Progress so far

[Ryan....@gmail.com]

Hello everyone,

I've just joined this group and I'm a little bit intimidated by the
amount of data available. Despite having recently graduated with a
B.S. in Linguistics from SUNY Oswego, I don't have much authentic
experience dealing with raw language data so I'm not sure where to
begin. I have yet to research any current infomation on Kusaal but
was wondering what processes or interesting tidbits have been
developed so far. What is everyone working on specifically and is
there any interesting things you've noticed that you don't have time
to pursue. I have the word list database but is there any syntactic
data available yet?

I'm a full time English teacher in Japan and don't have nearly enough
time to devote to this as I would like but, I would appreciate any
help that would allow me to save thinking time and get to work on
something productive.

I look forward to collaborating with everyone.

Sincerely,

Ryan

[Mike]

Hi Ryan, welcome to the group! At this point, we're not really
functioning as a cohesive whole yet. As I said on the bottom of the
Home page, this is the first time I've ever tried something like this
and it's going to take some trial and error before we figure out the
best way to go about it. For the time being, some of the members have
downloaded the Phonology Assistant program and the PA data file in
order to look at the data individually. I'm assuming that you have
done that also?

I've not had any feedback on results from anyone yet, probably partly
due to time constraints on their part, but most likely because I
haven't made it very clear what it is we need to do first and how to
do it. I hope to correct this in the next few days by posting an
explanation of the phonological analysis that is needed and how to go
about it. But basically, from the phonetic data I've provided, the
first thing we need to do is identify the phonemes present in the
Kusaal language. So please keep an eye on your e-mail over the next
few days for more about this.

I greatly appreciate your interest and look forward to collaborating
on this project with you!

Mike

[Ryan....@gmail.com]

Ok then, simple enough. I am teaching English in Japan and fairly
busy as well so I will devote some time when I can find it but, I am
excited.

[Mike]

Great, Ryan. The first part is fairly simple, filling in the phones
and then starting to compare phonetically similar segments to see what
phonemes we get as I outlined on the "Step 1 - Phonological Analysis"
page.

Thanks again for your interest, and I'm looking forward to your
participation. Start filling stuff in as you are able. If you're not
sure about something or where to put something, just drop me a line
and we'll work it out.

Mike