How to answer linguistic questions Is it possible to answer linguistic questions without having studies linguistics? Yes, and it’s actually not that hard at all. The trick is to recognise what the core problem is and then to try to solve that problem. So you do not need to understand and answer all of a question, but only its most important part. In that way, you can help the glossers working in Leipzig a great deal without having studied linguistics. Below are some areas where questions may be asked and suggestions how to answer them. Don’t worry if some of the captions sound a bit complicating - there’s an easy explanation and an example for every area. 1 Summary This section provides a very brief summary of what is said below: how to answer each question type. You can use it as a reference after you have read through the detailed part. question type spelling/typos answer yes/no + correct spelling translation yes/no + correct translation lexical semantics translation or description alternatives yes/no glosses stem of the word example “Is Chhintag spelt correctly?” “No. It should be chintaŋ.” “Is We have eaten the right translation for aciaŋsace?” “No, aciaŋsace means ‘You have eaten.’” “What does sontoloŋ mean?” “Orange.” “Is ŋassa an alternative of nassa?” - “Yes. Older people use it.” “How to gloss keccanco?” “The principal parts are keiʔma, kede, and the meaning is ‘break’.” 2 Spelling and typos Sometimes transcribers make mistakes. They can be of two types: • The transcriber does not know how to spell a certain word according to the CPDP/CLRP conventions. For instance, khaiʔma ‘जान’ is sometimes spelt khai/ma or khaima, or cakhaŋ ‘ ढडो’ is spelt cakhang or chakhaŋ. These are called spelling mistakes. • The transcriber does know how to spell a word but doesn’t hit the right key on his keyboard. For instance, khaiʔma could be spelt jhaiʔma (because the key J is next to K on English keyboards), or cakhaŋ could be spelt xakhan. These are called typos. 1 Spelling mistakes and typos often confuse our glossers. For instance, if they see something like chakhang, how can they be 100% sure that this is cakhaŋ and not a different word? For instance, you probably know the English word wine, which is a kind of alcoholic drink made from grapes (अ गर). Now you see a new word vine. How do you know whether this is just a mistake or a different word? In fact, this is a different word it means the plant ‘अ गर’, not the drink! This is how our glossers feel when they see a word which somehow looks like one they already know, and this is why they will often ask you “Is this word spelt correctly?” or “Is there a typo in this record?”. The answer is simply “yes” or “no”. If the answer is “yes” - so there is a transcriber mistake - please also add the correct spelling. If you feel insecure yourself ask one of your colleagues. Every member of the CLRP team should know the transcription conventions, so no excuses here! 3 Translations Sometimes translators make mistakes, too. There are several cases where this can happen. Take a look at the following examples. • Chintang text: anne saıl̃ i • Nepali translation: ‘ ददी सा हली’ • English translation: ‘Sister, Maili.’ The Nepali translation is correct. But the English translator changed the S for an M, so ‘Saili’ became ‘Maili’. • Chintang text: hanci wa • Nepali translation: ‘ तमीह को कखरा’ • English translation: ‘Your dog.’ Again, the Nepali translation is correct. However, the translator misread कखरा as ककर (they do not look that similar, but they sound very similar). So the hen became a dog. • Chintang text: baiʔ bhitta lɨktumhẽ • Nepali translation: ‘यहा िभ ामा छ ा यौ ।’ • English translation: ‘You put t here at the wall.’ This is again a little different. The Nepali translation is not wrong, but there is a small spelling mistake: because it’s ‘we’ it should have been छ ा य , but the translator spelt it छ ा यौ, which looks like ‘you’. This is why the English translator uses ‘you’, too, although it’s clearly ‘we’ in the Chintang text! • Chintang text: joni khuma kha tokno • Nepali translation: ‘जोनी बो पाउछ ।’ • English translation: ‘Anyone may talk now.’ Here the Nepali translation is wrong, too - khuma does not mean बो न but बो न (maybe the translator just switched ल and क). Finally, there are cases like this: 2 • Chintang text: sace be • Nepali translation: ‘कसको मा ?’ • English translation: ‘Whose mother?’ The Nepali translation is fine, but it is what linguists call ambiguous. This means that it has two different meanings. In Chintang, they would be expressed as sacebe ‘at whose place’ or as saiʔko umma ‘whose mother’, but in Nepali they are both कसको मा (in fact, sacebe would more usually be spelt कसकोमा without spaces). The English translator did not look at the Chintang text but only at Nepali - hence the mistake. What does that mean for you? Glossers will often ask you whether some translation is appropriate. As you have seen, these questions are not about perfect English - they are about very basic issues, such as ‘Is the sentence about a dog or about a hen?’ or ‘Is the speaker about you or about us?’. So when you are asked such a question, don’t worry about English grammar. Just think about the content of the Chintang sentence and ask yourself whether the translations correspond to it or not. Your answer should be “yes” or “no”. If it is “no” - so if there is a mistake in the translation - please add where the mistake is (Nepali, English, or both) and how it can be corrected. Again, it is not important that your correction is in perfect Nepali/English, but it should convey the right meaning. 4 Lexical semantics Right now there are about 6,000 words in our dictionary. About 2,500 of them are pure Chintang. This may sound like a lot, but it is not - Chintang has many more words than that! That means that our glossers often discover new words. And since they are not speakers of Chintang, they have no idea what they mean. This area is much more important than all the others because you are the only ones who can help to answer these questions! Other, more experienced glossers or PhD students may know whether the translation is right, whether there are spelling mistakes and so on, but they will never know the meaning of a word they haven’t seen yet before. So do take questions about words seriously. If you are asked something like “What does hoŋgi mean?”, your answer should include: • the Nepali meaning of the word: क मा • the English meaning of the word. If you do not know the word or if there is no word - as in this example - describe the meaning. For instance, you could say ‘Hoŋgi is a dish made of rotten soybeans’. • If the word is particularly hard to understand for outsiders, please provide an example as well. For instance, there are many words like tururuwa which we call ideophones. It is hard to explain what tururuwa means - ‘continuously’ does not say it all. But if you add an example like bago dhara tururuwa thano ‘this tap drops without stopping’ the meaning becomes much clearer. 3 5 Alternatives Some words take different forms depending on who says them - an old or a young guy, a man or a woman, a speaker from Mulgaũ or one from Sambugaũ. For instance, the word for ‘ladder’ (भ याङ) has the following forms in our dictionary: thakiloŋ, thakiʔloŋ, thakɨʔloŋ, thakilo, thattikolok, thaklok. They look quite different, but they all mean the same. But if our glossers find such new forms they don’t know that. They might find thaklok and think it’s a new word - maybe a special kind of ladder, or something completely different. So they will ask you things like “Is thaklok an alternative/variant of thakiloŋ?”. This basically means, ‘Does thaklok mean the same as thakiloŋ?’. If it does, say “yes”. If it does not, say “no” and add what is different about it. You can do this with a description or simply by providing the best Nepali/English translations. Sometimes a word is a mistake rather than an alternative. For instance, a small child might say thagi instead of thakiloŋ, or a drunk man might say thakhoŋ. In such cases, say what the speaker meant and add that this pronunciation is a mistake. Sometimes you might want to add something. For instance, nisa and nicha mean the same (भाइ). But nicha is rather used in Sambugaũ. If you know things like this, tell us. It is valuable information for the dictionary. 6 Glosses What do the glossers in Leipzig actually do when they gloss? - When normal people ask “What does this word mean?” they want a translation or a good description. For instance, if a Chetri guy who doesn’t speak Chintang asks you, आलो डा साखा भ को हो ? he will be content if you tell him (तपाइ) आउन भो ?. But linguists are different. The do not only want to know what the whole word means, they also want to know what its parts mean. For instance, alondaŋsakha has many parts which can be cut off: a- is always used when talking of a second person (‘you’), as in akhaʔno, anenota, aimsandi. -ŋs is used in a perfective sense, similar to English ‘have done’, as in khadaŋsehẽ, nedoŋse, aimsaŋse. Cutting up words and analysing the meanings of their parts is the job of the glossers, not yours. So don’t worry when they ask you questions like “How to gloss this form?”. You do not need to do their job for them. All you need to do is to give them a little help, and for that you don’t have to have studied linguistics. How to do this? In every word - however long it may be - there is one part which carries most of the meaning. This part is called the stem. If you point out the stem and its meaning to the glosser you will help her or him a great deal. Below are some examples that will hopefully make you understand how to name stems. On the left side you see long word forms, on the right side you see how to name the stem. 4 word khimce ukhimbeʔ hanako akkocenɨŋ tie tiaŋse tialiaŋsago alonde loıỹ a umailoıỹ oktaŋse amamaitatupyoktaŋse stem khim khim hana akka tama tama tama loım ̃ a loım ̃ a loım ̃ a tupma meaning ‘house’ ‘house’ ‘you’ ‘I’ ‘come’ ‘come’ ‘come’ ‘appear’ ‘appear’ ‘appear’ ‘understand’ If the word is a verb (most complicated words are) you should actually provide two forms called principal parts, like this: • • • • • • numma, numde ‘do’ cama, cie ‘eat’ tupma, tube ‘meet’ tupma, tupte ‘understand’ phaiʔma, phade ‘exchange’ phama, phade ‘help’ The reason why we need two forms is that some words look similar in either form. For instance, ‘meet’ and ‘understand’ are both tupma in the first form. But ‘she met him’ is tube, whereas ‘he understood it’ is tupte. Other words look similar in the second form (e.g. ‘exchange’ and ‘help’) but not in the first: ‘to exchange’ is phaiʔma, but ‘to help’ is phama. So if it’s a verb, always provide these two forms. Maybe sometimes glossers will ask you about smaller parts of words, so not ‘How to gloss this word?’ but ‘How to gloss this part?’. For instance, instead of “How to gloss utiaŋsace?” they might ask “How to gloss ce?” (the last part of the word). If you know the answer, give it. But if you don’t, never mind. Answering questions like this is actually part of linguist’s job, so they should be able to give the answer. 7 In case you don’t know Nobody knows the answer to everything. Not even native speakers know everything about their language. This is not a problem at all. So if you do not know an answer, say “I don’t know”. If you don’t understand a question, say “What do you mean by that question?”. That’s all fine. What you should not do is to simply ignore questions. The reason is this: if you leave a blank space behind a question, we can’t tell whether you overlooked it or whether you really didn’t know. So in the latter case, always let us know that you don’t know the answer. 5