I mean, that (it turns out) is what these terms were invented for (the contrast between two sets of phonetically voiceless unaspirated consonants in Switzerland), but the terms have been used so often in so many different ways that many apparently just roll their eyes when they encounter them (e. g. Ladefoged used “fortis” for the extra-weird Korean stiff-voiced consonants), and it would leave me *sniff* without a way to name the contrast between the two sets of phonetically voiceless unaspirated short stops in Austrian Standard German and most Bavarian-Austrian dialects. It also occasionally occurs in some Englishes. (Apparently it’s the loudness of the release = pulmonic air pressure.)

Lucky though, because I’m not up-front enough to be able to ring people I don’t know and ask them if I can unfurl a swag on their floor.

Re: getting speakers to repeat something, I know exactly what you mean. This is a typical exchange:
Me: Can you say this one for me? “ga-yu buluman, gahan gakkalak” (that moon is big)
Speaker: Yowey. (yes, as in, ‘yes, that moon is big’.)

I’m going to go for straight elicits, possibly primed with a target word. So, starting with “what’s that word for moon?”, then “Okay, so how do you say ‘that moon is big’?”

¹If any concreters of friends of concreters read this, take it facetiously.

For accommodation – I once rang up random people at One ARm Point I didn’t know to find a place to stay for a few days. “Hi, you don’t know me but I’m one of these researchers and I can’t get hold of anyone I know so can I camp on your floor for a few days?”. It worked…

Have a great trip!

Alejna, you know I’m an archivist in my other guise, soto hear that you record just on your laptop inflicts pain. But, if you have a good sound card and so on, it might be fine.

Perhaps you should get a good small encoder, such as a Motu, that plugs into your laptop and syncs with an audio recording program. But set-ups like these aren’t the best if you ever plan to leave the lab. But, get a good mic!! If your speakers don’t mind having an obtrusive microphone in their face and you’re in the studio, recording individuals reading from a page or something, then you should be using a dynamic mic, they’re not expensive.

“Reasonably quiet” places don’t exist in this part of the world. There are inevitably kids playing, dogs fighting, sprinklers sprinkling, air-conditioners air-conditioning, fans fanning somewhere close. And of course, my speakers like to cough directly into the microphones. You learn as you go.

Thanks also for the details on your equipment. I’ve been thinking about investing in a solid state recorder and other equipment for my own nefarious purposes. (It may shock you to learn that I do most of my own recording on my laptop with a fairly cheesy microphone. But I usually primarily need just a good pitch track and a decent spectrogram. Plus most of my own work is on American English. Which, as you may know, is not exactly endangered.)

It makes me happy to know you’ll be making such high quality recordings. I hope you’ll have a reasonably quiet place to make them, too.

I haven’t thus far done any phonological/phonetic analysis, but my supervisor wants me to do some now, since this won’t be an academic trip and I won’t have to concentrate entirely on complex predication. I put the ‘phonology’ tag in before I edited out a lengthy paragraph detailing precisely what I’m looking at, so here goes.

Wagiman, like most Australian languages, doesn’t have a voicing contrast, though phonetically speaking, some stops might occur as voiced and others as voiceless. It does, however, differentiate between fortis and lenis, but on the basis of length of closure rather than voice onset time (I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, so I don’t need to dumb it down). So while there isn’t a ‘voice’ distinction in the European sense (where VOT = voice), there is still a fortis/lenis distinction.

Unfortunately, I can’t think of any minimal pairs, but to give you an idea, we write the geminate (fortis) stops with double ‘voiceless’ letters, like /kk/ in ‘bakka’ (tobacco), and the simplicate (lenis) stops with a single ‘voiced’ letter, like /g/ in ‘-buga’ (plural suffix). I want to get enough tokens of each, in various positions, to get an idea of what length of closure is perceived as a geminate versus a simplicate. Also, we want to find out whether the only phonemic difference is the length of closure. There may in fact still be a difference in VOT as far as we know.

I also want to know what length of ‘closure’ is typical of geminate (long) nasals, since there is a long/short nasal contrast too. And this time I do have a minimal pair:
nga-nanda-yi [ŋánandai] ‘I see him/her/it’
versus
ngan-nanda-yi [ŋánnandai] ‘he/she/it sees me’
Add to that the fact that clusters don’t phonolgically become homorganic; any heterorganic combination is possible, or so we think.

I use a Marantz PMD660 flash ram recorder, using highest quality uncompressed PCM WAV; 16 bit resolution, 48 kHz sample rate. The accessories invludes up to four microphones: two Behringer matched, mini condensers, one lapel condenser, and one Rode dynamic. I’ll probably use the dynamic for the phonetic work, the condensers are for elicitation and texts. The lapel is a spare. Add to that two mic-stands, multiple CF cards, mic cables (4 in total), Sennheiser headphones and a backup mp3-dictaphone. I probably won’t be doing any of the actual ‘analysis’ while I’m there, but when I do, it’ll be with Praat, most likely.

See how straightforward fieldwork is?

Is it primarily phonology research you’ll be doing? (I noticed your “phonology” tag.) I’m curious what sort of recording equipment you use. And what might be the “essential accessories”?

I will also miss your posting!