
the Niger River and I and when trouble broke out in the in the far north
I so it was not possible to go to Gao or Timbuktu any longer
I actually focused on the language of the Songhai language of Hombori and
also the variety spoken in Djenné which is even further south which is close to
that of Timbuktu so I kept working on those Songhai
languages I also discovered a another Songhai language that hadn't been known
to the to the academic literature which I called Tondi Songway Kiini
or mountain Songhai language abbreviation TSK I discovered that in a
a village spoken than a different mountain a little further south not far
from Douentza so I had a lot to do with the Songhai took a number of years to
work out the most difficult of those was the language of Hombori it was the first
real tonal African language that I had worked on since the Songhai of Timbuktu
and the Songhai of Gao had lost their tone so there were no
special difficulties about working on those languages but Hombori was
was tricky because it has only two tone levels high and low but a lot of
combinations and a lot of tone sandhi and a lot of subtle tonal distinctions
in alienable versus inalienable possession and a lot of things like that
that I was quite unprepared for and so that's another language that really
bamboozled me for a long time I would work on it for a while and then I
throw my hands up and do something else for a while
and then later come back to it and now almost really 25 years later I'm still
tinkering with the language of Hombori still working on finishing up the
the text volume having having belatedly published the grammar and the dictionary
all right so at some point I'm basically done with the Songhai languages of Mali
there are songhai languages in the Republic of the Niger in a couple of urban
pockets in Benin and I had visited those areas but I was and I was not able or I
guess I chose not to spend a great deal of time on that I'll leave them to other
people so what I decided to do was to keep working in Mali in the same general
area that where I had been working on Songhai and just move south to the next
language family which was there which is Dogon. Now the Dogon languages there are probably
80 locally named varieties of them and we can sort of group them into about 20
or 22 languages depending on how you make the language dialect distinction
and I looked around there's basically nobody working on them. There were no
serious reference grammars there were a couple out of the 20 languages there
were maybe two that had pretty good missionary grammars but without the
tones and which is which is deadly for tonal african languages so I sensed an
opportunity and I got some funding to work on one of the languages Jamsay
of out of a base in Douentza which is at the northern end of the the Dogon
country and I worked on that and did a little survey work on a couple of other
languages nearby and it turned out to be very interesting. The language... Jamsay
language turns out to have very interesting very different kind of tonal
system just two levels like Songhai but with without the tone sandhi, instead
with the kind of tonal kind of Ablaut, which we call tono syntax which was very
interesting on its on its own terms and I could see there were a bunch of other
Dogon languages that badly needed work so I began trying to recruit other
people to come and join me in doing this and this is at a time when it was
starting to become possible to get grants for endangered language
research - so I first brought in a Dutch linguist named Stephan Elders.
He was actually going to work on Bangime which is a language isolate spoken in
the Dogon area and he was there for for about a year and then he got sick and
tragically died in the field at a time when I was back in the US so that
project didn't start very well. However we picked up the flag so to speak and
kept kept going and some other people joined us and
we developed a much better infrastructure with the real home base and a vehicle
and a project assistant to avoid the kind of thing that had happened before
and over several years we had a number of people come in including
Laura McPherson who worked on the Tommo So language and finished a grammar and has
gone on to be an assistant professor at Dartmouth and is doing various projects
of her own in Burkina Faso and in Melanesia another project
member was postdoc Abbie Hantgan who had been a Peace Corps volunteer in that in
the Dogon area and came back with a PhD in linguistics - or as a PhD student
in linguistics and Indiana - to work on her original Dogon language and
also on the Bangime that Stefan Elders had had left unfinished and we had a few
other people including couple of Russians who had come and and worked on
individual Dogon languages and we're still we're still plugging away some
some of them are still coming back. Also Steve Moran who in addition to being our
website designer and administrator our project website
administrator is also been doing field work on one of the Dogan languages
Now after all this after so that was like 2005 we got started or I did on Dogon
and now it's 2018 and we're still plugging away on the
last few Dogon languages that remain to be described but we've gotten we've
knocked down more than half of them in terms of a decent sized book-length
reference grammar and some supporting materials so we've gone a
long way toward building a foundation
for Dogon linguistics. Now the other language in that area that I mentioned
is Bangime that's an interesting language - isolate. It's spoken in a in a
valley that cuts into the rocky plateau where the Dogon are but it's... they're in
complete isolation they there's really nothing behind them or to the left or
the right other than other than the cliffs going up and just rocky plateau
up above them which is uninhabitable so they're very isolated they have an
outlet into the into the plains which they can where they can come out and go
to the markets along the highway but there's to this day they're still kind
of isolated in these in these cul-de-sac valleys now their language has been a
mystery almost almost no work had been done on
it before we got there. Roger Blanchard visited spent a couple days there and
did and did a very informative couple page, three-four page.. a brief description
on his on his website basically trying to get somebody to go in there and do do
a serious job on it. So after Stephan Elders after Abbie who had taken a... in 2012
I believe had taken another postdoc I was able to go in and complete that work and
as we speak in April 2018 finally our Bangime
grammar as is coming out as being published and I think this week in
Germany at the Mouton grammar library so we're very proud of that. Bangime is
also interesting the language and the Bangande people as they're called are
also interesting because of their isolation and their fact that they're
linguistically unrelated to other language families and we were fortunate
enough to enlist a young genetics postdoc named Hiba Babiker from Max
Planck Institute for this for the science of human history in
Jena Germany she was actually a sudanese native and citizen but we were able to
get her to come down to Mali and to get genetic samples from a couple of Bangime
villages and also from several of the Dogon villages in the region and from
two Songhai communities Hombori and also the village where the TSK language
is spoken and also from one Bozo village in the plains just outside where the the
Bangime speaking people come out and one Fulfulde village so we so she now
has a very good genetic samples from several ethnic groups in that area which
was the first decent his first decent genetic material to come from that from
that area and so we're expecting considerable progress in the study of
the the demography the historical demography of those areas but it does
appear from the preliminary results that the Bangime speaking people the
Bangande really are genetically isolated within the context of West
Africa. Alright in 2012 there was another rebellion in the north of Mali
this time much more serious than the earlier ones. It started out as an
independence movement and then morphed into a jihadist movement. So the Tuaregs
basically and Arabs in northern Mali took control of the major cities in the
north Timbuktu and Gao and Kidal and they controlled the area down to and
including Douentza where we had had our original base when we were starting
to work on Dogon and it made it difficult for us even to work out of
Mopti, Mopti Sévaré where we had moved after several years in
Douentza down there to to take advantage of the better facilities that you have
in Sévaré than further north. And so we had been working out of Sévaré
but even that became too hot so we jumped into a vehicle and myself and my
Malian assistant and a couple of language informants and we took off and
we headed to Burkina Faso the next country over and we drove till
we got to the city of Bobo-Dioulasso in the southern part of Burkina and we
basically laid down some roots there. Now initially we used it as a
base to continue our work on Malian languages so I had three junior
project members who wanted to keep working on their Malian language and so
we brought more Malian native speakers down to our house in Bobo-Dioulasso and
the junior project members rejoined us there and so at one point we had eight
Malians, myself and three other expat linguists all working all living and
working in the same house so it was a little a little bit crowded but we
managed to keep the work going without much of a brick now we've
continued to maintain a base in in Bobo-Dioulasso so I now have two bases the old
one in Mopti Sévaré in Mali and the new one in Bobo-Dioulasso and one of the
things that happened when we were in Bobo-Dioulasso we looked around and we saw
there were some interesting languages in that area including a couple of
endangered languages one in particular the Tiefo language or one of two
Tiefo languages that's usually spelled T-I-E-F-O and there were two languages
which which we call Tiefo N and Tiefo D for the main the names of abbreviation
of the villages where they're spoken and Tiefo N was really down to a
couple people in fact it had been written off by by other linguists as
already dead but we found a couple speakers - a couple of very old speakers and so we
we began working on them a kind of a crash basis so that that work involved
Abbie Hantgan again. It also involved a graduate student in linguistics in
Burkina named Aminata Watera and I did what I could and then later when
Abbie left I took over that project and I'm still working on the second Tiefo
language the first one the one that was down to two speakers is Tiefo N and
we've published a short grammar of that and we're now working on Tiefo D
myself and Aminata in particular there was also another language there called
Jalkunan which I worked on and we've also been encouraging other young
linguists even if not directly part of our project to come there and be hosted
by us and work on one of the many other languages that are spoken in that area
so we've had... we've had one graduate student from my University of Michigan
who has gone there to work on Bobo the Kate Sherwood and another person who was
a one of Laura MacPherson students at Dartmouth and then graduated and came to
spend a year with us that would be Nate Severance is now a graduate student at
University of Oregon. So nowadays I'm continuing to do my own work in Mali of
finishing up on Dogon languages and also working on both starting a new project
on Bozo languages while also shuffling back and forth between there and and
Burkina to work on the Tiefo D there's also a
an endangered language of Cote d'Ivoire that I in a couple of Ivorian
colleagues and one graduate student are going to be working on this coming year
called Bere or sometimes written Mbre M-B-R-E which is a language thats down to we
think about 50 speakers in northern Cote d'Ivoire. So we're doing things like that
that are opportunistic that have to do with or with languages that must be
studied very quickly the Jalkunan, the Tiefo and the Mbre but we're
also hoping to get to get younger people in there to - to make southwestern
Burkina kind of a go-to place for a study of Manding languages for study
especially of Gore languages and one or two others that are in that area so
that's about where we stand at this point so I'll cut this segment off
No comments:
Post a Comment