Rural Asante Village

Okay, so FYI, I will not be posting for the next two weeks (at least), because we will be in a rural village (well, all of us are spread out over three rural villages) doing our mini independent study projects (small versions of the 5-week projects we will be doing at the end of the semester). After that we go to the north, where we may or may not have internet, but where we will definitely get to go to a national park with elephants and giraffes! I'm excited. I think they said we can camp out for one night there, too. So stoked.

We had our Twi exam today. They split us up into 4 or 5 different groups for class every day and then rotated the teachers through, so each of us learned slightly different things (but the hope was that it would kind of balance out...). When it came to tones, which are supposedly phonemic in Twi (I'm not convinced), we were told by the academic director not to ask any of the teachers to write down the tones for us because they don't know how to write them. They just know how to speak the language as fluent native speakers. So, we were just supposed to ask them to say it over and over again and then write down what we heard so we would remember and be able to say it back. Every group did this in their own way except the group that had Uncle Joe, who got his PhD in Linguistics  (and gave my a most-questionable etymology of the numerals in Twi, which are hardly even used anymore anyway... they just use the English numbers for almost everything), and apparently wrote down something that was supposed to be the tones for them.

For example, they would give us the words papa (low - high, "father"), papa (high - high, "good"), and papa (low - low, "a fan") and we would repeat them, try to write down what we thought the tones were, ask them to repeat it a few more times, consult each other, and try one last time to say it right. That's how class went for the Tone session, with a bunch of minimal (ish) pairs. Some were homophones (homotones?) with different meanings, and some were completely different categories (like, da "never," da "day," and da "to sleep"), but all were supposedly arguments for why tone is important in Twi (hah).

Rachel, Natalie and I decided to have a study sesh last night. Natalie and I had been in the same group, and Rachel had Uncle Joe.  As we started going through the flash cards Natalie had made, Rachel started to comment, "This isn't how we learned it..." So we pulled out our notes and compared... about 80% of what we'd written down was completely different from what Rachel had been told by Uncle Joe. Some of it made sense: we'd written mid - low where she had low - low, which makes sense since the second low would be lower than the first one with the cascading tone system... we just heard "sound - lower sound" and put it as mid - low. That's logical. But there were some where we had "high - high" and she had "low - mid" or other totally crazy things like that, which were clearly just inconsistent. We decided to trust  Uncle Joe, Ph.D. Linguistics and made up a fun learning game where we overly dramatized the tones, singing the English word with the same tones as its Twi counterpart. Thinking we were good, we parted ways and I went home to my Twi dictionary and looked up a few of the words.

This was about 10 pm. As I looked up the first word, I found that the tones in the dictionary were completely different from either what Nat and I had written or what Uncle Joe, Ph.D. Linguistics had told Rachel. Yikes. This went on and on... there were maybe two or three that were the same as what Nat and I had written, and one or two that were the same as what Rachel had from Uncle Joe, but most were something entirely different. Some weren't in there at all (small dictionary) and some were completely different words (not a very good dictionary).

I gave up and went to bed.

In the morning, we spent probably 45 minutes trying to convince our professors that it made no sense to test us on these tones when we had all been taught something different, and none of it was right anyway. They responded by trying to re-teach us all 30-40 of the words again, less than 10 minutes before our exam, with Yemi, the academic director (who got a Masters in Linguistics and actually is pretty confident in his ability to write the tones... so far he's been consistent with my dictionary at least, so I trust him), writing down the tones for us and over-riding Uncle Joe. We were all still pretty frustrated.

When it came to the test, I'm pretty sure I bombed most of it, because I had lost all confidence in my ability to say the tones correctly on the words we'd been taught, but the person testing me was the same person who had taught me the tones, so she was really lenient and helpful during the test, and when I got it back I'd only missed half a point for "hesitating"when saying the numbers 1-20... in fact I had completely messed up the word for four and had to correct myself, haha.

Anyway, tones really don't seem to be THAT important. We all mess things up terribly and people understand us just fine, which may be partially a cultural thing where they are very accepting of mistakes and eager to understand you anyway, but when I was trying to learn a few phrases of Mandarin, for example, and messed up the tones even a little bit, people had no clue what I was saying at all. So, I'm really not convinced that tones are all that important in Twi... most of it seems to be recoverable from context.

Okay, we have to go explore some botanical gardens now before we have our big danc/drumming performance tonight!