Friday, April 24, 2009

Cool Playground!

I just finished comparing the Wagi word lists, which, I must say, is my favorite part of any survey report. I took five lists of 170 words, lined them up and decided which words were similar and which were different (there is a detailed set of guidelines for this process, I don't just follow my own whim, but I will spare you the details here!). Then I used a computer program to calculate the percentage of words that are similar. So at the end of the process I'm able to say, for example, "If you're comparing Village A with Village B, 95% of the words on the list are similar between these two villages." This helps us get a general idea of where dialect boundaries are and which villages can probably understand each other.

On another note . . . who needs a playground when you have a tree like this?!

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