OLAC Record oai:soas.ac.uk:MPI1034561

Metadata
Title:		p017 and p022 enjoy conversational riddles
		Riddles
		Documentation of Baga Mandori (Atlantic, NIger-Congo) (ISO 639-3:bmd)
Contributor (recorder):		Frank
Coverage:		Guinea
Description:		This session came about because p017 contacted me to tell me that he could do "Jeux de mots" for me. I tried to figure out what he meant by this, but he was not very clear, so I told him to come Friday morning for a session and we would record "Jeux de mots". Before the session started I tried again to figure out what he meant by "Jeux de mots", to figure out how to record this, but I still could not figure out what he meant by this. To this day I am somewhat stumped by his proposal, but I think that he meant conjugations of verbs etc. I asked him for an example, and a bystander was willing to fill in to participate in the "Jeux de mots". But seemingly he was equally stumped and so I asked them, if they knew riddles. Both were quite exited about this and we recorded them asking each other riddles.
		This project delivers the first in-depth linguistic documentation of any of the Baga languages spoken in the Basse-Côte region of Guinea-Conakry, West Africa. Baga Mandori (also Baga Ma(n)duri), the focus of this project, belongs to the Atlantic (Niger-Congo phylum) group of languages and is part of the Mel cluster. Baga Mandori represents one of the two linguistic communities – the other being Baga Sitemu – that still use a Baga variety in intra-communal communication to some degree. The language is, however, under pressure by Soso, a Mande language and the dominant lingua franca of the region. This project will employ an immersive research approach, which aims to deliver a diverse and integrated multimedia documentary archive that will combine linguistic documentation with community training and participation. Linguistic documentation will be in the form of a trilingual dictionary (Baga Mandori-English-French), an extensive grammatical outline, an orthography, and annotated and transcribed audio-visual material from a variety of linguistic genres.
		He said that he is 35 years old, but then we established that it was long before Lansana Conté took power that he was born. He already had 2 children at that time. He also said that he was born durng the reign of Sekou Touré By estimating that he was about 22 years old at that time, we arrive at an age of 54. He studied to be a mason and builder with a local mason at Dobali. He says that he has been doing this for 8 years. He is not a member of a Sèrè. He is not initiated. He does not move around very often and goes to Kamsar maybe once a year, he says. He says he moves around in the immediate region around Dobali.
		p017 made an interesting comment during the interview claiming that Kamlack is originally a Baga Mandori village, but that Nalu and Susu came to settle there and it is now a mixed village, with a Nalu name ka-m-laak 'location of the rock'. What is the difference between Kamlack and how it came to be to places which have a 'campament' close by? Kamlack is a village where the people are considered 'owners' of the land, but it seems to have incorporated different people with different backgrounds, similar to the 'campaments'. He is not initiated completely, but he claims to have some sort of knowledge about the teachings involved. His initiation 'was not deep' and only took 1 day. It is called is 'kïbara inkïnc mö' (?) or 'kïnïngk mbaancong' (to see mbaancong'. He also commented on the meaning of 'mbaancong' which is a generic term which encompasses several masks. He gives the following names for the maks: In Dobali the name of the mbaancong mask is called Mamsangït, in Bel-bel it is Tompani, and for Nalu it is Sawal. He says that he travelled a lot and he has also spent some time at /boulama/ (Bissago?, p001) and Bissau.. Nowadays he rarely goes to Kamsar or Conakry.
		p001 is the main researcher in this project which he runs from the University of Florida. He is emplyed as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for African Studies. This is his second language documentation project. In the first documentation project he documented the Atlantic language Nalu (naj) spoken in close proximity to Baga Mandori (bmd).
		Denilson is a nickname taken from a famous soccer player Denilson, although it is not clear to me which one and I forgot to ask. When I asked him about his grandmothers, he told me that he never met his grandmothers. He lives in Kamsar with this brother. He resides mainly in Kamsar. In his own estimation about 10 months, the rest of the time he is either in his home village (2 or 3 weeks, 3 or four times a year) or in Conakry. It is in Conakry where he goes and buys the clothes he sells on the market. He said he goes to Conakry about once a month. Apart from Kamsar where he did most his schooling after grade 10, and where he now lives, he lived for approximately five years 2008-2013 in Dalaba for his studies. Before that he resided in Kanfarandé for grades 3-10. He has been to Labé once for a few weeks.
Format:		audio/x-wav
		video/mp4
Identifier:		oai:soas.ac.uk:MPI1034561
		PD-50029-13
Identifier (URI):		https://lat1.lis.soas.ac.uk/ds/asv?openpath=MPI1034561%23
Publisher:		Frank Seidel
		University of Florida
Type:		Audio
		Video
OLAC Info
Archive:		Endangered Languages Archive
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/soas.ac.uk
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:		Pre-generated XML file
OAI Info
OaiIdentifier:		oai:soas.ac.uk:MPI1034561
DateStamp:		2016-11-05
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for simple DC format
Search Info
Citation:		Frank (recorder). n.d. Frank Seidel.