OLAC Record
oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0001-486D-0

Metadata
Title:Vocabulary and other recollections
Faces
Making Wichita Accessible: A Multimedia Archive of Data and Analyses
Contributor:David
Shirley
Vivian
Tiny
Gary
Doris
David S. Rood and Armik Mirzayan
Coverage:United States
Date:2002-07-15
Description:Speakers of Wichita were gathered for a meal and a chance to "talk Wichita" with each other for about two hours. This session records the linguist, the tribal president, and four speakers recalling individual words and remembering some details about their lives. Most of the conversation is in English, but there is some Wichita discourse as well.
The project is to videotape the last speakers of Wichita talking in and about their language, history over the last century, and culture. Videotapes were made in the summer of 2002 in Anadarko, Oklahoma.
This file was generated from an IMDI 1.9 file and transformed to IMDI 3.0. The substructure of Genre is replaced by two elements named "Genre" and "SubGenre". The original content of Genre substructure was: Interactional = 'conversation', Discursive = 'conversation', Performance = 'word lists, extremely brief narrative, oral-history'. These values have been added as Keys to the Content information.
With some prompting from the linguist, speakers try to recall some vocabulary, first for body parts and colors. They use photocopied notes that had been distributed at language classes over the past couple of years. Later the linguist asks questions about personal and group history (talk about your grandchildren, what did your parents do when you were sick, etc.), some of which triggered some statements or descriptions in Wichita. Toward the end of the session some pieces of children's songs and stories are recalled.
Speakers are asked to use the language, first to describe body parts, and later to discuss bits of history and culture as recalled from the participants' childhoods. The linguist asks numerous questions to prompt the discussion, many of which lead to complete dead ends. One successful question concerns parental doctoring techniques, and elicits a short description in Wichita. At the end of the session, discussion turns to children's songs and discussions of what some of them mean. In editing this session for the archive, we have cut out sections which were exclusively in English or where the linguist's questions failed to produce even English discussion.
Four Wichita speakers (Doris, Shirley, Vivian and Tiny), the linguist, and the tribal President, Gary McAdams, exchange information in an open, unstructured conversation. Most of the talk is about individual words, but there are a few descriptive sentences here and there as well. All of these people have lived near each other most of their lives, and they shared many childhood and young adult experiences.
Rood is the linguist on the project. He has been working with Wichita since about 1967.
Shirley has not spoken the language much in her adult life, though she can often recall things that her parents and grandparents said, and she understands a lot.
Vivian has spoken both Wichita and English in her adult life. She had a stroke a few years ago, but seems to have recovered from it very well. She does not speak very clearly in the videotapes, but she is able to say almost anything she wants to in Wichita if the environment is right.
Tiny is the daughter of the first speaker that Rood ever worked with, Frank Miller. Apparently their home language was usually Wichita when she was a child, but she has not spoken it much as an adult. This session was Rood's first acquaintance with her.
Doris is the most fluent speaker in the group, and the most willing to speak. She was raised by grandparents and in her youth used Wichita for all communication around the home. In recent years she has been the primary resource person for the tribe's language classes.
The senior collector is a linguist at the University of Colorado who has been studying Wichita since 1967. His assistant is a graduate student in linguistics. On the videotape, Rood is frequently heard prompting for additional information. Mirzayan operated the camera and controlled the recording devices.
Rood introduces session and asks how one would describe a face.
Speakers begin to discuss the way fact type was used for nicknames or derogatory descriptions of people, then go on to name other body parts. Includes a long list of body part terms read from notes, and Vivian's description of "sweet cheeks".
Further discussion of body part terms.
Request to "talk about your grandchildren" elicits reaction in both English and Wichita and a short statement from Shirley in Wichita.
A little more inspired by the "grandchildren" theme: the number 27 and "there is no word for great-grandchild".
Question "What did your parents do when you got sick?" elicits the longest connected Wichita response of the evening, as well as some discussion in English.
The topic of children's songs is introduced, and leads to a discussion of words in songs which people cannot understand now. This segment includes a lot of long pauses.
Format:video/mp4
video/x-mpeg1
video/x-mpeg2
audio/x-wav
text/x-eaf+xml
DV
Identifier:oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0001-486D-0
Publisher:David S. Rood
University of Colorado; Volkswagen Foundation
Subject:Wichita language
English language
Subject (ISO639):wic
eng
Type:video
audio

OLAC Info

Archive:  The Language Archive at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
Description:  http://www.language-archives.org/archive/www.mpi.nl
GetRecord:  OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:  Pre-generated XML file

OAI Info

OaiIdentifier:  oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0001-486D-0
DateStamp:  2017-02-14
GetRecord:  OAI-PMH request for simple DC format

Search Info

Citation: David; Shirley; Vivian; Tiny; Gary; Doris; David S. Rood and Armik Mirzayan. 2002-07-15. David S. Rood.
Terms: area_Americas area_Europe country_GB country_US iso639_eng iso639_wic

Inferred Metadata

Country: United KingdomUnited States
Area: AmericasEurope


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Up-to-date as of: Wed Apr 12 4:32:09 EDT 2017