Logba - a new ISP topic!

I am leaving at 5 am tomorrow morning to go to the mountain village, Logba, to study the endangered language of the same name (although they call themselves and their language Ikpana). The language is being pressured by Ewe, mainly, but also to some extent Akan and English. I will be there for about 10 days, then I am headed to Cape Coast to celebrate Thanksgiving with the other students. Afterwards, I will head back to Accra to analyze my data and finish writing my paper.

I'm excited! I finally get to work on an endangered language after all. I also have an enthusiastic new advisor/co-advisor (Prof. Kofi Dorvlo) who seems to be quite happy to let me work on a language he has been studying for the last five years or so. "There is plenty left to study! You will find something. No trouble," he said, when I pointed out what little time I had to find something relevant to research. "If you want to study an endangered language then you will not leave my office without having the opportunity to do so." He gave me a pdf of the grammatical description of the language he wrote. Another student let me borrow her computer to read it and I couldn't put it down. I spent four or five hours going through it, and only stopped because the computer was overheating and all of my roommates had gone to bed.

Prof. Dorvlo is going to drive me and another student up to the village tomorrow morning (we're leaving super early to beat the traffic of Accra). He will introduce me to the people I will be working with, arrange for me to have a place to live (homestay), and show me around a little bit. Then he'll leave the next day and I'll do my research there (I'm back to plant names and uses, which I find interesting, hasn't been studied too much, and could be an indicator of the level of pressure that other languages are putting on the language depending on how many borrowed terms exist in the language). I'll be using my video camera (and possibly machete) a lot, and then when I come back to Accra I'll be able to analyze my data and hopefully have time to type it up into Toolbox or something to add to the corpus of lexical entries for the language. The research will be useful for the community, especially if the language loss becomes so severe in the future that the younger generation no longer remembers some of the terms that their grandparents knew. It will also potentially be quite useful for academics, either in Linguistics or in Botany, and maybe even Chemistry, according to Prof. Dorvlo, since a lot of the plants are useful as medicine and their chemical composition might be interesting to analyze. This is just the kind of project I've been looking for.

Hopefully the community will be accepting of a new student coming in to work with them on their language, and hopefully a week and a half is long enough to get everything done. If not, at least I've heard its beautiful there - there are supposedly caves and waterfalls and lots of fruit! Plus, it's on a mountain, so I can have all kinds of adventures exploring and hiking around.

Oh, and of course, I get to learn a new language! Suh-weet!

I wish I had a laptop, though. Then I could work on the analysis much more easily while I'm out in the field. But, oh well. I have a topic!

I have to go make dinner, pack, and write a new ISP proposal to give to the SIT staffmembers. I called Papa Attah today and told him I had changed my topic and location. He exclaimed, "WHY?!" in much the same way my homestay Auntie in Kumasi responded to me having shaved my head. Once I had explained it more he said, "Oh. That is okay."

Yemi (the Academic Director), as of yet, has no idea. He is traveling in Nigeria. But my original advisor, Prof. Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, said she would e-mail him her full support of my decision if he had any doubts. Hurrah! Plus, by the time he comes back from Nigeria there won't be much he can do to stop me. I'll already be there.

Today I was readily accepted as a "true Ghanaian," because I was wearing a football (soccer) jersey Claire had bought, decided didn't fit, and given to me. Who knew it was so easy? The cover falls when they start asking me about it though: "So, you like Ghanaian sports?" "Who is your favorite player?" "What team do you follow?" I try to find a way out before they can get me to admit that I don't know, I don't watch t.v. and I definitely don't watch soccer. Sorry. But, for anyone planning on coming to Ghana in the future, I think it is a good investment to learn a bit about the teams and buy a jersey or something to show your Ghanaian spirit. I now have a Ghanaian flag ready in case I need to run through the streets in celebration of another major victory (did I ever admit to the fact that I slept through the final goal of the under-20 world cup? My roommates woke me up and we all ran out into the street to join the crowd of happy Ghanaians, where I pretended I had been watching the whole match).

Oh, and in reading the grammatical description of Logba I came across a proverb which I feel explains my time in Asaam, the Ashanti village I stayed in for two weeks: However distant the time is, we say it is tomorrow. Yes, yes you do.

Appreciate the beautiful, my friends, and create beauty wherever you go.