 I'm chairing this session, and the speaker who is standing in front of you is Hameya Kiryu, so I think all of you are ready, but can we, you know, do you know that can So Homa is a PhD student, so she's a good model for you, and then she went to France to do her PhD work So at the university party set, and so working on the course of the journey, which is an Endangered Language in the Victoria River District of Northern territory of Australia And we might have heard about her, but she worked on the course of this language And then she moved back to the UK and worked at Manchester University And she was awarded a PhD in 2010, and then she rejoined so last year But I suppose you were in 2010 according to your website, but I feel as if you have been here for longer than that Yeah, I kind of always stayed a bit, without the foot, teaching a bit So she has been a wonderful colleague for me But we've heard there are two students, so our students who are presenting with her So it's really an opportunity for me to hear about this project because I knew bits and pieces of this project for a long time And I'm nice to be able to hear about it more in depth today So you see two students' names here, Andriana Convalu And Marie Tauge So actually I checked with Andriana when did we first meet because she told me that she was here in 2008 And she has never left since then And she did her BA here, and then she did her masters here And then she's a PhD student, and just who is just about to finish the PhD So she has to be working on Hindi, but along with Candy, as a founder of Candy And we just introduced all three people And then Marie Tauge, who is a MBA and PhD student And both Marie and Candy, the co-founders of the Selective Project, is that right? Yes, she's always been there from the beginning But currently Marie and Andriana are the president So president, you are the co-presidents of the Selective Project So they have been working on this project for quite a while So it's a wonderful opportunity to hear about it So I think we have been looking at a book So if you have a good thing for the book, maybe you take a look and pass it around So it's for you to take a look at it to learn more about that project So Candy? Thank you very much Noriko, and good afternoon everyone It's very nice that you all come to hear about our presentation And we will concentrate this afternoon on the making of the storybook So the storybook is one of the sub-projects of our bigger Siletti project So we will give you a little bit of context We want to tell you a little bit about Siletti as a language And then Siletti as a language in London We'll just give you very, very little few markers about the Siletti project itself Before we actually start discussing the storybook And we want to present to you the steps that we undertook in the editing process But we want to highlight, let's call these learning opportunities maybe We could call these challenges that we encountered For example, Andriana will talk to you about grammar And she will illustrate the point that we want to make with one more theme The e-morphim, the e-morphim Andriana will talk about learning opportunities with regard to autography and script And I will conclude with showing you a few of the issues that arose when we actually had We dealt with an artist making the illustrations for the project So the Siletti language, Siletti belongs to the eastern branch of the Indo-Aryan subgroup Of the Indo-European languages So if you look at this tree, it looks very nice because Siletti is actually showing on the tree Next to Bengali And of course Siletti is spoken in Bangladesh and in the diaspora by up to 11 million people It is a very important element in the identity of people in Bangladesh And I will show you a few maps in Bangladesh but also in areas of India and Assam And there is also a very lively community in diaspora Both in South Asia and Europe and Australia and around the world So just a few maps to situate Siletti, I suppose, within South Asia So that it is part of Bangladesh of course And I'm sort of showing you this map because we might think that Siletti is spoken So this is Bangladesh and sort of surrounded by India And there is Siletti province here And what we want to bring to your attention in fact is that Siletti is not spoken only in Bangladesh It's also spoken in parts of India So if you look here in pink on this map, it's a bit of a maybe confusing map But I think it's one of the few maps that we know that actually shows these borders That we want to show you these boundaries So in pink are the international borders, so there's India and Bangladesh In blue is the areas where Bengali is spoken as a language And in red is actually Siletti As you see, Siletti is spoken across the border in Assam province of India, for example And in some of the valleys over there So this is actually very important and very relevant for the work that we do in the Siletti project And maybe it will explain a few of the challenges that we encountered So the Siletti project is not concerned with Siletti as it is spoken in Bangladesh But rather with Siletti as it is spoken in London And this is a map showing London and its districts or boroughs And the very first thing that I want to point out here is that in green are the areas So these are the sort of inner London boroughs In many places in London in the official sort of representations Bengali and Siletti are sort of put together as one language So Siletti is not considered to be a separate language And in fact it is a very big issue, widely debated Whether Siletti has the status of a language So you will see what we think about as we progress in the presentation But it is something that is widely debated And if you encounter people from Bangladesh everybody will have an opinion about that So 95% of the UK Bangladeshi community actually come from the province of Siletti And there's a few more numbers maybe that are relevant So this shows that out of the 300,000 people in the last census that come originally from Bangladesh 55% of them live actually in London So this is just showing again the same inner boroughs where And this is what we're interested in Bengali or Siletti are spoken because they are always kept together And 22% of the community are actually found for example in Tower Hamlet And in this map again these people are not identified as Siletti speakers But as Bengali speakers So if we just again to understand a little bit better the community, the people we are working with The earliest migrant actually who came to the UK, they were seamen And they arrived just after the Second World War And you might wonder a little bit why people who come from a country that is at the foothills of the Malaya Are actually sea people Well we discovered that ourselves I suppose But the valleys of Bangladesh are flooded every year during the monsoon So that there is a very long tradition of people being good seafaring people Or waterfaring people maybe There was a second wave of migration after these first arrivals Who actually came as family members joining the first people who settled Most I suppose interestingly is that the different towns of Bangladesh Have actually different connections with different UK areas And the families that we work with in Camden Which is just here in Camden They tend to come from this one area in Bangladesh The project itself, we met with Dr Mukesh during 2011 And he was at that time the manager of the Suma Community Centre And also this is a community centre which is about 10 minutes away from here next to Houston Station And he explained or he expressed his concerns that immigrants The new immigrants from Silat to the UK seem to speak a different language To those better established immigrants And that younger generations were no longer using the heritage language And then seem to be becoming much more monolingual in English He also discussed with us how younger people seem to be under pressure When they are negotiating their identity, multicultural, multilingual identity And of course it is quite natural that language may have evolved differently in Bangladesh As it has here for those people who are living in London But he was very particularly concerned about the negative experiences of the young people Who went to visit their families in Bangladesh would speak Silatih But then when they spoke Silatih in Bangladesh they were told that they spoke funny or something like that Which did not make them want to speak very much more Silatih when they were here back in London So he was interested and sort of brought all these things to our attention And then he asked us if we would help in documenting and describing Silatih as it is spoken in Camden And particularly documenting the language of these elderly speakers who spoke Silatih as Silatih is spoken in Camden And not anymore in Bangladesh We have had support from the linguistics department throughout And at the time Tom Castle was working in the archive My friend was teaching the course in field methods And the three of us decided we'll try and do something that will link up the courses in language documentation and description But we always ran it as an extracurricular activity So for a few years we did have consultants in field methods who were Silatih speakers But we always ran in parallel different activities that were open to everyone So the project has never been restricted to only students in the MA in language documentation and description That's never been the idea So the whole point of the project is to try and do some real work documentation work But it's also been a fantastic opportunity for the students to bring along their own knowledge, their own skill, their own experiences And this is why we've ended up with such a rich output There is, I should mention, another institution which is the SOAS Silatih language society So this is all the societies that are supported by the Student Union And the language society actually teaches Silatih for the last two years at least in London So we have so far created a dictionary app which you can access We have put out, we did have an academic conference because we've had fantastic outputs from essays For example, analysis that have come out of the field methods for students' work and field methods These students wrote their dissertation on Silatih and I just felt that this is proper scientific output as far as linguistics descriptions go So we had an academic conference two years ago and we're actually going to have a publication out of that And the storybook last year, three years before There's been a lot, I feel maybe a little bit unfair when I mention these sort of these outcomes Because through the years there's been sort of many smaller sub-projects that may not have such a glamorous, yeah Maybe it's not as glamorous to call, filming people making curry and rice And explaining to us all the steps how it should be done But all of these sub-projects altogether are actually sort of a crew, a lovely amount of on Silatih Alright, so the community, when we speak about the community, we're mainly in our project talking about the people at the Suma Centre And mainly we've worked with sort of three main groups, the women's group So these are elderly women and most of them don't speak English and they meet together to do all kinds of activities and exercise and so on They've been very supportive of what we do, there is a men's group, they are usually bilingual But they are not really interested in our Silatih efforts and some of them are actually against us working as we do And we've worked also with the youth group which meets later in the afternoons early evening And these young people they usually say that they speak Bengali, their parents have always told them so They're mostly unaware that Silatih is a different language And these are the people who have suffered the identity crisis either when they visit families back in Silatih Or here in London because in some schools for example organise Bengali lessons, not realising that Silatih and Bengali might not be the same thing And when they attend Bengali lessons they are usually told that they need to speak properly As if Bengali is not a proper language and they should speak Bengali, they should speak properly We've also worked with some other organisations for example Shantia Boy which is an SIL group And they do provide Silatih Niagara lessons and you learn more about Silatih Niagara So that if you want to learn how to write using the script that is specific to Silatih You can go to them and you will learn how to script to them We've worked with them So the storybook project itself, well the money to start with maybe put that out of the way We did get funding from the Student Union and we also had the crowdfunding campaign One student, I think I've auditioned on that two years ago, funded is made by doing crowdfunding So we thought us how to do it and we collected £2,400 I think, so that was great And of course the whole idea of the book was the conjunction of everyone in the group But particularly we benefited from two of our students who had experience with book publishing Emily and Daniel and they are still part of all this Although Emily is somewhere between Australia and I don't know where at the moment And Daniel is in Spain So the very first stage and we will discuss these stages as we go through the presentation today So we used three stories that were recorded and transcribed Sort of this material was recorded either during film methods or outside film methods classes And they were transcribed in IPA and translated Then once we selected these stories to do the storybook We worked with the two authors to do some editing So that was really moving from the spoken to the written register We needed to deal with variation and we'll discuss that at Lent, Andrea and Marie will tell you all about it And finally we had to make this into a book So all kinds of issues with layout and illustrations and we'll discuss that a little bit too So I would rather leave the place now to Andrea But really we have these three stories, Boy Who Cried Tigers So you may recognize that as a very famous fable So sometimes it's not a tiger, in other places it could be other kinds of animals But I think that you're familiar with the story The London of Sticks and the Wind and the Sun And so when we edited the story, so we had the recordings But when we used these stories we had to first of all sort of do a first editing Which meant eliminating repetitions, reordering the texts Structuring the text because from the spoken word to the written word These spoken sentences don't come out in the same way that written sentences do And we had to make decisions about the choice of words, for example Because of course when people speak Siletti there's a lot of words that are Bengali And in some cases we were asked to replay some of the words that were too obviously Bengali And some of the times we had to keep some of these Bengali words We'll discuss these things, we'll show you some examples And then the whole point is that we are working on a language that is Well first of all not considered as a language and has no standard written form And there is a lot of variation So of course variation in pronunciation, variation in the production of grammar Anyway I don't want to keep speaking because all of this will make so much more sense Once you see some examples of the challenges that we encountered So I leave the place for Andrea now to tell you about the case of the E So I'll tell you about the little marker in Siletti, the marker E Which raised a lot of questions for us in the process of making the storybook And more particularly in the process of editing the storybook Because we observed a certain degree of variation between our two authors In their intuitions and how the marker should be used So for us these were big questions of how to deal with variation And how do you choose what to edit and what not to edit And what is our role in the whole process, that was a big question for us So the stories were first recorded but the text underwent quite a lot of transformation So what you see in the storybook, the printed text, is not what we originally recorded And when it comes to this E marker The transcriptions from the recordings show that in all three stories This little marker is realized on agents But not so consistently in the third story compared to the other two And what struck our interest is that the authors themselves entered into a discussion In how they shared different intuitions in how they used this marker And what they should do about it And what was even more interesting was that they decided that They would add the marker where it was not originally produced So in the end we have the printed storybook where all three stories are quite uniform In the patterns they show when it comes to the use of this little marker Although originally they were not so uniform So I will now walk you through the three stories And I'll show you the distribution of this little marker where it was produced Where it was not produced and the changes that were made So the first story is a boy who cried tiger And it's about a little boy who would take the cattle to pasture And in the jungle, here the tiger has come, the tiger has come So you can see in green the tiger and in blue come So when we had the tiger come, we didn't have the marker realized And if you look at the second example, here in his screaming The local people would come running with sticks and spares to save him And in this one we have Manush people And again, no marker Moving further in the story, one day while he put the cows to pasture A tiger really came So again we have bag, I say, tiger come, no marker In four, now we have having come The tiger attacked the boy And here we see the little marker which we have close to the agent Surfacing on the tiger So tiger attack head door, we get the marker So the little boy was screaming a lot The tiger has come and this is consistent so far With come, we never get this little marker The tiger is eating with all tiger eat take We have the marker there on the tiger And the tiger called me, helped me Again we have bag, catch, take, go And further on in the story The village people thought that he always lies and screams And jokes like this So they don't come to his rescue And in this little sentence we have people And we have the marker realized on them with Mind, people thought And we have the little marker there realized So if we could sum up a little bit very quickly We had the marker on tiger and people When we had the verbs for what tiger attack eat think But we never got it whether it was a tiger or people Where the verb come So if we move to the second story So that was narrated by the same author And the same patterns were there Seven just gives you a further example So this story is about a father who has six sons Who would argue a lot And in order to teach them a lesson The father tells them So one day the father told them You all each bring me a bag of stick And we have father set With say we have the marker there on father And in So if the father instructs them bring me a stick They all manage to break, we have a little interstations They all manage to break the stick But then he tells them to try to break The whole bundle of sticks and of course they can't do that So in the end The father advised them Remember unity is strength So in the select line we have Father, a very good And we have a little Agentive marker there So if we can quickly wrap up what you observed So we had two stories which were said by the same author And we saw this little marker Realized quite consistently on agents When we had verbs such as hit Attack hit, eat, catch, then give advice Say never with the verb come So we had to go beyond the stories Because the data was not enough really To make any definite conclusions So based on the dissertation sessions With this particular consultant And his native speakers intuitions It looked like Hindi had What I think widely called splitting transitive And we discovered That he would put this little marker On all agents of transitive clauses And some in transitive clauses So verbs such as laugh, jump, dance But it would be ungrammatical for him To have it with verbs such as die, fall, grow And interestingly come would be thrown in there as well So that was very nice And it looked very organized And it was very nice But if we look at the third story It gets quite clear that there is much more That you could say about this little marker So this story was narrated by a different author And the examples that I'm giving you now Are examples from the unedited version Of the text So this is not what you will see In the very book itself So in this one we have Once the wind and the sun Were arguing about who was stronger So we have Wind and sun, far and though No marker In the second one we have We have the wind said my strength is more We will say no marker, wind And we have the sun said No my strength is more The sun said no marker And when we have the man said Why is it suddenly very strong in the game With the man we had a little marker there And 13 gives you just a further example With the man, finally the man took off his show Oh, I've talked about it Was there no story on that? Yes, so we have We have a little marker on the man And at this point we thought that Animacy could be a play It looked like you could make Some sort of argument when it comes to animacy But if we look at Other examples in the story It doesn't look so simple So in the 13 we have The wind exhaled wind And in that case we get the marker In the second month The wind made dust and dirt And trees leaves, everything fly everywhere And again we have it on the wind But again in the big sail It's dropped So in this one we have the wind exhaled Wind much more forcefully like a storm So we have Boyard, we have Boyard Starla, big sails, no marker Although in the 13 we had it So that wasn't I mean you couldn't argue for A split system of some sort Something else seemed to be going on And of course we had to go beyond The stories again So we worked with The lady who narrated these stories And we found that this optionality It's not It doesn't come up only with inanimate Which is what this story would make you think The same optionality was there With animate and piece And this is something that we are Working on right now So I can't give you any very good Conclusions and very good analysis We are quite certain that Context related factors are at play But what is interesting for us here Was that the two speakers Did not share the same intuitions So The author of the first two Stories would treat the marker With the transitive clauses And some intransitives Whereas the second author Would treat it as more optional And what was I think most interesting Was that the authors themselves Picked up on these differences And they themselves discussed What could be done in that case And what was decided was to Add the marker in the end So 16 and 17 Show you examples Which you can find in the book itself What you see here In yellow was added Although it was not originally produced And so I think this Concludes this little case study And I think it was a very valuable Experience for us To be there and to observe The whole discussion To be part of that decision making process In some way But I think the question that kept Going on in our head was What is our role in this Do you make any suggestions Do you interfere in the discussion Or are you more of a quiet observant Observer kind of Active listener kind of thing I think this is a strategy that we preferred Not to make any suggestions To ask any specific questions about it But to Leave it to the intuitions of the authors And how they would like the story To be represented I think we can move to Illustration, no, to selling So here at SOAS In our program we're learning to be Documentary linguists Which means that we don't invent data We collect the data and then we Analyze it the way we get it But when we produce something Decisions have to be made And I would extremely uncomfortable With these decisions But they had to be done It's been a good learning experience I suppose So the first foray Into writing Saletti Is that we had several options In the end we did not do IPA It breaks a linguist's heart But it's not practical We also have the Roman script In which some people are literate Because they know English These are from the omnibot page We did not use that transcription system In Roman You'll see the most later on There's the Eastern Nagri or the Bengali script And then there's the Saloti Nagri script Which is being revitalized It was used probably from the 16th To the 18th century pretty regularly Depending on a person's literacy And then it When Bangladesh was created There were some instances of Encouraging it to be no longer used So it has been used for a couple generations now And in addition to deciding Which scripts to use We had to decide how We were going to use them I was told that you could not put All four lines on one page It would not look good So in the end Our linguistic landscape Came about putting Nagri As the Saletti identity In the forefront Using the English The Roman transcription As a form of aid To help pronunciation To help learn Saloti to read Saloti Nagri And then we put the Eastern Nagri and English translations In the back The English translation is a true translation The Eastern Nagri is not a Bengali translation We transcribed Saletti Using a system of transcription Decided by the authors Just because I think the authors again They understood that There was going to be pressure On saying that Saletti is Bengali And if the Bengali script Was just simply standard Bengali That there would be confusion So there was an effort To differentiate Saletti From them all And there are copies of the books Being passed around If you'd like to have a look at it The other ones as well Are they Everybody has time to look at it So the challenge with the Saloti Nagri Hadn't been used in quite a while But it now exists in Unicode So there is a community of Saloti Nagri users That I got most of my data from To see that these are the old Old books And then we've got a Facebook friend Who started translating some primers That they use in school in Bangladesh And Facebook So both of our authors were literate They're both literate in Eastern Nagri and Bengali And in English, the Roman script But not in the Saloti Nagri So you know and find How to spell all these different words And we've had this wonderful Facebook page It's been great Just that we can go And people contribute with the way They think things should be spelled The meanings of proper Saletti words People asking about Difference in vocabulary And then he just saying I don't understand this Can someone please tell me what it is So it's a good So it can be used for data collection Okay so Not only So before we can actually write the language We have to work on The orthography And to work on the orthography You have to know a little bit about How the system of the language works So Saletti is a typical South Asian language And it does differentiate between Dental and Alveolar Retroflex Flosos It's closest neighbour Asamese does not Saletti does not distinguish Between non aspirated And aspirated consonants Which has been very interesting In the spelling because in South Asian scripts You have separate letters for both The aspirated and non aspirated consonants So Unlike standard Bengali This was another challenge to spelling Is that Standard Bengali neutralise All the siblings To the post Alveolar Whereas Saletti has kept A differentiation between the siblings Sur and sure In addition to Adding some more fricatives That standard Bengali doesn't have Again standard Bengali has Long and short vowels Saletti and Asamese do not Asamese still writes them Saletti and Agri cannot write them Because they just have the one Diacritic for the vowel Knowing that Saletti and Agri Is much more suited for Saletti Than the Bengali script 500 years ago people already recognised That Saletti did not have Long and short vowels Saletti has lexical Tone or so I've read I now have a long list Of Homophones that Have a high tone The hypothesis is That when Saletti lost Its aspiration That a high tone Was left over And then Saletti Has Classifiers Unique to the Eastern branch Of South Asian languages Compound post positions And it tends to be Standard Bengali tends to be So they just kind of Say things should be one word When I don't see it Okay So we have a database 5600 entries With An extra almost 2,000 variants So a third of our database Is just variants And that's a natural language It's not standardised People have lots of variations Do we write this? A classic example Half the people will say Half the people say Both are correct What do we do? Here in this case We decided to go with One But then we come across things Like the emphatic markers They're both E and O In the differences we kept them I proposed making them Stand in uniform But nope Diagnetics as well We've got a couple cases where All of a sudden we have an E Instead of an A I asked if we wanted to be changed No, it was good the way it was So we kept that So what's really interesting In this editing process Is our two speakers are very intelligent people They're literate They've learned a lot Over the years They've trained themselves To identify which language is which It's not a natural situation For multilingual speakers But the fact that they're literate In other languages doesn't mean They have a sense Or an instinct To spell anything Which made editing somewhat difficult Because I had to almost push And ask a direct question Because for them it just seemed okay Informal writing Informal usage So, okay Here we go So from transcription to written text Originally we presented The stories transcribed We've got IPA We've got the Roman alphabet My attempts at Nagri And my attempts at Eastern Siloti Nagri and Eastern Nagri And then we started going through them But then we always come up with these By mixing everything together Not problems Issues, issues came about So for example, do we write So I'm going to go really quick You don't have to understand any of this Because I know the scripts are So the first issue Do we always write a good after the veiler nasal In some words we do and some words we don't We do sometimes and sometimes we don't This spelling It seems like Manus would have been The natural Siletti Pronunciation but the Bengali Manush Has become more standard So nobody says Manus anymore They just say Manush Which causes a problem when we start using it With phonotactics So what happens Is that Manush becomes My Che Which is classed in Siletti The underlying Affricates were Frictivized Were weakened to simply Sö and Sö Unless they encounter A dental next to them And then they'll manifest again As an affricate So we have here is unfortunately How do we spell this word now That The different scripts it's not going to work By using one In one language And a different letter and a different script And then of course again we have Elated bowels Do we write them, do we not write them Some say yes, some say no Again Difference is opinion dropping What do we transcribe if this is transcription Or do we respect a more standard Bengali spelling That was always debated Where we Stick something in there or not Here in this transcription Of Bishash It's a more Sanskritic classical Word We tended not to use this letter Anywhere else in transcription except in this word Because if we kept two of these Letters It struck them as not being correct They had their Habit of seeing A certain spelling, a certain way It outweighed The logic of the transcription system That we were developing But then in Sotinagri It doesn't have these different letters So we do have The same letter twice And then words Here we have An example of Emo Lakhan Which would be a phrase But it's been condensed Sounds have been Dropped Eila also exists in the story Which Eila is a very reduced version Of Emo Lakhan Here they say Emo Lakhan Do we write it as one word Do we try to keep things more regular What do we do And then we come to Some more phonotactics In Salati the Valer-plosive Is Next to high vowels And A and A Except when we have it in a Jemenit In a Jemenit it will still go back To the plosive form In an expression So you say Ekhano You write an Ekhano Should it be one word Two words They're saying here Yes it should be one word Because of this pronunciation change You say Ekhano for them it's one word But then we get to other examples Ekhlogi they're saying Yes it should be one word Because it's more of an adverb Ertlage, pronounced a lage Know that should actually be two words Again between the Ita and Eta And there's one person who says Ertlage But in the end we respected the author's intuitions And then again with the South Asian Scripts we have Conjunct letters do we use Conjuncts taking the two letters together Doing not So that's kind of just A tiny little snippet Of what we had to deal with With different scripts And different spelling conventions So just to Resume In the end The use of the Roman script We mostly copied social media Usage from social media and digital communications The transcript is on the page In order to help with pronunciation Because our book Is most likely available to people here In the UK This Is written actually With the kh Like the sh is to be sh Because this kh Because nobody knows the upside of IPA Basically Then we had to deal with the Afrikaets che and je That become se and ze So in the Roman transcription We have four different letters Where in the Soleti and Eastern Nogger transcriptions We just have the one because the speakers know That the letter will change depending on Where it is in the word We did not So in South Asian languages We have capital and lower case letters So we didn't impose that on them So proper names and beginning sentences Don't begin with a capital letter Like they do not begin with any capital letters In South Asian scripts So instead of using diacritics That nobody really uses because You can't use that in social media We use capital letters to indicate The retroflex sounds That's mostly for learners A person who uses social media They don't type retroflex They don't have enough of the words They don't need to spell it properly And then of course No tone is transcribed That wasn't interested Anyone in the Roman script Eastern Noggery script Again it's used in Social media and digital communication In a mixture of ways It's used between People use standard Bengali spellings But then they'll also use a formal transcription Informal transcription So our choice to put the transcription In the back pages Was to get Wide in the difference Between Saletti and Bengali Visually Again it is a transcription So it's supposed to help The pronunciation of proper Saletti I've already watched a few people Who speak standard Bengali And know standard Bengali Reading the pages and wrinkling their noses Because our spellings are so shocking to them We use The aspirated consonants So we use the letters In the Eastern Noggery script To represent The different sounds Instead of using them for the standard spellings So when we have a He We use the letter that is the aspirated con And we use the Ph For the F We didn't need to use it In a long bowels That was easy enough Because the letters weren't needed So we just picked the one Except in the one case where it didn't look right And then we had to use the two different ones Two different letters And then of course Here the Affricates Affricates were alright because Most speakers sometimes identified They transposed The letters from Standard Bengali to Saloti Noggery Easy enough in their mind With the Affricates And no tone is transcribed And we did write The Elated Bowels And then of course the Saloti Noggery script There's no standard yet So most likely we'll get lots of criticism On our spellings Simply because In the end I asked as many people as I could And people gave differing opinions And then You had to make a choice I do not like applied linguistics And what is strange enough Is people are more accepting To alter the Eastern Noggery script To write it To use it in a form of transcription But they don't want to alter Any of the Saloti Noggery script They really do want to respect Some kind of etymology One of the logics to keep Respect in etymology is they're saying That well if you respect etymology You're writing tone So all of a sudden Now here they want to indicate tone In this script Whereas the Eastern Noggery and the Roman script It wasn't an issue And so I put Here's a chart basically Of people who are learning to write Saloti Noggery It's a chart just equivalencies Between the Eastern Noggery The Bengali letters And the Saloti Noggery letters Except it doesn't work that way The Bengali letter And transliterate it Into Saloti Noggery Saloti has had a separate evolution Mainly It's loss of aspiration Also lost its h's When it's lost its h's At a time the africates were Weakening into the Sibilants Well all the sibilants Then became the h's So you can't transcribe All a word Hoice And then in the end In addition to actual spelling There was What's a word Do we space it, do we not space it Some people say That the verbs should be together Other verbs should be apart Is the negation used as a suffix Or is it a separate word Conjunct letters were Confusing and in the end They basically didn't use most of them And then There's Still a domination, even in Easter Noggery In Bengali there's been a domination Of There's been a domination Of Of English Of punctuation from English So you do have the Easter Noggery Full stop I'm not sure what this is I've only seen it ever used in poetry Whereas in Soloti Noggery These are wonderful little images I'm sorry they didn't come up But basically you've got four dots Three dots, two dots, and a dot And I haven't figured out How those are supposed to be used No one really knows And then the question mark again Is from English Soloti Noggery did have his own question mark But it wasn't put into unicode And then One idea with numerals is that In the end I guess a story of illustrated books Don't have page numbers But the question of page numbers came up Do we use Easter Noggery numbers? Do we use Roman numbers? Soloti Noggery numbers weren't an option Because they weren't put into unicode So in the end We're documenting things And we want the data from the speakers We want to know how they use The language and they use the script But in the end They don't always have the option Of using everything And so what's happened as well Is there's an extra diacritic That has been added to Soloti Noggery In the unicode Which didn't exist before And now people are arguing again How that is supposed to be used So at the same time that they're arguing That you should not use something Because it's not original They've now got this new element So in the end Make things available Make the choice available The choice is more important than anything else And So our book is An attempt Many people will have problems with it But it's a first attempt And What it is is At least encourage discussion And correction And so as a documentary linguist The way I look at orthography Especially today now that we have So much digital communication Is bottom up That the people write the way they want to write Give them the options They will use the language They will invent their own spellings And then record how those are used We don't need The top down saying this is correct This is how it should be used Just a few A few words And take some of your questions I'd like to just report a little bit On some of the issues that actually Arrows when In the making of an illustrated book So you have the book In your hands And I suppose What we did We had our funds And we had explained part of our funding With the crowdfunding Was that we were going to hire a professional But what we wanted was to create A professional Storybook Something that The speakers would be proud to show To their children and grandchildren As a storybook So we had A professional illustrator Submit portfolios And all of us decided together With the people at the community center Who Which artists we wanted to work with Because the few issues that I want to raise With you now are issues that Pertain to The very first is Cultural awareness So it's not because you are in the middle of London That you will not encounter Issues that are actually Linked with cultural Values And people So really the three main Areas Where we say issues that we encountered Where issues that you can sort of Put together under Accuracy Authenticity And the limits of artistic license Because if you hire a professional artist A professional artist is an artist And they want to do what artists do Which is their own creation So Really eventually you need to wonder Who Or to discuss who is in control of the message How much research is Needed and who should do the research Prior to even starting to do Any of the illustrations And eventually as well Somebody Needs to manage Expectations at all levels From the speakers, from the project participants Which was all of us And of course the artist as well So just look here You have the book here but Artistic license, what we mean is And some of the comments we had was It just looks Good like this but Things, okay So let's look at issues that arose With accuracy and authenticity So we did provide Our artist who was not A member of Bengali Or from Bangladesh So we showed the picture We sent big bunch of pictures And so ladies in Bangladesh Were sorry And this is the first picture that was produced And the people At the community center Really did not like that at all Because they said we don't wear this kind of coat Why you should dress like that Okay and eventually After much discussion we managed to get The artist to redraw And show us something A dress that looks I mean a piece of dress That looks more like a sari There was also an issue with Showing A basket with the tea in the back Because not everybody picks tea It's a very Sort of specialized and special people Do the tea collection and so it wouldn't be Likely that any woman would be Walking about with a basket Full of tea leaves at the back So there's some sort of exoticism Maybe that was at play there This Issue with the clothing arose Here too with the lungi Which is what the men wear Which is sort of a wrapped up piece Of material so it's not A pair of shorts So this is kind of A little game of finding the seven errors Really So some of the things that Again just discussing again Accuracy and authenticity So the clothing The Men wouldn't wear shorts like that They wear lungis which looked More like that so that was corrected So can you see as well that here This is the north wind The wind and the sun story And so they They said it doesn't make Sense that if it's windy and cold And he is wearing A cape sort of thing That he's bare chested He needs to have a t-shirt on Makes sense So they did not like this at all And another question With authenticity in the story It is mentioned that he walks on a path And here there is no path So we needed a path To be to reflect the story As it is told by the speaker And finally there is a huge Problem with the hills But the hills remain As they are Because if you have traveled In these parts of the world If you've seen the Himalayas What people call hills in those places Are the biggest mountain you've ever seen They just look like a few little hills With a few little trees on top Doesn't look like anything in Bangladesh So they were not very happy with that But eventually we had to make Decisions as what we change What we don't change and this remained But this certainly does not look Like a Bangladeshi hill Okay Who controls the message Here is as you can see This is from the boyo cry tiger And because in that Story there wasn't all that many Women Heroes The artist decided The women were going to participate In the chase But of course The people The authors and the people at the community center To whom we showed the pictures originally Said women will not First of all she's wearing her frock And second You see She also changed the Short sort of Things that they had originally On demand for the loonies But women would not Take part in the chase To you know Hunt for a tiger No with the kids Not crazy you know Leave the kids at home And go hunt tigers So we did need to We wanted to be politically correct And participate in things But this does not respect How things are done actually In reality So this is just Sort of bringing to your attention A few of the issues It was difficult To It was difficult To To Respect everybody I suppose Who had given us the stories Respect the people at the community center Who wanted to have a book that would represent them And of course Respect the artist who was creating Actually which is like What has come at the end Has come out as a really beautiful book So all of this needed to be Negotiated and Some of it With a lot of smiles and some of it With false smiles at times So this sort of Concludes our presentation I hope we have Convinced you That the exercise Of making a storybook Is certainly very worthwhile because The nice thing now that we've gone through All of these steps And that the book exists The speakers are actually very happy To have this As Marie and André and I have said There will be and there are A lot of discussions, there are a lot of comments People don't agree with Everything that is Presented and how we've presented it But on the whole they really Are very happy to see the result Of the storybook And I suppose The very last word is that If ever you imagine That making a storybook is Taking a story that you've Recorded and putting it in a book Brace yourself There's a lot more to it Thank you So I think we have time for Questions But may I ask the first question So you described Your approach I mean to publish Marie said this is the first Attempt So my question is Will there be a second Funding Yes Projects need funding And so if you ever Participate in any projects as well Funding is another thing you have to learn how to do I think there are a lot of people In the audience I think it's funding but one aspect Of all of this That has been absolutely amazing Is the dedication of all the team Because when I tell you Emily The students who were part of the project Were doing the MA Not last year, the year before So they do their MA Like we've had Marie saying Because they started with the project And have continued studying here But many students do their MA Twelve months ago But we have these group discussions With people who are one in Spain One in Japan Wherever Emily happens to be All of the You know Jean was doing work All of them have gone on To live their lives And They have Continued being dedicated to the project So I think that is an amazing Realization from the students actually So that's a commitment Very nice If I can add The reason there is this commitment Is because it has been an original experience It's not just writing an essay For a course, we're actually doing something And living real experiences Thank you Questions? Yeah Did you agree to Do it for free? Or Yeah, I mean Did you consider Selling it? Or was that something the community didn't want To happen? Or could they want to Our initial Production Our strategy is that It's probably unethical to sell it at the moment We did compensate our authors For their time With the editing process But The fact that we did crowdfunding And the fact that we said It was going to be for the community It wouldn't be ethical To sell it at the moment There has been some talk about Maybe doing a second run On some kind of paper printing But at the moment, no It was done for the community Funded by the community So we're not selling it It's not ethical at the moment to sell it How many copies? How many copies? A little over a thousand pounds For 250 copies And these are to be distributed I mean, we've done that To schools, community centers People who are interested in selecting We have colleagues in Sunderland Who asked us for some copies So it's really meant to be A community-oriented needs But we Many requests So this is why we need to discuss What So of course when we did the crowdfunding Did It was not to be sold So we need to be true to this And then But we've had a lot of discussions But I'm not sure where we're going But It may seem expensive, five, six pounds Per book that we had printed But then I guess in a smaller Run, the fewer copies you print The more each copy will cost So we did with We made as many as we could With the money we had Budgeting And we chose a Printer Who specializes in publishing Materials in Welsh Trying to become consistent Values You said You gave Community centers and schools What do they do with the book? Do you know? That will be very interesting to find out So Going to the community center And distributing the first copies of the book It was just interesting to sit there and watch people How they interacted with the book Like I said, certain people Just flipped right away to the back Because they were literate in the Magaulay Scripts, and they scrunched their nose up At these weird transcription Spellings There were a couple of women in that women's group Who did no non-green That was interesting But they weren't too interested in there At the times But people took it At least people are taking it In the end, the worst thing that could happen Is that nobody would want it So people are taking it People seem to appreciate at the moment What they do with it What people will decide to do with it Will be interesting to observe I'd be very interested In that For example, you talked about How young children Do not run Are not interested in non-insularity And also Something you would know That it's a different language from Bengali So I would be Very much interested to know If their Attitude to us Their language changed Or if any young people are interested In learning it So that I was also interested In The society That married is Italian So I wonder Who are participating If any of those people are young Yes How they look at the book So we've not Started the language lessons Yet this year But in the past years There's people who have Either interest in South Asian languages And the free language lessons Which aren't really included in courses Anymore here at SOAS, unfortunately Community members There's not just students here at SOAS There are 50, 60-year-olds Who have come to the lessons To see what's going on To understand Some are not so interested Because we start from the very beginning Each time we've had partners Living in others of Soleti speakers Attend the lessons So they have personal interests in learning And it's been very interesting Pouring into applied linguistics And curriculum development In that We've worked with Two main teachers From the community centre And then we've Tried to find teachers here at SOAS Unfortunately, it's not been very successful With SOAS students as teachers Because Deadlines arrive and they can't teach lessons So It's not been so successful But just to have different people Coming with different ideas And especially the SOAS students Their first idea Of a standardization Of their spoken language Which has been just informal to them And watching them kind of try to negotiate that And limit their usage To some teach When you teach a language You can't just speak naturally You have to reduce what you say You're focusing on what they've already learned So that's been interesting So you can use the hook too So December 5th, Tuesday From 6.30 Until 8.00 I believe it is I don't know the room number yet But we're having actually So to do something this first term We're doing a lucky language society Introduction to Soleti Nagri Meeting So anybody who's interested In South Asian languages Anybody who's interested in Scripts Anybody that's pleased to come along And you'll be looking at the book at that time You won't have to write your name In Soleti Nagri All the classics It seems actually that I'm not sure if it's again that Makes it maybe to be Thought to a little bit more But it seems that You see I'm not sure if I'm just talking About my ignorance But when we started It was very clear that Say in London people just Talked about Bengali And we've had a few people Who have come to see as partners For example from King's College A young researcher who works on Emergency messages Like a warning for Extreme temperature for example So it sort of does this course analysis But he's interested He works closely with some government bodies Who issue this back health warning If you're old don't go out too far To date that kind of thing And the kind of work that he does He is aware that For example the government Publications Are in Bengali But people speak Soleti He is aware that Soleti And Bengali are different languages And he's very interested in learning Soleti So there are Movements Towards a better awareness Of the linguistic Landscape that is much more complex Than many people imagine I'm not sure if we are contributing to this But certainly I Think that the last four or five years More people are coming up Discussing these things And I think with the story But maybe we should have started saying That it's one of the Speakers who has been a consultant For a long time Who kind of planted The idea when she told us Well you know that her children Are little kids They have lovely story books in English When they go to school They have story books in Bengali But there is never anything in Soleti They just don't think that it's possible So I think that's what planted The idea actually in the very first place So maybe people who want to Share more with the The younger generations Will have this The one story book So far Not sure If it will really happen We'll see I'm curious In the process of working In the project and Observing the different things What is your reflection on standardization Because We talked quite a bit We said the old text aren't standardized Presumably social media text Aren't standardized And standardization comes With a very heavy sociological price So I can see why you want to do what you're doing But then stepping back And thinking what is it that we're doing I'm curious Do you entity the community On the other hand The outside On the other hand I can see why you want an analysis Of this beautiful analysis Of two texts I'm sure that's the reason But that's the linguistic interest I can share the passion for that But in a text Whether there's a random A at the end Of a work or not Should be kept I had a lot of questions Because I happened to Observe This whole decision making process And for me, I had a purely linguistic interest As you said, whether this A was there Or was not there, it was not That interesting for me, but at the same time While all the decisions were being made I always Was thinking should I interfere Should I make a suggestion Should I just let the speakers decide what they want Which in the end is what we chose to do But through the whole time I felt quite a bit sad That the stories were getting stripped From their richness So it was a very tricky situation To be So you Writing is a reduction of language It's language in reduced form So There is a pressure to create something In this reduced form In the end So In the end we are doing something As we're serving as a platform for questions So the fact that nobody's Really been out there asking these questions About Saletti Nobody's considered that Saletti is a language And I know that the fact That we're associated with the university There's prestige involved And the fact that we're asking So it's not some, I mean the horror Inside our spelling Right It was very difficult Emotionally difficult as well With my database I'm proud of its Diversity And I'm proud that on the Facebook pages That we encourage this diversity But But it's asking those questions Having somebody ask the questions That as well it's important So Should we or shouldn't we But my personal passion Comes from my interest And the fact that I'm asking the questions And then just Standing back and just kind of Taking in the answers I suppose it's a more anthropological way Of doing things But the fact that the questions are being asked Is important in the end Are there any Are there any ways To select From the Dash Region How do they view what you're doing I assume they have discussed The very same issues Because they also encounter Difficulties inviting down In the language of using the scripts Come and check out the Facebook page And see many different Spelling is actually quite emotional People get very Enthusiastic And develop strong opinions So It's quite difficult actually Because I'm not sure how many people are aware Of the CELETI project in Bangladesh We do have connections With some people who have been working In Bangladesh for a long, long time Also the Political context in Bangladesh Is very, very different So I'm not sure that Because Bengali Is extremely important In the national history Of the national identity So The discussions that we have Are a lot With people in the diaspora Actually And I think that for many I'm not sure that I'm Right, but I think that for people In the CELETI Those who start writing Write in Bengali Standard education is in Bengali So I'm not sure if these questions Are really That relevant for them Although there is A trust in the CELETI Magni script Which is Taking place Interesting enough The current impetus of the Revitalization of the script Is happening because of Assam In Assam the Indian government Was questioning some of the Land deeds These land deeds were written In CELETI Nagri script So people in Assam India had to start pushing To have CELETI Nagri And at that time SIL had already published their Bible And they had Unicode SIL did the unicode Proposal So they are beneficial in some way Most of the people on the Facebook are about half and half Half are Bangladeshis interested in finding a forum That they can speak about CELETI As a language and the Facebook group You'll notice almost all Facebook groups On Most of the social media groups are closed groups Because there is There are many people out there Who are quite negative About CELETI being a language You just mentioned The Revitalization Of the CELETI Nagri script I was going to ask you about that By whom And how extensive are these Revitalization efforts And was there some kind of dialogue That you guys could work with In your In your transcription So The page Most of this I first started learning CELETI Nagri at Shantyapoi Which is the book shop Just off Brooklyn So it's a Faith orientated book Associated with the SIL people They sell the Bible, the New Testament both in In CELETI, in the Eastern Nagri And in the CELETI Nagri script Which explains why there are some weird things In their Unicode portfolio I think they did what Transition from Eastern Nagri To CELETI Nagri instead of going through Writing everything Typing everything again So I learned it there They do have teaching material that they've been working on For I say about 20 years now In London at least Within the diaspora community There has been interest in CELETI Nagri For quite a few years That interest has never blown up I suppose before But it still exists And Facebook is now supporting it If you install the font into your computer You can actually see that Instead of I don't know what happened here So This is exported as a PDF From my laptops It should have come up But it's in Unicode And it's a step to modernization That it can be used For the community For the grammar For the actual text Just the authors The two authors When I sent the completed text To various people For them to give feedback on spelling Especially CELETI Nagri spelling Some of them also gave grammar feedback We didn't take any of that It's saved somewhere The text are the original text by the authors So that's the way the authors wanted them to be And that's But there was like the case marking There was negotiation between the two of them Because we did the editing With both of them together And the story held at the same time I was just wondering Because we have the same language in Thailand I mean We have these languages from moving to Thailand They're actually from the same history But different languages So the standardizations So we just wonder It's a logical concern We have to think What standardization Maybe this is going to be I mean This is the language that they speak It's okay to be different Or maybe we should try to make it more standardize Definitely the variation That we observe is One author Has lived in the UK for a long time As a man Younger Grew up In Bangladesh So she's a woman Younger So there's age, gender And life experience And There's regional variation as well So all of this together Makes for a certain amount of variation And there seem to be differences Between male and female There are lots of variations I mean between age Between geographical regions Between sexes I'd say they I mean We did start off with Versions of the stories That were produced by each of them Individually And it's true that anything Maybe things would have turned out differently If we just worked on each author's story And then in the end What to uniformize And what not to Would that be ethical Perhaps we can talk To other members of the community And see what they have to say About these stories I think our View Is that this is Our first book It's not as if It's really possible for us To standardize The decisions about standardizing The language I think our view of our role Is that we listen We Ask questions But at the end the standardization Process is much longer And we need a lot more people involved Obviously So I'm sure you have thoughts And more questions I think we need to finish here But you can move to the ILO So if you don't have a question Please come to us at the ILO In a few minutes I'll give you 15 minutes more Thank you very much