Amarkantak Gondi Standardization Conference – Day 5

A long road ahead

Today we saw the final product begin to emerge. All of the past few day’s hard work is organised in a master spreadsheet and finalised by the team (gaps are filled, all of the groups’ words are collated).

The conference work is projected onto a wall to be finalized

 In the screenshot above you can see some of this. For example, in the column on the far left is the Gondi word गाडी (gari) which means ‘to come together’. It is a verb and its Hindi equivalent is, in the fifth column, आमान सामन आना. The columns after that are the different regional variations: visible are the contributions from participants from Andhra Pradesh and Telengana but beyond that there are also entries from Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. 

Patterns of similarity are easy to spot and tend to map onto geographical location: AP and Telengana have many words that are same, similarly Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Odisha, far away on the East Coast, seems to have the most differences. 

It has been, by all accounts, a successful few days. Tomorrow everyone will go home, the details of publication will be worked out and a report will be written and distributed to everyone who is interested or in a position to further the cause of the Gondi language.

Amarkantak Gondi Standardization Conference - Day 4

Part of the team

This morning was spent continuing yesterday’s work of collating the regional variations of Gondi words. 

Taking notes

This process continues to present interesting challenges. One problem, for example, is translating very specific words. The Gondi word 'kacci visi', for example, refers to a large kind of biting fly common in the hill regions of Telengana. 

Screenshot of the Gondi dictionary (it is written in the Telugu script, rather than the Devanagari that our dictionary will be completed in)

Everyone struggled with coming up with suggestions for this one: the specificity of this word makes it difficult. It identifies a single insect species that may not be present elsewhere, or may have different names across the region and it is difficult to be sure that this word refers to the same insect as another word (the English translation, ‘large green fly’ is, of course, no help at all). It is only through group discussion that such things can be studied.

 After lunch we all went on a cultural outing through the thick forest and the hills to the nearby town of Amarkantak. Amarkantak is a famous holy site for Hindus, the area is the source for three rivers: the Narmada, the Son and the Johila. The town holds a special value for pilgrims who embark on a daunting three year journey from the source of the Narmada all the way to the sea and back again.

Hanging out

 Also of interest in the town are the historic temples built by a Gond King who ruled the area long ago. On the top of one of these temples is his royal seal, a lion on top of an elephant, which is often used today as a symbol for the Gond people.

The Gondwana royal

Amarkantak Gondi Standardization Conference – Day 3

Conference delegate is hard at work logging all of the word variations

CGNet’s involvement with the people of central India has brought it to the Indira Gandhi National Tribal University for the third conference on Gondi language standardization. We will be keeping you updated as events progress here.

Microsoft Excel is, I think, rarely used for a purpose like this. Each of the columns shown above documents a different regional variation of Gondi words: the finished product should resemble a kind of thesaurus of differences throughout Gondi speaking regions. Participants gather in groups to log the variations on the words that they know. After the initial teething problems (organizing laptop chargers, finding the correct files and formats etc.) this is a fairly speedy process: this morning each group got through around forty words in two hours. 

Discussion is essential to this process

The participants are using for reference a basic Gondi-Hindi-Telegu-English dictionary that gives them a framework to build on. Each group is allotted a number of pages and works through the words one by one, giving the Gondi word and its Hindi and Telegu equivalents until a sense of the word is realized and regional variations can be suggested and logged. This dictionary, while essential, importantly lacks the regional variation this conference is trying to pin down: though a useful tool to use, it was compiled using data from only a small area of Telengana, and requires further input from the wider Gondi region to be called truly representative of the language as a whole. 

The Gondi words discussed today cover a wide range of topics: ‘sandal’, ‘silver neck ornament’, ‘bleed’, ‘roof’, ‘storm’, ‘rash’, a word that translates as ‘to uproot many things quickly’ and ‘fishing net’. 

After everyone finished for the afternoon we were treated to a performance by a Gondi dance troupe.

And after that, everybody joined in!