September 12: The Native Speaker of Wakhi

My favorite branch of linguistics is historical-comparative and documentation. So when the linguistics department at Columbia was offering Language Documentation and Field Methods, I jumped on it. The first class was last night and it. was. FABULOUS. Man I feel really rusty and out of my linguistics training, but I loved it. The best part about the class is that it is going to be focused on actually going through the entire process to document a language that has very little documentation, and the professor has chosen Wakhi, an East Iranian language spoken in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and China.

With a native speaker in the class, he sat patiently, awkwardly, and uncomfortably as the professor explained the syllabus, structure of the class, history of Wakhi, etc. The course is 3 hours every Monday, so after all this and the introductions, the professor wanted to just dive right in and begin the process. Setting up the recording device, we needed to start by creating a Swadesh List to begin to identify the phonemes of the language. This basically means we simply ask the speaker for vocabulary in their language. Listing categories and transcribing the words into the IPA, we collected the words of animals, numbers, family terms, clothing, fruit and colors in Wakhi. After asking him to repeat the terms for "mother" and "green" or "say plum goat together" or "what is chicken brother?" to hear the contrast of sounds in Wakhi, everyone was giggling, the speaker was laughing, and even as we all debated or hmm'd and haw'd over sounds he would whisper "I think it sounds like 'g' to me!" he was all smiles trying to help.

I'm so looking forward to the class, but the experience with Nazeer touched me and made him my Favorite Person of that Monday.