11/28 Small-Group Meeting

For our final meeting, we spent a little time gathering data and most of our time debriefing Harsha.

Data:

We noticed that there was a gap in our investigation of numbers, so we took  quick look at money.

æg-aro dolar
"One dollar"
æg-aro ʈaka
"One money"
dɔʃ ʈaka
"Ten money"

"Where and with whom did you go?"
kotʰai gele ar kaɽ ʃatʰ-e gele?
where went.2 and who-of together-LOC went.2?

"He said he is going to the store"
o bollo o dokan-e d͡ʒatʃe
He said he store-loc is going

o bollo o dokan-e d͡ʒat͡ʃilo
He said he store-LOC was going

Harsha compared the semantics to that of English.

ami etʰa kalk-e kurt͡ʃʰi
I this tomorrow-LOC am doing
korbo
am going to do

Both verb tenses are future and both are equally valid.

DEBRIEFING:
We asked what Harsha hoped to get back from the class, although we referred specifically to our final projects as we did not know everyone else's.  He said he would be interested in having access to our completed dictionaries and also wanted to read our papers, so if anyone can make their papers available to him, you should do that.

He enjoyed himself very much and didn't have much criticism, although I believe there was a little bit in the recording that did not make it into the notes.  He enjoyed the opportunity to work with other speakers, and he wishes he had been able to work with more student speakers.  He thinks we would have gotten "better" Bengali from his adult relatives but that they probably would have shut him out of the conversation.  He enjoyed the different activities and games, less the elicitation itself, and really appreciated getting to learn the intricacies of his language and strongly believes that linguists should try and teach their consultants linguistics skills in order to work with them better to understand the language of study.