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ScanDiaSyn-bloggen
2010
Tisdag 16. mars
NorDiaCorp-meeting in Helsinki
We (Tiina and Henrik from Lund) went to Helsinki on the 5th of March for a meeting with the NorDiaCorp group in Finland. We arrived at noon, and after a short taxi trip to the university we were met by Camilla Wide and her team: Lisa Södergård, Helena Palmén, Leila Mattfolk and Sanna Wiklund. Margareta Södergård, who couldn’t attend, will also participate in the project.
The Finnish group intends to start their data collection in the summer, and we informed them about our experiences, the background for the project, methodology and a number of practical issues (like how to best record test sentences). Lisa Södergård had translated the questionnaire into local Swedish dialect, and we discussed her version of the questionnaire in detail.
We talked for about four hours, including a coffee break with Swedish as well as Finnish coffee and small Karelian pirogues (baked on rye). Pictures and a Swedish recipe can be found here. In the evening, Camilla and Henrik continued the discussion at a restaurant.
– Henrik
Måndag 15. mars
Viktig information för er som skriver på denna blogg!
Det kommentarsystem vi har använt på denna bloggen har ändrats och för att slippa betala för det har jag satt in ett nytt system. Själva koden, som kommer på samma ställe i texten som förut, ser ut så här:
<div>
<script>
var idcomments_acct = 'fbff353244a1888e79a2bb09b9364e51';
var idcomments_post_id = 'DATE';
var idcomments_post_url = 'POST_NAME';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.intensedebate.com/js/genericLinkWrapperV2.js"></script>
</div>
Det man behöver göra är att ändra följande två linjer:
var idcomments_post_id = 'DATE';
var idcomments_post_url = 'POST_NAME';
I stället för DATE skriver man in dagens datum och i stället för POST_NAME skriver man namnet på inlägget (samma som under a name ovan vid inläggets början). I stället för det som stod vid Janne och Signes post (13032010 och midwesttour) skriver jag nu 15032010 och kommentarer.
Man får akta sig att man inte ändrar något annat, för då kommer inga kommentarer att synas. Speciellt viktigt är också att man inte tar bort <div> och </div> för då kommer kommentarlänkarna som i en klunga vid det översta inlägget.
– Gunnar Hrafn
Saturday 13 March
Brief introducion on the Mid-West tour 8.-22. March 2010. Part 1
When the Norwegian Research Council and our own department ILN at the UiO granted money to extend the Norwegian Dialect Syntax project to Norwegian-American dialects in the US, the Mid-West tour was planned immediately, and this blog recounts our experiences from Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South and North Dakota.
Janne Bondi Johannessen and Signe Laake are at present on a two-week tour in the Mid-West of the USA to record Norwegian-American speech. We have lined up meetings with informants throughout this period. The informants or acquaintances of theirs contacted us after having seen adverts we had placed in Norwegian-American journals.
We want to see what this language is like, look at its dialectal variation, a variation that is caused both by the original dialects in the old country and by the geographical conditions, distance and contact, as well as linguistic conditions. By recording the speech in various places we will get good background material for studying the language, not least as a preparation for the workshop we are planning together with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, this autumn.
Mid-West tour. 9. March 2010: University of Wisconsin, Madison
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| Janne and Joe Salmons |
After a very long travel from Oslo to Chicago (ten hours in the air) and an exciting two-hour car journey through fog and dark from Chicago O’Hare Airport we finally arrived at our first destination, the Double Tree Hotel in Madison. It was Professor Joe Salmons who had kindly booked it for us. The morning of the 9. March he picked us up at our hotel at 8, and we walked over to the nice building at the University Club, where his department is. Troughout the day we had a really good time with Joe, who we met for the first time after several months of correspondence. He took really good care of us, w.r.t. food, coffee and linguistics (and pleasant company), and we met with several colleagues and students of his, who were interested in dialect collection and building up resources. Janne also had the chance to give a talk at the university about the Nordic ScanDiaSyn project and the Nordic Dialect Corpus to an interested audience. We wil probably cooperate more in the future, not least aout the workshop that we are planning together, to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on the 16.-17. September this year.
The evening ended with a very nice dinner at the house of Peggy Hager and her husband Tom. Peggy teaches Norwegian at the university in Madison, and was even interviewed about Norwegian mentality and the Winter Olympics in Wall Street Journal.
Mid-West tour. 10. March 2010: Westby, Wisconsin
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| Eileen and Signe in Westby |
The day started with our contact person for Westby, Eileen Nelson, meeting us at 7 for a very nice and sociable breakfast at the hotel, and then leading the way on the two hour drive to Westby. In Westby we went to the farm where Eileen’s sister Sharon received us with great hospitality, and we met three very charming informants: Archie Rundhaugen, Howard Moilien, Florence Holen, aged 79-87.
We did a short interview with each of them, and then asked them to talk with each other, two and two, while we were recording them, just as we do with dialect informants in Norway. The Norwegian dialect of Westby has a strong Gudbrandsdal origin, with some Østerdal as well. Here we experienced what we have also seen later: These dialect speakers, unlike the ones in Norway, do not understand the high speed Oslo dialect. Since their school education has all been in English, and do not know how to read and write Norwegian very well, they are not familiar with the written language, and hence haven’t encountered the words of the central Oslo region. We quickly learned that we must adapt, and we now use question words like håssen, håkken, høkken, køss,koss, kor, å instead of hvordan, åssen, hvor, hva, to be able to ask questions on "how","where", "what", "who" etc.
Our informants told us that although Norwegian was the only language they spoke until school age, they nowadays speak mostly English. Even so, it i clear to us that their Norwegian language is mostly very fluent, even though they may sometimes be searching for words.
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| Informants in Westby |
The day in Westby was very pleasant, and we had many good laughs during the hours we were there, including the lunch at Sharon's house, eating her husbond's nice vegetable soup and Wisconsin cheeses.
In the afternoon we drove to Minnesota, to our motel in Willmar, a drive that took seven hours through thick fog, and also in the dark. Would anybody believe us when we tell you that we were driving on a little country road and missing the left exit, in spite of the GPS instructing us about it and we driving really slowly not to miss it? That is how thick the fog was. Since we couldn’t see the whole width of the narow road, we also at one point were driving on the hard shoulder, thinking it was the right hand lane. Ant at another point we were drivin on the left side of the road, not realising that this was what we were doing.
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| Janne in Westby |
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| Westby |
Mid-West tour. 11-12. March 2010: Sunburg, Minnesota
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| Some of our informants in Sunburg |
Willmar was our home while having two days of recordings in Sunburg. It was Jane Norman who had contacted us. She and her sister Annie runs the Kultur Hus (culture house) in Sunburg. Through some brief e-mail correspondence before we came, whe had understood exactly what we needed, and had found us 13 informants, spread out over two days, two by two, and had even included a schedule with names and times for each informant. She also provided lunch for us and excellent localities in her Kultur Hus, with a common room downstairs, and two recording rooms upstairs!
We had a wonderful time i Sunburg as well. The informants here too had mostly not learnt English until they went to school, and Sunburg and the whole area around it was almost totally Norwegian in the first decades of the 1900s.
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| Leslie Ellingson |
Our informants in Sunburg were: Roger Hagen 76, Jean Hagen 77, Bruce Peterson 68, Colleen Peterson 67, Maxine Medalen 84, Earl Knutson 73, Charles Hagen 70, Marilyn Young 76, Leslie Ellingson 86, Maynard Lundebrek 76, Marilyn Gehardson 77, Eunice Sanders 84, Gladys Stai 86
We heard many nice stories and many reflections on language. One of our informants in Sunburg said: "Actually, there are some English words in the Norwegian language that we speak here: for example træin [pronounced like a Norwegian word] is really very similar to the English word train!" This statement is very wise, we think. It is really clear to us that the Norwegian spoken in each area is a dialect with its own stable vocabulary. Thus, it is not as if English words are taken randomly into their language by each individual, but rather, that their language has a certain mass of clearly defined loan words that are phonologically and morphologically integrated in the language. Some examples:
Lexical loans into the Sunburg dialect:
/travle/ : to walk (used about walking outside, in the forest etc.)
/go:/ : to go (the phonology and inflection is like Norwegian gå "walk", but has received a new meaning from English)
/portret/ : photograph (e.g. used about a photograph of a crib)
/ro:dn/ : the road
/ænti mi/ : my aunt
/no:/ : no (as denial) (the Norwegian word nei is still used as a discourse particle)
/hi:reman/ : hired farm worker
[titsher] : teacher, sh is a retroflex fricative
/fi:ld/ : field
We'll report on syntax later.
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| Kulturhus in Sunburg |
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| Jane Norman, our contact person in Sunburg |
Mid-West tour. 13. March 2010: Starbuck, Minnesota
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| Helen Bjorgo with her daughter and son in law |
In this little place on the shore of Lake Minnewaska we stayed the night in a B&B. We had dinner in a place, The Wild Ridge, Glenwood, we were recommended by a guy at a petrol station (gas station, as they say around here), and we can safely say that it was an error of judgment not to be cricial to one’s sources. It was the worst meal Janne has ever had, and the whole plate of dry, old, brown potatoes filled with a sickly, yellow, luke-warm cheese substitute, had to be left uneaten. Add to that that the waitress first served the luke-warm food, then forgot to give us cutlery, and that the inedible potatoes came with lots of bacon even after Janne told her she didn’t want meat, and you can calculate the tips that she got from us. Unbelievably, the restaurant was full, which probably says everything about the choice of restaurants around here.
Starbuck is also old Norwegian territory, and the landlady and landlord of our B&B are both 100 % Norwegian, as they say. But they don’t speak Norwegian. Having walked around here a bit this morning, it turns out that there is a Norwegian museum here, and they have big sign saying they made the world’s biggest lefse in 1983.
In Starbuck we met a very old and very nice informant, Helen, at 90. We had been invited to her apartment, and it turned out her daughter and son-in-law were also present. They were very hospitable and we had a great time talking about the olden days in Norway and Minnesota.
Her family background is from Jostedalen, Sogn, which was clearly audible in her Norwegian, but there were also other features that showed she is a real Norwegian-American, related not least to the vocabulary we wrote about yesterday.
– Janne and Signe
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| Lefse in Starbuck |
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| Minnesota |
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| Our car |
Måndag den 15 februari
NorDiaCorp fieldwork in Västergötland and Närke, SwedenFebruary
4th and 5th, Andreas Widoff and Johanna Prytz visited Torsö, Västergötland and
Viby, Närke to carry out the third field work for the NorDiaCorp Göteborg
section.
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| Older informants on Torsö. (Photo: Johanna Prytz) |
The data from Torsö, an island in Lake Vänern,
seems to roughly correlate with the Västergötland data already gathered in
Floby. However, the data on binding and reflexives differs somewhat from Floby
as well as from other places investigated by us so far.
Reaching Viby, we left Västergötland behind and
entered another region and another dialect area. In the data we gathered there,
the most striking difference from other places is the acceptance of the
conditional with har ('have'). In Viby, we also met the first
informants to accept the particle to be placed before the reflexive pronoun
when using a reflexive verb. The older informants both thought this was just as
acceptable as placing the particle after the pronoun, while the younger informants
where more reluctant to accept it, even if they did not entirely rule it out.
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| Viby is famous for the buzzing i:s in their dialect, locally sometimes written with a double i. (Photo: Johanna Prytz) |
The informants also provided interesting data
on some dialect words. On Torsö, an alternative to the interrogative pronoun vem is the dialect word tocken, with the varieties hocken and töcken. In Viby, they used the dialect word vetja or tja (/vɛʃɑ:/ or /ʃɑ:/) 'undrar', as in vetja om han
kommer 'undrar om han kommer', and the word fälle 'månntro' as in kommer
hon fälle 'kommer hon månntro' or 'ju' det
gör de fälle visst inte 'det gör de ju visst inte'.
As for the methodological part, we had some
trouble finding younger informants who previously participated in the SweDia
2000 project, and we had to resort to two new younger informants. Also, one of
the older informants had trouble hearing the sentences and keeping up with the
assignment given, which resulted in some unreliable data. Moreover, one of the
younger informants did not show up at all to our appointment, but we were saved
by having booked no less than three younger informants that day. This once
again raises the question of how to best pick out suitable informants for the
research, as well as maybe having standby informants just in case something
should happen.
- Johanna
Torsdag den 11 februari
NORDIACORP – Fältarbete i Blekinge
Blekinge 20 – 21.1
Under två dagar i januari gästade vi, Henrik Rosenkvist och Tiina Pitkäjärvi, Torhamn och Jämshög för fältarbete. Detta var första gången vi genomförde fältarbetet på två orter i följd, och fältarbetet var således en bra uppvärmning för att planera våra nästa och lite längre etapper i norr.
Vi intervjuade både nya informanter och informanter som deltog i SweDia 2000 denna gång. (På grund av ett återbud saknade vi dagen innan resan fortfarande en yngre kvinnlig informant i Torhamn, men efter telefonsamtal till såväl bybutik som skola i Torhamn hittades en fjärde lämplig informant: intervjun gjordes på den lokala förskolan i Torhamn, med ett och annat par nyfikna ögon och små fötter i dörrspringan.) I Jämshög lyckades vi däremot nå informanter från alla fyra kategorier som medverkat tidigare i SweDia 2000.
De övriga intervjuerna med informanterna gjordes hemma hos de intervjuade. Just nu planlägger vi för att resa till Jämtland, med sikte på Aspås och Berg i mars.
- Tiina
Tysdag 2. februar
I have just sent out a belated New Year's greeting to the group leaders in ScanDiaSyn, hoping that they will forward it to their group members. In effect the letter gives a status report for the collaboration and sketches upcoming events and the possible future for the project. The letter can be read here.
- Øystein
Onsdag den 20 januari
NorDiaCorp fieldwork in Bohuslän and Västergötland, Sweden
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| Orust in Bohuslän, and Floby in Västergötland |
The 11th and 12th of January Johanna Prytz and Maia Andréasson travelled to Henån in Bohuslän and Floby in Västergötland to perform the second field-work for the Göteborg group in NORDIACORP. Henån is located on the island Orust on the west coast of Sweden and the informants met with us in the local library the 11th of January.
In Orust there are some local lexical varieties that stresses the need for using a really good speaker of the dialect for the recordings. The dialect speaker that we used for Orust informed us that the word sliten and utsliten does not mean both 'torn, torn out' and 'worn out' in the local dialect, but only 'worn out'. For 'torn (out)' they use reven (standard Swedish riven).
This turned out to be of vital importance since the older informants rather disliked the sentences discussing a radio that had been sliten ut or utsliten but accepted them totally when the verb was reven ut or utreven. The result is that all informants in Orust, just as those in Frillesås, accept incorporation of verb particles both with är ('is') and blev ('became') as the copular verb.
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| Younger informants in Orust. (Photo: Maia Andréasson) |
Another lexical difference is the local supine form skutt in Orust. Both young and older informants accepted the sentence Där blev skutt många älgar förra veckan (gloss: 'there became shot many moose last week'). We double checked that the form was used with har ('have') and hade ('had') to see that it really was a supine. The standard Swedish form skjutit did not get the same high scores. (Generally it is very difficult to get the informants to hear the difference between the supine form skjutit and the participle form skjutet.)
In Floby we got higher scores than on other places for Den boken kommer jag inte ihåg om jag läste den (gloss: 'That book come I not remember if I read it') with the resumptive pronoun den ('it'), with an average of 3.75 (of 5) for Floby and 1,5 for the other locations.
The double supine forms in the sentence Han hade länge velat läst den där boken om maffian (gloss: 'he had long wanted-sup read-sup that there book about the maffia') were only OK for the younger informants in the two locations in Halland, but in Orust and Floby also the older informants accepted this sentence. Maybe we will see some more acceptance of this construction when we get further to the north?
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| Older informants in Floby. (Photo: Maia Andréasson) |
When it comes to local forms for interrogative pronouns the informants in Orust use hurre for standard Swedish hur ('how') in Hurre var det? ('How was that?') and Hurre många blir det? ('How many will there be?'). This form corresponds to the old Swedish huru, that one of the older informants in Frillesås, Halland, use in the latter question: Huru många blir't? The older informants of Orust also use hudden for standard Swedish hurdan in the sentence Hudden är han? ('What is he like?').
- Maia
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