Tous les articles par Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

Séminaire doctoral “Science ouverte : enjeux et méthodes”

Un groupe de collègues du campus CNRS de Villejuif a entrepris d’organiser un séminaire doctoral “Science ouverte : enjeux et méthodes”. La page du séminaire sur le site de la Sorbonne Nouvelle expose la problématique et présente le programme des séances. Les billets de ce Carnet de recherche vont permettre de compléter ces informations par des liens vers diverses ressources, et d’accueillir les réflexions des uns et des autres.

Programme des séances

Affiche avec liens vers les captations vidéos sur CanalU,

Ressources liées aux interventions

En préparation de l’exposé de Lionel Maurel, une lecture incontournable : le Carnet de recherche S.I.Lex, dont la fréquentation régulière est vivement recommandée. On pourra débuter la lecture ici, par exemple (choix tout subjectif!)

Bibliographie et autres ressources

Le groupe Zotero “HAL, Open Access, Communs” joue le rôle de répertoire bibliographique pour le séminaire. Le groupe est semi-public : tout le monde peut lire mais tout le monde ne peut pas contribuer. Cette configuration autorise à y partager des fichiers. Si vous souhaitez contribuer, vous pouvez écrire aux organisateurs pour demander l’accès complet. 

Le Comité pour la Science Ouverte. (Si leur site ne répondait pas, resterait leur compte Twitter.)

DoRANum, une plateforme d’auto-formation en ligne sur la gestion et la partage des données de la recherche. (Egalement sur Twitter.) Un webinaire aura lieu le jeudi 24 septembre 2020, de 10h30 à 11h30. Pour participer à ce webinaire, on peut s’inscrire via ce lien

Le manuel collaboratif de formation à la Science Ouverte de Foster Open Science, The Open Science Training Handbook. 

Historique

En mars 2018, le campus CNRS de Villejuif accueillait une matinée de réflexion et sensibilisation organisée par Julie Giovacchini et Elodie Chacon sur le thème Science ouverte et libres savoirs : l’Open Access , un défi scientifique et politique. Il s’agissait notamment de :
> comprendre la Loi pour une République numérique
> diffuser ses publications
> identifier les prédateurs
> choisir ses outils 
Etaient notamment invités Pierre-Carl Langlais (chercheur en sciences de l’information et de la communication, GRIPIC) et Armelle Thomas (chargée de la promotion et l’information sur l’Information Scientifique et Technique, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Dijon).

A la suite de cet événement, un groupe s’est constitué autour de Julie Giovacchini, Raphaëlle Chossenot et Jean-Baptiste Maistre. Des échanges auxquels ont participé Anne Bélingard, Karine Gay, Agathe Marion, Isabelle Michel, Nathalie Olivier, Duna Troiani, Sophie Vassilaki, Bernard Weiss, Houcin Zerroug… ont abouti à la formulation d’un projet de séminaire, qui a été accrédité par la Sorbonne Nouvelle et par l’INALCO.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Licences Creative Commons et documentation des langues en danger : d’une recherche de solutions simples à une exigence de Science Ouverte

(Billet en français – This post is only available in French)

A la demande de Danièle Bourcier, introductrice des licences CreativeCommons en France, j’ai rédigé un court texte au sujet de l’emploi de ces licences dans l’entreprise de documentation des langues en danger qui constitue, depuis sa fondation en 1976, un axe central des activités du laboratoire LACITO (Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale).

La Collection Pangloss rassemble des documents multimédia de langues « rares », principalement à tradition orale (sans écriture). Elle est l’une des collections hébergées par l’archive ouverte CoCoON (Collection de Corpus Oraux Numériques). Depuis ses débuts dans les années 1990, la Collection Pangloss a suivi le principe qu’on résume aujourd’hui par la préconisation d’un accès aux données aussi large qu’il est possible, aussi restreint qu’il est nécessaire. Les données primaires et leurs annotations sont consultables en ligne, et téléchargeables en intégralité. Les licences Creative Commons ont été recommandées aux déposants dès leur diffusion dans les premières années de ce siècle, et demeurent (en 2020) les seules licences qui fassent l’objet d’une présentation sur le site internet de l’archive ouverte CoCoON. C’est donc tout naturellement que les déposants se trouvent orientés vers ces licences.

Les déposants adoptent volontiers les licences Creative Commons parce qu’elles promettent des solutions simples pour éviter les problèmes juridiques. Si on ne sait trop où porter son choix parmi les diverses déclinaisons de ces solutions clefs en main, on n’a qu’à choisir une licence qui offre le rempart le plus solide possible contre des usages indésirables : interdire l’utilisation commerciale, en mode NC, et la modification, en mode ND. On est à l’abri des soucis, et on a l’esprit tranquille pour se concentrer sur ce qui compte vraiment : produire nos publications.

Par quel ébranlement accède-t-on, dans un second temps, à une autre vision des choses ? À l’occasion d’une invitation à une réunion du chapitre français de Creative Commons ? D’une discussion avec un.e passionné.e du libre accès qui travaille à la bibliothèque universitaire, ou avec un.e collègue qui vous oriente vers la liste internet [accesouvert] ? Ou encore en regardant une vidéo de Calimaq, qui vous amène à découvrir la Quadrature du Net, et des livres passionnants (Hess & Ostrom 2007; Snowden 2019) ? Dès lors, en même temps qu’on découvre que les licences Creative Commons ne sont pas une réponse nécessaire et suffisante à toutes les questions juridiques que posent la collecte, l’archivage, la diffusion et l’exploitation de données linguistiques, on mesure leur rôle de porte d’entrée vers le monde des Communs – communs sylvestres aussi bien que communs de la connaissance. On est dès lors prêt à entendre des messages comme celui que porte une Journée d’étude « Diffuser les données numériques en SHS : le droit et l’éthique comme alliés ». Dans une époque où des gouvernements « décomplexés » orchestrent l’étiolement de l’enseignement et de la recherche (faible investissement dans la recherche publique, modalités déséquilibrées de répartition des crédits au détriment du financement de base à l’activité scientifique, soutien insuffisant aux collectifs de recherche, diminution continue de l’emploi scientifique, dégradation des conditions de travail), l’engagement pour la Science ouverte en vient peu à peu à se confondre avec le beau programme d’un « retour aux sources de l’ethos de la science ». Une source où puiser « la force qui nous manque » (Joly 2007), qui est celle du collectif.

Références citées : 

Hess, Charlotte & Elinor Ostrom. 2007. Understanding knowledge as a commons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Joly, Eva. 2007. La Force qui nous manque. Les Arènes.

Snowden, Edward. 2019. Permanent record. Macmillan.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Scientific journals need to make access to research data a prerequisite for reviewing

Data sets on which our publications are based need to be made available, for obvious reasons of verifiability, replicability, and cumulative progress in research. This point is made eloquently in many publications. For instance:

“Openness is one of the central values of science. Open scientific practices such as sharing data, materials and analysis scripts alongside published articles have many benefits, including easier replication and extension studies, increased availability of data for theory-building and meta-analysis, and increased possibility of review and collaboration even after a paper has been published. Although modern information technology makes sharing easier than ever before, uptake of open practices has been slow.” 

(Morey, Richard D., Christopher D. Chambers, Peter J. Etchells, Christine R. Harris, Rink Hoekstra, Daniël Lakens, Stephan Lewandowsky, et al. 2016. The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative: incentivizing open research practices through peer reviewRoyal Society Open Science 3(1).)

Since I first wrote down my fundamental beliefs on this topic back in 2002, the field (linguistics, and specifically, phonetics) has not changed as it should have: disposable data are still the norm. This post takes the example of three small data sets that I deposited this year (data associated to publications from the early 2000s) to illustrate the current situation of lack of support for the conservation of research data. The conclusion is that changes to the mainstream model of publication and evaluation should be made now: scientific journals need to make access to research data a prerequisite for publication. And for these changes to happen, we need to take action. 

1. Data from my first phonetics paper

My first phonetics paper was published in 2004:  “Final consonants and glottalization: new perspectives from Hanoi Vietnamese”. Phonetica 61(2–3). 119–146. It is based on audio and electroglottographic recordings. At the time, neither the reviewers nor the editor asked for access to the research data. Various pieces of software carry out citation counts to estimate ‘impact’ (this paper was cited 1 time in PubMed, 33 times in Web of Science, 120 times in Google Scholar, etc.) and analyze ‘traffic’ (how many times the PDF was downloaded, when, by whom, etc.). On the other hand, even though the corresponding data (multimedia recordings) have been online for more than a decade, no tool that I know of ever looked for connections between the study and the data (and software) on which it is based.

The recordings were first made available online in 2005/2006 through a “Databases” project at Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle that aimed to make linguists’ data available online in good order, as multimedia files accompanied by metadata and logically structured transcriptions and annotations. The metadata (here) are sufficiently clear that a web crawler could identify the language of the recordings as Vietnamese: the language is encoded in the metadata as x-sil-VIE, and while this code is not very widely used, a key to the language codes used in the database is available (here), clarifying that this is a code from the Summer Institute of Linguistics’ Ethnologue database and that it refers to Vietnamese. The deposit is also associated with a PDF description (here) that is not hard to ‘mine’ for information, not to mention that high-tech tools could conduct automatic language recognition from the audio files. 
Software built by Google Scholar engineers is pretty good at identifying references despite the bewildering diversity of citation formats. Similar results could be attained in locating data sets: allowing for multifaceted search across databases, tracking data set usage, and so on. Linking data, publications and software into an Open Science environment is not a technical impossibility: the reason why it is not happening is that Open Science is clearly not a priority of the big players (the commercial publishers and service providers). The assessment of research output (for finding a job in a research institution and keeping it) is based on publications, with little if any recognition of the time spent on the empirical basis of science. And paradoxical as it may seem, the evaluation of a submitted manuscript in phonetics/phonology is often conducted without even a sample of the data on which the results, discussion and conclusions are based.

This year, the data set of my 2004 study was made available in the Pangloss Collection, with time-aligned transcripts and translations. These data not only constitute an indispensible complement to the research article: they also have potential for an open-ended list of uses. (The materials are currently at bottom of list here.) But for want of institutional recognition and support, such efforts for making data available along with publications remain an uphill journey. 

2. Sample data from a 2003 book chapter

In 2003, I contributed a chapter to a book about focus marking:

“Focus et tons lexicaux: de la variété des paramètres prosodiques”. In A. Lacheret-Dujour & J. François (eds.), Fonction et moyens d’expression de la focalisation à travers les langues (Mémoires de La Société de Linguistique de Paris, nouvelle série, tome XIII), 13–47. Louvain: Peeters.

This was my first contribution to a book and I was keen to make a good job of it. In view of the relevance of speech prosody to focus marking, I suggested to the editors to have multimedia materials published alongside the printed volume. I am delighted to report that they readily agreed to this, and not a few of the contributors to the volume chose to make audio and video recordings available on a CD-ROM. The printed volume, with accompanying CD-ROM, is available from a dozen of university libraries in the (French) network of academic libraries, SUDOC. The catalogue entry mentions the CD-ROM, but cannot go into any detail on its contents, which limits possibilities for locating these data samples.

When I deposited the preprint version of my chapter in a preprint archive about four years later, I forgot to upload the supplementary files. I have now done so, and the audio files (WAV files) are now available as supplementary files associated to the publication (here), also with a PDF providing explanations about these data. I feel good about doing so, but it is, again, a lonely journey. I frequently get automated e-mail asking me to confirm authorship of a paper, to review my list of publications in a database (there are quite a number of such databases), but I never got e-mail asking for this kind of assistance (‘academic crowd-sourcing’) in relation to data or software. This is because, as recapitulated above, the importance of primary data is oddly underestimated in the current editorial environment (‘publication ecosystem’?) in linguistics.

3. Sample data from a 2003 conference presentation

In the same year that I wrote my first book chapter (in French), I wrote a paper (in English) for a conference about speech prosody. ‘Deaf and dumb’ papers about prosody sound like a strange paradox, so I asked the organizers whether they would find it useful to have multimedia files accompanying the research papers. Like the editors of the 2003 volume published by the Société de Linguistique de Paris, the editors of the “Prosodic Interfaces” conference (Amina Mettouchi and Gaëlle Ferré) found the idea relevant and forward-looking. Participants were encouraged to submit audio files for inclusion on the CD-ROM containing the conference proceedings. These files are still accessible (as of 2018), here. This year, I added the files associated to my conference paper to the deposit in the preprint archive, here. When doing so, I felt proud about these excerpts, which (in my perfectly objective opinion as data collector and author of the paper!) add a lot to the publication. Cited examples can be listened to, and I also included audio recordings of explanations provided in Naxi (the target language) by language consultants expressing their intuitions about subtle stylistic nuances associated with two variants of an utterance (one with a full form and the other with a reduced form). This allowed a colleague who is a native speaker of Naxi to spot a beautiful example of syllable reduction (which I had not noticed) inside the very sentence in which the consultant described processes of syllable reduction. This lovely case of mise en abyme constitutes a further piece of evidence that syllable reduction processes are pervasive in the Naxi language.

But contrary to what I expected, such initiatives failed to gain much traction among linguists. Despite possibilities for embedding sound files of cited examples into PDFs (as exemplified in this paper), it has not yet become common practice to offer at least a sample of data alongside scientific papers. 

Conclusion

“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching”, as the saying goes: looking it up, I realize that it’s from none less than Mahatma Gandhi. But it’s now over 20 years since I made documentation and conservation of spoken language data one of my lifelong priorities, and judging from my experience, making small steps on one’s own will not get us where we want (any more than sporadic, individual attempts at consuming less resources and creating less pollution can avert environmental disaster). To advance towards open science, we do not only need to get the principles right and put them to good practice. We also need to do advocacy and change the rules.

The field needs to take a turn towards Open Science, and this is not going to happen without us investing some of our time into it: taking a strong stand, and voicing concerns that are key to our discipline’s future, every time that we have opportunities to speak out as authors, as members of editorial teams, as evaluators, and so on. If scientific journals make access to research data a prerequisite for reviewing (as they should really have started to do two decades ago), also insisting on open access to the data (with an embargo of several years or even decades where necessary), practices will change, and the Open Data Excuse Bingo will be a thing of the past.

Open Data Excuse Bingo. (Click here for source)

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Release of Persephone (/pərˈsɛfəni/), an open-source automatic phoneme transcription tool

This is a follow-up on a previous post about experiments using automatic transcription for Yongning Na. It’s been an eventful and exciting time!

Oliver Adams has now released his automatic phoneme transcription tool. It’s all open-source code. Here is the address: https://github.com/oadams/persephone

The transcription tool is named Persephone (/pərˈsɛfəni/), after the goddess who was abducted by Hades and must spend one half of each year in the Underworld. Which of linguistics or computer science is Hell, and which the joyful world of Spring and light? For each it’s the other, of course. The name Persephone is intended as a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the sense of estrangement and uncanniness that one can occasionally feel in interdisciplinary collaboration. Interdisciplinary work has difficulties and rewards of its own – like fieldwork, in a way, but to some fieldworkers the difficulties can be perceived as the last straw, coming on top of a heavy work load. It is clear that linguists engaged in language documentation cannot spend half their lives learning about language processing, any more than computer scientists would want to spend half their lives reading books of linguistics. But linguists can be convinced to spend… maybe one fifth of their time playing with software and understanding how state-of-the-art tools work. “Digital Humanities drive the scholarly tradition towards a more uniform approach or an approach where the divide between two cultures – humanities on the one side, and computing on the other – is no longer constructive”, as a report of the Research Data Alliance puts it.

There is a presentation and user guide written by Oliver on the project homepage on GitHub. A paper (LREC 2018) is available here.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Speech recognition for newly documented languages: highly encouraging tests using automatically generated phonemic transcription of Yongning Na audio recordings

Automatic speech recognition tools have strong potential for facilitating language documentation. This blog note reports on highly encouraging tests using automatic transcription in the documentation of Yongning Na, a Sino-Tibetan language of Southwest China. After twenty months of fieldwork (spread over twelve years, from 2006 to 2017), 14 hours of speech had been recorded, of which 5.5 hours were transcribed (200 minutes of narratives and 130 minutes of morphotonology elicitation sessions). Oliver Adams, the author of Persephone, an open-source software tool for developing multilingual acoustic models, volunteered to experiment with these data. He trained a single-speaker automatic speech transcription tool over the transcribed materials and applied it to untranscribed audio files. The error rate is low: on the order of 17% of errors in phoneme identification. This makes the automatic transcriptions useful as a canvas for the linguist, who corrects mistakes and produces the translation in collaboration with language consultants.

Today I am posting my initial report to Oliver Adams, written in the field in Yunnan, on May 12th, 2017. I consider this date as a landmark in my work documenting Yongning Na! This document remained confidential until today because its online availability would have de-anonymized a submission that was under double-blind review for a workshop in Australia (the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop, Dec. 6-8, 2017). This paper, which presents Oliver’s work to an audience of language technology specialists, is now available here.
Continuer la lecture de Speech recognition for newly documented languages: highly encouraging tests using automatically generated phonemic transcription of Yongning Na audio recordings

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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“Tone in Yongning Na” now published!

Book cover: Tone in Yongning Na

The volume Tone in Yongning Na is now published.

It is open-access: the book is freely available as a PDF from the publisher’s website.

It is open-source: the LaTeX code is freely available on GitHub (from the same page as the PDF).

Last but not least, the analyses are based on data hosted in an open archive (the Pangloss Collection) that allows free download of original sound files and transcriptions (no login required).

I think I should now let the book speak for itself 🙂 and thank once again the many colleagues who helped all along the way.

One of the aims of this blog post is to spread the word about the publishing house. Publishing a book at Language Science Press was a sparkling experience all along. If you do not know about Language Science Press yet, I strongly encourage you to read the description of the “Motivation”, “Setup” and “Vision” of this wonderfully forward-looking publisher.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Project completed! Looking back at the past 48 months, and forward to online grammars and more connected data

The completion date of the HimalCo project (2013-2016) is the day after tomorrow: December 31st, 2016. It’s a good time to look back at the past 48 months, and forward to more and more connected data: online grammars with one-click links to data, and other improvements for the greater benefit of linguistic research.

The aim of this project was to build several types of corpora (traditional stories and dictionaries) for unwritten and endangered Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Nepal and in Tibetan areas of China (Khaling, Thulung, Koyi, Japhug, Zbu, Khroskyabs, Na), as well as to produce tools to analyze and format these corpora. We were able to develop a dictionary interface on the Pangloss collection website (http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/pangloss/dictionaries/), and an online tool of parallel corpus comparison (http://himalco.huma-num.fr/corpus/comparable/index.htm and  http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/pangloss/dictionaries/). The Khaling, Thulung, Japhug and Na corpora of the Pangloss collection were also significantly enriched.

The software engineer Céline Buret collaborated with us during 24 months. She developed a python library which implements in XML the lexicographical norm LMF, with conversion tools from the MDF format (used by many fieldwork linguists to make their dictionaries) to LaTeX, HTML and DOC. PDF versions of the dictionaries have been generated using LaTeX, and a paper version of the Khaling dictionary has been derived from it.
Continuer la lecture de Project completed! Looking back at the past 48 months, and forward to online grammars and more connected data

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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“Tone in Yongning Na” is the first book to enter Open Review stage at Language Science Press!

The HimalCo project allowed for the completion of the linguist’s “three treasures” for the Yongning Na language: a dictionary; a collection of texts; and a monograph. This monograph was submitted in June 2016 to Language Science Press.

Language Science Press publishes high quality, peer-reviewed open-access books in linguistics. All publications are free for both authors and readers. General Editors are Stefan Müller (FU Berlin) and Martin Haspelmath (MPI for the Science of Human History). They are supported by a high-profile Advisory Board.

The book, entitled “Tone in Yongning Na: Lexical tones and morphotonology”, was accepted in October 2016. Anonymous reviewers provided a wealth of comments and suggestions, which were gratefully implemented. Now “Tone in Yongning Na” is the first book to enter Open Review stage at Language Science Press. I hope you will want to have a look!

Two quick notes for readers:
(i) The draft that is currently open for you to review has a few unsightly page breaks and line breaks: for instance, the word “construction” begins at the end of page 144 (“construc-“) and the ending (“tion”) is orphaned on page 147. Some examples are also split over two pages. And a few lines spill into the margins. Please kindly disregard these issues concerning page breaks and line breaks: we’re aware of those, but page breaks and line breaks will only be finalized at the very end of the typesetting stage.
(ii) It seems that the PDF made available on the reviewing interface, PaperHive, is not searchable. It makes it hard to navigate the volume. In case you struggle with this, you can download the (searchable) PDF at the following address:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nekau4g6q91tg6t/109ToneInYongningNa_Draft_21Dec.pdf?dl=0
You can then EITHER provide your comments by logging in to PaperHive and locating the places you have comments about, OR send me comments by e-mail (alexis.michaud@cnrs.fr). All comments will be gratefully acknowledged whether transmitted through PaperHive or by e-mail.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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8 months to completion: quick progress note

This is a {quick [progress note]}
(i.e. a quick note about the project’s progress)
rather than a {[quick progress] note}
(i.e. a note reporting quick progress in the project)! 🙂

Dictionaries are big pieces, which raise many (most?) issues that linguists can confront when tagging and encoding data.

The dictionaries are currently here:
http://himalco.huma-num.fr/dictionaries/index.htm

To come in the next 8 months: an Android interface for the dictionaries; improvements in parallel texts; and stable embedding of the dictionaries in the interface of the Pangloss Collection. Plans for later include full lemmatization of texts; phoneme-level alignment of transcriptions of the Na texts; and ‘crowdsourcing’ for the improvement of the dictionaries and collections of texts: allowing easy deposit of new resources and offering tools for a widened range of contributors (including the communities of speakers) to enrich the annotation through added translations, comments, and feedback generally.

The project’s funding was entirely consumed by the end of last year (2015), as originally planned. The ANR agreed to allow us to extend the project’s duration for 1 year, i.e. until December 2016 (without extra funding). The work now continues thanks to other sources of funding: the “Empirical Foundations of Linguistics” project (funded by ANR-CGI from 2011 to 2019); financial help from the participants’ home laboratories; and when necessary, our own money (e.g. for my next field trip to Yongning, in May 2016, which will help finalize a book-length study of the tone system of Yongning Na).

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Phonetics in the Field: topics of data acquisition, e.g. means to avoid reverberation when recording audio, and use of electroglottography

How to avoid reverberation when recording
How to avoid reverberation when recording

To study less-documented languages where they are spoken, know-how of various kinds is required, including the essentials of sound recording (along with some knowledge of botany and medicine, if possible). From a technical point of view, if one is going to spend weeks and months transcribing and studying a recording that will remain as one of the only traces of a language, it is well worth taking a few precautions to achieve good audio quality. Whenever possible, I pad up my workplace with quits, to avoid having too much reverberation. The result is acoustically OK, though visually unattractive! (Follow this link to get to the recordings) The cardboard boxes piled up in the room contribute to covering up the hard, smooth surfaces (cement walls and floorboards).

Placing the electroglottographic collar
Placing the electroglottographic collar

Ms. Latami Dashilame had not participated in linguistic fieldwork before she began to teach me her language. As we became more familiar, she willingly accepted to take part in such unfamiliar tasks as phonological investigations and phonetic studies, using somewhat impressive (but fully innocuous) techniques including electroglottography: a measurement of vocal fold contact during speech. (Click here to access a web page presenting electroglottography, including some scripts for analysis of EGG signals.)

The traditional Na costume, which she had put on that day for the visit of a journalist who wanted to see us at work, includes an elaborate head-dress which is incompatible with a head-worn microphone. On the other hand, it combines easily with the collar of the electroglottograph.

Linguists who do fieldwork have ample opportunity to realize the paramount importance of mutual understanding between the investigator and the consultant. I think that ‘laboratory phoneticians’ stand to gain by learning from fieldworkers’ experience of the data collection process. This is one of the beliefs that inspired a joint paper with Oliver Niebuhr about “Speech Data Acquisition: The Underestimated Challenge“.

To me, growing acquaintance with my teacher Ms. Latami Dashilame is a wonderful learning experience. In her childhood, she was one of the actors in a documentary-fiction film about the Na and their unusual family structure (‘A-zhu’ marriage among the Naxi of Yongning《永宁纳西族的阿注婚》). Later, her son became an anthropologist, specializing in Na (Moso) society, and a number of his colleagues came to her home. She witnessed how the Na of Yongning became an object of curiosity and fantasy, and how Na culture became folklorized for the promotion of the tourist industry, with its pleasant sides and its less lovely ones. These experiences shook her belief in some of the traditional beliefs that had been passed on to her by her elders, such as Buddhist beliefs. While she conscientiously goes through all the prescribed rituals on a day-to-day basis, her own belief in Buddhist teachings such as reincarnation was faltering. The narratives that she recorded show how she suspends her belief in the traditional lore of a waning cultural universe which nevertheless remains hers.

Photos: Qin Qing (秦晴), 2012

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Au revoir to Céline Buret — with all our thanks!

Céline Buret brilliantly completed her two-year contract with CNRS as the main engineer in the HimalCo project. This post is to say a BIG Thank You and wish her all the best in the next steps in her career!

The Python library that Céline developed to implement the LMF ISO standard for dictionaries is now available online. For an example of what the XML code looks like, check out the Na dictionary in LMF format (machine-readable). This file is available for download from the same page as the (human-readable) PDF version. This deposit also provides the full database in its original format: as a TEXT file that can be opened with the Toolbox software (SIL MDF format).

Further development of the tools is being taken up by her colleagues Séverine Guillaume (permanent member at CNRS) and Rémy Bonnet (on a contract funded by LabEx “Empirical Foundations of Linguistics”).

Merci Céline !!!

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Fieldwork in Yongning (language: Na), August 2014

Here is a short report on a field trip to Yongning that took place this month. This time, three students of Dr. Yang Liquan 杨立权 (on the right in the picture) asked to come along to learn more about fieldwork. Not that there is anything I can add to the wealth of available publications on the topic of linguistic fieldwork (a wonderfully concise and informative introduction is Dixon’s “Field linguistics: a minor manual”), but “an ounce of practice…”

Meeting Naxi, Mosuo and Bai colleagues in Lijiang, before leaving for Yongning. Left: Latami Dashi; right: Yang Liquan
Meeting Mosuo, Naxi and Bai colleagues in Lijiang, before leaving for Yongning. Left: Latami Dashi; right: Yang Liquan

The students got to practise International Phonetic Alphabet on a language that has relatively complex phonetics. The set of useful symbols for Na includes ɭ ʈ ɖ ʑ ɕ ɻ ʁ ʂ ʐ ʋ ɿ ʅ ɳ ɲ ŋ, æ ɑ ə ɤ , nasal vowels, and symbols for tone. The different language backgrounds of the students (Na/Mosuo, Bai, Mandarin dialects, English…) led to an initial division of labour among themselves: one could pick voicing differences easily, another was able to recognize different sets of apicalized vowels… This allowed for lively ‘cross-tutoring’ sessions. The aim, of course, is for each trained linguist to be able to identify and learn the entire range of phonemic oppositions found in the language under investigation.

Now the students are back to Kunming, and it will be up to them to decide to what extent they are interested to launch into fieldwork of their own — to break new ground, to make discoveries about languages of Yunnan, and to establish a sizeable record before these go out of memory.

Here is a group picture on the last day of fieldwork.

Hosts and students, at the main consultant's home. Top to bottom and left to right: Yunnan Univ. students He Wenju, Ji Xi and A Hui; the main consultant, Latami Dashilame; and her daughter-in-law Guo Geiruo
Hosts and students, at the main consultant’s home. Top to bottom and left to right: Yunnan Univ. students He Wenju, Ji Xi and A Hui; the main consultant, Latami Dashilame; and her daughter-in-law Guo Geiruo

Concerning research on Na, the main highlights were:

(i) advancing from the current state of the Yongning Na word list towards a decent dictionary, in particular verifying the identification of plants and animals;

(ii) getting answers to many small questions that had come up since the last fieldwork 9 months ago; and

(iii) recording new data, this time with a 4-channel recorder that allows for the recording of an electroglottographic signal plus audio from a table microphone, a head-mounted microphone, and an extra head-mounted microphone for a person serving as the speaker (storyteller’s) respondent.

A recording session
Checking signals and adjusting input levels at the beginning of a  recording session

In this case, the respondent was the student A Hui, who is a native speaker of (another dialect of) Na, and has special interest in a language and oral literature that have not been fully passed down to people of her generation. Her discussions with the hostess extended well after the recording sessions were over.

Talk about real communication: discussions in the Na (Mosuo) language, outside the (home-made) recording booth
Discussions in the Na (Mosuo) language, outside the recording room

The weather was cool and the nights cold (rainy season), but there were occasional sunny intervals. Electricity is now available most of the time, and with the help of a voltage stabilizer, plus a UPS for short power outages, we were able to use electronic equipment without any glitches. Extra batteries carried us through the occasional power cut.

The ritual of ‘walking around the mountain’ took place during our stay, allowing us a half-day off from linguistic work, and a view of the magnificent scenery of Yongning, under a spectacular cloudy sky.

Hill top above the Yongning monastery, on the day of a ritual: walking around the mountain
Hill top above the Yongning monastery, on the day of a ritual: walking around the mountain

We are grateful to those who made this intensive fieldwork possible, and in particular to our hosts and consultants.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Project currently developing on GitHub — out of public view

The project blog has gone quiet in the past 5 months, as texts and dictionaries are in the making in a (nonpublic) GitHub repository. Tools for data migration from Toolbox / MDF format to XML and LaTEX are now operational. Painstakingly collected linguistic data and innovative technology make a heady cocktail: we were excited to see the very earliest professional-looking draft versions of our dictionaries.

Aimée Lahaussois made a field trip to Nepal earlier this year; Guillaume Jacques is beginning one in Southwest China; and this post’s author will visit again Yongning (also in Southwest China) in August. Lots of tasks are under way. In GitHub jargon: hundreds of ‘Commits’ (updates of documents and scripts), 9 Wiki pages, (currently) 33 ‘Issues’ (tasks to be done)… and high hopes of having great things to showcase here in due course.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Welcoming a computing engineer to the HimalCo team: Céline Buret

Technical aspects are central in the HimalCo project. This project allows us to hire a computing engineer for a duration of 2 years. The selection procedure took place from June to early September. We were impressed by the quality of the applications that we received. In spite of the modest financial conditions offered, there were a number of outstanding candidates, each with their own strong points, and all highly motivated.
The project team is proud to announce that Ms. Céline Buret, a highly experimented IT person, will join us on November 18th, for an initial period of 2 years.

December 2013 update: the work on dictionary formats is in full swing already. The HimalCo blog has gone quiet as our attention focused on starting up a GitHub repository which, among many useful functions, helps us keep track of scripts as they are gradually improved before a public release. We plan to make some scripts available in the Spring of 2014.

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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Ongoing fieldwork on Yongning Na — Lijiang, China

A new fieldtrip to Yunnan has begun. Despite a declining health, my teacher/consultant gives me some time every day to continue research on Yongning Na (Mosuo). The main objective is to make headway in the description of the language’s tonal grammar. Work sessions mostly consist in transcribing narratives; verifying earlier data; and eliciting phonological materials.

My consultant is currently staying, not in the village of Yongning, but at her son’s home in the town of Lijiang. Working here has the big drawback that it’s not “immersion fieldwork”: this is not a Na-speaking environment. On a positive note, power cuts are few, and there is Internet. Also, my consultant misses Yongning; now living in an apartment in a recent concrete building, she sees Na/Mosuo life from a distance, and this makes the task of teaching me folk tales and traditions more interesting to her than when I interviewed her in Yongning, from 2006 to 2009.

Continuer la lecture de Ongoing fieldwork on Yongning Na — Lijiang, China

Alexis Michaud

I'm a linguist, focusing on un(der-)documented languages, in particular Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language.

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