Olga Kazakevich

Research Computer Centre, Moscow State Lomonosov University

A Multimedia Database of Ket: the following step in the project realization

Language is a part of environment, and its destruction is painful for a person and can have serious consequences for society. At present all over the world minor languages undergo a powerful pressing from dominating languages. In Russia it is Russian that dominates. As our civilization is based upon diversity, including language diversity, the preservation of this diversity is crucial for preservation of our civilization and avoiding crisis situations. The project “A Multimedia Database of Ket” being realized at the Laboratory for Computational Lexicography of the Research Computer Centre of Moscow State Lomonosov University with financial support of the Russian Foundation for the Humanities is just aimed at preservation of linguistic diversity or at least the memories of it for the future generations. The project proceeds on new linguistic material the work started by our group in 2001 which presupposed complex documentation of endangered languages of Russia using modern technologies of audio and video recording and creation of a computerized multimedia archive (a database) for preserving the collected field data and for providing a convenient access to them during their future processing. It is not by chance that the Ket language was chosen for our present project. The language situation among the Ket to-day is such that if we don’t create a representative audio and video archive containing fixations of the language functioning in the nearest future, we’ll lose the last chance to do it at all: only in the elder generation Ket full speakers can be still found; among those who are 35-55 years old there scarcely are a handful of Ket speakers; as for the youth (under 35), only some of them are able to understand (not to speak) Ket.

Fully acknowledging the importance of the programming support of our database, we think that the crucial point of the project is the quality of the information to be stored in the base. Though Ket linguistic materials is now being collected by the researchers of Tomsk Teacher Training University, Institute of Philology of the Siberian Section of the Russian Academy of Sciences as well as by German linguists, up to now, as far as we know, audio recording of the sounding Ket speech was a sort of subsidiary option where by the main form of linguistic material fixation remained graphics (transcription). Besides, practically in all field researches of Ket done the informants were chosen among competent speakers of the elder generations, while the “spoilt” speech variety of the speech of those who are younger and less competent remained outside the research interests. Working at our project we see one of our tasks in fixation of the Ket speech produced by representatives of different generations with different linguistic competence which will give us an opportunity to reveal the dynamics of language changes in the situation of language shift. The Ket language is split in local dialects (the Northern Ket, the Middle Ket, and the Southern Ket), all these dialects are to be represented in our database.

In the framework of the project we organized two expeditions: in 2004 to the village Sulomai (the Baikit district of the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous area) and in 2005 to the villages Kellog and Surgutikha (the Turukhansk district of the Krasnoyarsk territory). Our objective in the course of the expeditions was complex documentation of the local dialect of each visited village, which included collection of demographic, sociolinguistic, and linguistic information, information on traditional and modern culture, as well as folklore recording. The linguistic data brought from the expeditions consists of audio recordings for a sounding dictionary of Ket representing three local sub-dialects and audio and video recordings and transcriptions of 35 Ket texts (10 texts in the Sulomai sub-dialect, 23 texts in the Kellog sub-dialect, and 10 texts in the Surgutikha sub-dialect).

To record materials for the sounding dictionary we used a standard Russian-Ket word list sorted thematically, a sort of a thesaurus, which comprised about 1500 entries. The word list was compiled on the basis of the published Ket dictionaries, first of all “Vergleichendes Wцrterbuch der Jenissej-Sprachen” edited by H. Werner (Werner 2002), and focused on specific features of the Ket and not of the Russian lexical system: beside the words designating objects and actions of everyday life and the Swadesh 100-word list, it includes the words designating objects and notions of traditional Ket culture, and animals and plants of the Ket environment. Working with a Ket informant we gave him/her a Russian word from the list as a stimulus. If the informant couldn’t give a Ket equivalent of this word we gave a second stimulus – the Ket equivalent from our list, and in case the word was familiar to the informant asked to pronounce it in the proper way.

The majority of the recorded texts are life stories, only quite few people remember folklore texts and are able to perform them. The most valuable folklore recordings were done in the village Sulomai from Olga Vasilievna Latikova (born in 1917), a most experienced informant who in the 1960-1970s had worked with E.A. Kreinovich, A.P. Dulson, E.A. Alekseenko. Really interesting are also the songs of Alexander M. Kotusov (born in 1955) recorded in Kellog. For audio recording we used minidisk recorders. This digital technique was chosen because of the high quality of audio data it supplies. For video recording we used a digital video camera.

At present the database contains: the first module of the sounding dictionary of Ket local dialects (the Sulomai sub-dialect); photo materials and representing the villages and environment of the Ket communities visited during the expeditions, inhabitants of the communities including our informants; brief linguistic biographies of our informants; description of the language situation among the Ket in the whole and in the surveyed communities in particular; brief information on the Ket phonemic system. In the nearest future the sounding dictionary will be enlarged getting two new modules with the Kellog and the Surgutikha sub-dialect materials, and the database will be supplemented with a text pool containing audio and graphic representation of the recorded texts. A demo version of the database can be found on the Internet sites sdld.narod.ru and minlang.srcc.msu.ru.

WWW lingsib.iea.ras.ru