1 Putting oral narratives into writing – experiences from a language documentation project in Bouganville, Papua New Guinea Ulrike Mosel, University of Kiel
[email protected] August 2008 1. The setting: spoken in North-West Bougainville, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guina, ca. 6000 speakers Genetic classification: Austronesian, Oceanic, Northwest Solomonic Nehan/North Bougainville (Ross 1988) Typology: nom./acc- language, verb-second language head-marking (Mosel with Thiesen 2007) Contact languages: Tok Pisin English Teop Literature Hymn book (printed in the 50’s, not available) primers (printed in the 80’s not available) Magum, E.H. et al. 2007 Amaa Vaahutate vaa Teapu (Teop Legends) 1 The Teop Language Corpus 1.1 The problem The main goal of language documentation is to record natural everyday discourse. Producing edited versions of indigenous oral narratives means: imposing the Western normative literate tradition on indigenous oral cultures, creating a new European style written genre (Foley 2003, Woodbury 2003). But if speakers of endangered languages want their legends be recorded and edited for the production of reading materials, who would deny such a request and argue that unwritten languages must be kept unwritten? 2 1.2 Previous research on written and spoken varieties of European languages Table 1: Spontaneous speech vs. written language Spontaneous speech Writing and editing limited planning ahead planning of constructions linear construction under real-time pressure reshaping of constructions without traces the 'add-on' strategy small quantity of information per phrase/clause (low lexical denisity) parataxis, more coordination, less subordination smaller range of vocabulary (Miller & Fernandez-Vest 2006) 1.3 Recommendations for the editors Do not imitate the style of the English stories.