Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

Putting oral narratives into writing 323
3 The Teop Language Corpus
3.1 The problem of inventing new text types
For some linguists the main goal of a language documentation is to record
natural everyday discourse. Producing edited versions of indigenous oral narratives
could mean imposing the Western normative literate tradition on indigenous
oral cultures, and creating a new European style written genre (Foley
2003; Woodbury 2003). But if speakers of endangered languages want their
legends to be recorded and edited for the production of reading materials, who
would argue that unwritten languages must be kept unwritten and not attempt
to grant the request of the speech community? Complying with the wishes of
the speech community, our Teop language documentation project inevitably
led to the creation of new text types. The first new text types were the edited
versions of legends, then the local research assistants started editing autobiographical
narratives and procedural texts, which were recorded earlier and
probably represent a new text type even in their oral form. After having done
transcriptions of audio recordings and editorial work for five fieldwork sessions
between 2003 and 2006, the Teop research assistants have become so confident
in writing in Teop that in 2008 they started writing legends, personal
narratives and descriptions without doing recordings and transcriptions beforehand.
3.2 Recommendations for the editors and workflow
Being aware of the danger of westernising the Teop ways of expression (Foley
2003), I recommended the following rules for the editors of the legends:
1. Do not imitate the style of the English stories.
2. Keep as closely as possible to the original text as the author of the story is
the story teller.
3. Only remove hesitation phenomena and speech errors.
4. Only make additions where they are absolutely necessary for the readers’
comprehension.
However, as far as I can judge, the editors did not strictly follow these rules,
but made more lexical and grammatical changes than expected. To what extent
these changes can be ascribed to the influence of English, Tok Pisin or some
universal strategy of transforming speech into writing is not clear yet, because
the changes result in Teop constructions that are also found in spoken lan-