Tshila 2023 Fieldwork by the Numbers

From August 24, 2023 to September 4, 2023, we (Andre and I) did fieldwork on Tshila, an endangered central Khoisan language spoken in southeastern Botswana. We did the fieldwork in Kaudwane, which is on the edge of the Khutse game reserve. The goals of the fieldwork were to collect at least 500 vocabulary items, at least one full pronoun chart (30 pronouns) and some basic grammatical information. We accomplished these goals. For context, we want (a) to set Andre up for future fieldwork on Tshila, and (b) to start the community thinking about developing an orthography.

This work is part of a four-year NSF grant to document Cua and Tsila and to train students in doing fieldwork on Khoisan languages:

https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1760980&HistoricalAwards=false

In the following summary, I give the numbers characterizing our research for summer 2023 work on Tshila: 

1.

9 native speaker consultants (4 women, 5 men), organized into five teams.

2.

3,457 sound files of lexical items, phrases and sentences (no oral texts).

3.  

143 notebook pages of grammar and lexicon.

4. 

565 lexical items (entered into FLEx).

5. 

120 pronouns (subject, object, possessor, subjunctive)

6. 

163 photos