Dettah

52 degrees fahrenheit

Zo….just over a week left to go here.  I’m rushing to finish everything up in a hurry.  There are 3 main things I need to finish up:

1) Dogrib CD’s;

2) Review Chipewyan materials;

3) Finish chapter 3 in Dogrib.

The CDs are actually just a single, short CD (about 19 minutes of recording) which Mary Rose and I recorded yesterday.  It has the alphabet on it with some simple words, and some short dialogues.  For the word lists, Mary Rose pronounces them in Dogrib and I’m the English voice.  Like you usually find if you buy something from the “Teach Yourself X” series–I tried to speak in a nice, deep newscaster voice.  For the Dogrib dialogues, though, Mary Rose is person A and I’m person B (or vice versa).  I definitely have an accent, or so Mary Rose says–she was laughing a lot when we played back the recording.  I notice that I have an extremely sing-song intonation when I speak Dogrib, I think I’m just hyper-exaggerating all my tones.  Betty also has a strong accent though I’m told that when she reads in front of the elders she gets tons of compliments, “oh, you speak Dogrib so well!”.  See, the way we talk is the way the old priests and missionaries used to talk, so speaking the language badly is actually prestigious.  Think, e.g., if the prestige dialect of English were represented by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For the Chipewyan materials, I’m going to make one last-ditch try to get a speaker of the Yellowknife dialect.  We tried another person who refused to work with us because he doesn’t want his voice recorded.  This whole thing is getting frustrating.  I have the whole thing done, it’s just I did it mostly with a person from Lutselk’e, so I’d like to go over it with a Yellowknife speaker and make sure I have the dialect right.

For more about dialect differences, see 4 1/2 minutes into this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD6Yv0rfkRA

“The chief doesn’t understand the dialect you’re using”—brilliant

Oh yeah, and then finally I have to finish Chapter 3 of my Dogrib stuff.  There’s a lot more I wanted to do but that’s what next year is for, eh?  Happily, the daylight has made me hyperactive, so I’ve been up since 3:30 and I’m fresh as a daisy.  So it’ll all get done, I think.