Dictionary grammar workshop

So how did you spend the month of August? A whole month to do nothing but study grammar may not be everyone's idea of fun but for those of us for whom it's an essential part of doing our ministry well but who rarely get or create the time to do it, it was useful (and I have a suspicion some people thought it was fun too!). The aim of the month-long workshop at SIL Cameroon was for each participant or team to produce an outline of the grammar of the language they are working in a form that would be appropriate as the introduction in a bilingual dictionary. That means things like explaining the order words typically occur in, how you make nouns plural and whether other words such as adjectives or numbers have to show in some way which noun they go with; how do you form different verb tenses, negative phrases, questions and much more. Well, I'm not sure any of the 13 or so teams (around 20 participants) actually came up with the finished product but we all made some good progress in the analysis of different apsects of our languages. For me the nett result on the one hand was some fine tuning of my old noun class paper (if you really want to know about Latege noun clauses you can look at the published paper on the SIL Cameroon website (http://www.silcam.org/folder030500/page.php), finishing the verb paper and writing some mini-papers on questions, negative, relative, temporal and conditional clauses. It feels good to finally have draft write-ups of these areas for which I've had lots of data for a long time and it certainly helps in deciding how to write and translate into Latege more consistently. On the other hand I discovered several curious sets of data that now invite many more hours of research to work out exactly what they signify. Quite where this will fit in the list of tasks and priorities once I'm back in Léconi remains to be seen!

I travelled back to Libreville, Gabon on Wed./Thurs. (9-10^th Sep.) - 23 hours in four different vehicles (to cover probably less than 600 miles!) with countless police/gendarme/border checks along the way but no undue hassle, but I'll spare you another travelogue. Just happy to arrive safe and sound.

The next adventure – Gabonese immigration office to obtain a new residency permit, hopefully tomorrow (12^th Sep.)