Thulung in Paris, followed by a visit to Nepal

Following the earthquakes in Nepal this spring, it was difficult to get the authorizations to travel to Nepal on official French government business, and so the process was begun to try to bring Chandra Kala Thulung to Paris.

While French citizens can buy visas upon arrival in Nepal, the reverse is not true, and thus began a long process of attempting to secure a Schengen visa for Chandra. This process involved many months of waiting for visa-related documents sent to Nepal to arrive (they never did) and eventually resorting to getting more local help: CNRS has a network of CNRS offices around the world, tasked with facilitating international cooperation. The Delhi office came to the rescue, agreeing to receive Chandra’s visa documents and hand them directly to the French consulate in Delhi (there is no longer a French consulate in Nepal, and visa applications must be sent to India). The French scientific consular officer in Delhi signed off on the visa request, vastly speeding up the process. The result was that Chandra’s visa was ready in Delhi, one week before her planned departure, the “only” remaining issue being how to get it back to Kathmandu in time (thus bringing us back to our original problem which was circumventing a not-very-reliable Nepali postal service). The CNRS office in Delhi tried to use DHL (which apparently does not service “remote areas” such as Kathmandu!) and eventually found a local carrier. There are no street addresses in Nepal, adding another layer of complication, but Chandra eventually got her passport and visa, 36 hours before her flight!

Once she arrived in Paris, we got to work quickly and efficiently, and the three weeks sped by, with many epiphanies about Thulung for me along the way: among them, clearly (for the first time) contrastive vowel length, and a fairly clear understanding, finally, of where to look for the applicative -t suffix which is such a fundamental feature of Kiranti verbal morphology but is much more elusive in Thulung (because of the merging in many cases of CVC and CVCt transitive verb types as well as the much more productive use than in other languages of an analytical causative).

I then followed Chandra to Nepal, where we continued work on the verb dictionary we are compiling (480 verbs so far, with clear verb category assignation and recorded examples for each verb).

The second week of my trip, I worked on Khaling ideophones in view of a presentation at the Himalayan Languages Symposium scheduled for November 26-28th in Kathmandu. We have yet to see whether the symposium will take place: Nepal is in a tough spot these days, with a politically-motivated blockade at the Indian border resulting in a fuel crisis bringing the country to its knees and making transportation and cooking very difficult, as supplies dwindle.

My Khaling hosts spent my last afternoon in Nepal building a wood-fire stove on their roof, ensuring that whatever happened they would still be able to cook meals. The construction was a cheerful event, with lots of laughing interspersed with discussions about the best design for a stove and how someone should take a picture and send it to (Indian PM) Modi to show how hard he was making Nepalis work.   Yet again, Nepalis face adversity in good cheer and with their usual resourcefulness.

 

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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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