A large conservatory in a cute wee cottage in St. Pierre du Bois was the setting for our session on Tuesday (20 April). When we arrived and saw as many as six people scattered all over the conservatory we were delighted to have that many consultants to listen to, but worried at the same time. The main dilemma was: where on earth to place the microphone to catch all the voices? The glass coffee table in the middle of the room seemed to be the most reasonable location so I gave it a go. As some consultants were more verbally active than others I decided to point the mic at them. The quality of the recording was satisfactory until the tea and chocolate mini-rolls wrapped in plastic foil were served. Putting the milk jug and cups back on the table and unwrapping the mini-rolls messed up the recording. As the conservatory door was open we were all well supplied with fresh air. The occasional sounds of birds chirping in the garden seemed to give a nice background to the stories and picture descriptions we were getting from our chatty consultants. That was until a bee flew into the room! Have I mentioned that the main female speaker had such a high-pitched voice that the recording level had to be lowered every time she spoke? Yes, you need to be on the ball all the time!

 

At the session last year (2009), this great diver, 94-year old, spoke in Dgernesiais for 3 hours without wanting to stop. Julia told us about this and thought it would be the case for this year, apart from that we planned to have cider-making our topic.

 

10:00, the lady’s house has a lovely setting, with sofas surrounding the table, carpets on flour, and curtains over the window glasses. It should be perfect for recording, especially for our extremely sensitive recorder—Marantz 660.

 

However, when I was monitoring the recording, I still heard the sound of floating air cycling around. It’s very likely caused by the spare space behind the sofa. If they were our main consultants of a long term project, we might ask them to change the living room setting, or set up a recording corner. But the fact that mostly we only arrange a visit to each consultant makes this option non-existing. We could invite the consultants to our place, where we could set up a recording studio. But the fact that our consultants in this fieldtrip have an average age of 80, again, makes this option hardly possible.

 

After the initiating conversation covering the hometown of me and Henriette, how Dgernesiais speakers confronted ‘le belle français’ and English, and important events Julia knows about the consultants, she moved on to the main topic—cider-making. But that topic didn’t last long, because, firstly and quite obviously, it’s not the genuine interest of our consultants, and secondly, we’ve got no equipment needed for making cider, and thus all the description of cider-making is abbreviated to a framework of main steps. Nevertheless, the great diver enjoyed talking about diving, diving competitions, and how to make diving poses. He showed us a lot of black-and-white pictures, taken of different diving poses he did high above the pool.  

 

However, they asked words in Dgernesiais to each other from time to time, although you know it’s not that they were not fluent, because they were fluent, but they started having difficulty retrieving specific words for specific objects or motions. Similar situation happened when I had my first visit in this fieldtrip. We had too much expectation towards the consultant but he apparently spoke French-French much more frequently even when he was young.

 

Anyway.

 

Participating in this fieldtrip turned out to be really important to me, as important as a turning point for the potential style of my future fieldwork. So far, the types of fieldwork I experienced are 1^st, one on syntax, particularly following the Chomskian framework, 2^nd, an MA training course with focus on phonology, morphology, text transcription, and typology, and 3^rd, one on phonology especially on African-typed tones. But, these are more or less theory-oriented. In addition, we know the consultants are fluent speakers before the fieldwork, not to mention they are still young and have got the environment to speak the language. The orthography for these languages are developed and work well, thus we are more confident with determining phonemes for allophones. In a word, the previous sessions I had are almost all elicitation, and I’d got perfect or ideal setting for both recording and linguistic analysis.

 

This time, everything is more or less the opposite. First, the fact that Dgernesiais has a fairly close relation with French, more precisely, Norman French, makes the speakers sometimes confused; we could say in such a situation of close contact, we shouldn’t expect a clear-cut boundary there. Whereas the previous target language are all main variant, the one with the biggest population, of one language. Second, having topic-prominent conversation is the main feature of our work. That’s partially because the one, who leads the sessions, speaks this language and does it in all sessions, which makes it unique. And I, personally, give a credit to Julia, spending years learning this language, even if it’s on-and-off type of learning. I will make an effort to make it, for my fieldwork. Third, to try out Frog Story, play mobile, maps, landscape pictures, and real photos shown by consultants, gives us new experiences of getting vocabulary from one language as well as skills for eliciting conversational context through topics consultants are interested in. Forth, knowing little about this language before coming to the field, due to a lack of accessible documentation, and reliable description, slowed down the transcription work. But at the meantime, seeing space of new ideas for describing this language is exiting. Fifth, confronting the fact that we couldn’t know the fluency of the consultants until we met them and thus had to prepare all kinds of elicit materials to suit different needs is a new challenge, which makes me more flexible-minded with fieldwork.

 

In sum, I love it.

20 April 2010—part one, Island FM by Eight

 

Elwira’s alarm officially woke me up at 7 o’clock, although I’d been turning right-&-leftwards in my bed since 06:00. Went downstairs, thinking about whether my dear roommate, still in bed, would get up in time to record my radio depute in Guernsey, as I requested the night before. The flavour of goat milk gave me an initiating nock, kind of.

 

07:29, early morning is incredibly busy in this island, compared with the tranquil afternoons and evenings we had on the way to the old Dgernesiais speakers’ places.

 

08:05, arriving at the studio of Island FM, I thought: this is a real local radio station which I’d never had the opportunity to go to if stayed in Taiwan.

 

8:10, standing in front of the shotgun, I felt my heart beating speeded up, second by second. Then, all of a sudden, the song stop, the DJ introduced Dr. Julia Sallabank, the revisiting guest mentioned during our way to the radio station at 07:47, which made us burst into laugh. She gave a very quick overview of the documentation project. And it went on to my turn. But, unexpectedly, he asked me about the language situation in Taiwan…(G, I wanted to talk about Dgernesiais!) Second question: how does Dgernesiais sound to you? Okay, apparently the intonation pattern is different from the French-French and English. (What an answer, no more than saying nothing!) Then it was Ali; perfect answers to 3 questions about the field trip and documentation project. Anyway, a 3-minute long interview painted everybody’s face with a surprising colour.  

 

After 8:20, sitting in a Café with Jan, ‘Both Elwira and I think you are the person to decide which orthography to use’, said I. A temporary conclusion for this trip of documentation, to the language officer of Guernsey.

Yesterday we interviewed a former Guernsey fisherman for the second time, and he showed us this scary-looking implement which was cast into the water and dragged along the bottom to catch certain types of fish (this was explained au Dgernesiais, so I'll have to ask Julia for the precise details). We took our consultant to meet another Dgernesiais speaker who has an old boat in his backyard, and I recorded the two of them having a lengthy discussion about the different parts of it, while Katie contorted herself around various obstacles to capture on video the relevant bits of boat. It was a really great documentation session because the two men, not having met before, had all kinds of things to discuss and the conversation was genuine, natural, and hopefully full of interesting vocabulary. 

A few days ago me, Yun-Hsing, Elwira and Sim met a group of old men and a woman at the sports centre. The idea was to get them talking to each other in order for them to become comfortable and fluent when speaking Dgernesiais. And they really did! Most of the two hours were spent telling jokes which we, of course, didn't understand much of, but it was still great fun to see them talking and laughing. With the help of playmobile we managed to get som colour terms, and when Sim asked about their plans for the future there were some future tenses being used! In all, it was a really nice couple of hours spent in the sports centre!

Posted by Henriette Matz

A flying visit to BBC Guernsey on Friday to record an interview about the documentation project. Katie, Sim, Jan and Julia stepped up to the microphone - the results will hopefully be broadcast later this week. 

Chik jour nous avai faire!! (I'm not actually sure if this is how to say "What a day we had," but, in keeping with the experimental spirit of our afternoon, I'm giving it a shot in the hopes that Jan will comment on our blog and give me some feedback...)

Today, Elwira and I spent a lovely afternoon learning to make gache melee (gaʃ melai)--a delicious traditional Guernsey apple cake--with Stella Le Tissier and her husband, Cliff. Although I've been hoping to work with a Dgernesiais speaker willing to drag me into the kitchen, get their hands dirty, and teach me how to make some Guernsey dishes, none of us were sure if it would fall into place. Luckily, Jan phoned up Mrs. Le Tissier and, after just a tiny hint from him that I'd be interested in learning to make gache melee, a very boisterous, giggling Stella whisked Elwira and I away to the kitchen!
The recipe requires the mixture of apples and flour to rest for 3 hours before preparing the batter, then another 3 hours to bake in a low-temperature oven until the apples & sugar caramelize into a mouthwateringly moist dessert with a texture reminiscent of sticky toffee pudding!! Because the prep time is so long, Stella and I only  peeled and cut up the apples, then mixed them with a pound of flour, setting them aside so Elwira and I could take it with us to finish at our flat. After the prep work was done, Stella explained the rest of the steps that we'd need to follow to finish making the gache. Since all of this took place au Dgernesiais, it was certainly an adventure in communication--both Julia and Jan had left by this point, so we were on our own to figure out what was being said. Luckily, Stella was quite good at making sure we understood everything!!
Once Stella made sure we knew how to carry on with the gache once we got back to our flat, we moved back into the sitting room for some tea and homemade sweet cake with she and Cliff. We found out that they rarely speak English when they're at home, just Dgernesiais. Although they've been married (and speaking to each other in Dgernesiais, of course) for 66 years now, their accents are different because they were raised in different parts of the island. Also, unlike some of the other speakers we've met with, it was quite apparent that their English accents were both heavily influenced by Dgernesiais.
While we finished out tea, they told us about their wedding day (March 16, 1944--during World War II--here in Guernsey), their family, and asked us about our countries (America and Poland), our families, what we're studying, and our impressions of Guernsey. All in all, it was an afternoon that more than exceeded our expectations, exercised our fledgling Dgernesiais wings, and certainly expanded our waistlines a bit!! :-D

A la pershoin!

Posted by Katie Crawley

Yesterday afternoon Sim, Julia and I visited an old married couple who live in a beautifully wind-free lane. We made around 2 hours of audio recordings, mostly conversation between the three Dgernesiais speakers, while Sim and I smiled and nodded vaguely from behind the microphone... We also tried elicitation using visual stimuli, which was great to have a chance to try, having heard about it all year. Julia introduced the 'frog story' as an often used tool among linguists, and after some initial scepticism from one of the speakers, it actually worked really well. Our female speaker entered into the spirit of it and described the whereabouts of the frog, the dog and the boy with great enthusiasm, and unexpectedly got through the whole book without stopping.

After more conversation, we got out another tool we'd brought with us - a box of playmobil figures. I created as many scenarios as the plastic pram, man, cats, bowl, girl and boy would allow, and although I felt completely ridiculous, our speaker was a great sport with this too, giving a running commentary on the activities of the different coloured cats.

Towards the end of the session, Sim brought out some origami. The idea was to elicit imperatives by giving one speaker the instructions and asking them to tell the other how to make the model, which in this case was a pelican. Having ascertained that one of our speakers still had nimble fingers (she'd been knitting before we arrived), we asked her husband to have a look at the instructions and explain to his wife how to fold the paper. This was very new for both of them, and although we did end up with some sort of paper duck, we all had to get involved and we probably didn't elicit a single imperative. Lots of conversation between our two speakers, though, which was great. And a paper duck, of course.

A couple of difficulties struck me: it's natural to repeat a phrase when a speaker directs it at you, a learner, but this should probably be avoided for the sake of the recording. Second, with elderly people, there's no way you're going to start moving their furniture around to maximise the quality of your recording, so in this case the microphone could only go on the floor between them, which wasn't ideal.

When we get a break between visiting all these interesting Guernsey French speakers, we'll finally start transcribing...

Posted by Alice