Work Description

These Marense materials were produced during one week of fieldwork with two speakers, Pafadnam Guingri (female, b. 2003) and Pafadnam Malick (male, b. 1971). Pafadnam is the family name. Their dialect is that of Wagobia village, but they have lived in Zinibeogo village. Some files in this work are lexical spreadsheets, including a multi-page .xlsx spreadsheet and .csv copies of the individual sheets (nouns, verbs, adjectives, numerals, adverbs). For most lexical items, the tone melody is shown in the leftmost column. For nouns, singular and plural are given in separate columns. For adjectives, [HIGH] and [LOW] tonal forms are given, along with their plurals. Verbs are given along with their verbal nouns. Additional word combinations and phrases are presented in columns to the right for a few lexical items. Another item in this work is an inventory of Marense words gleaned from Robert Nicolai�s article, Le songhay central (1979). Some items are slightly retranscribed where Nicolai�s diacritics are difficult to reproduce. Another item is a pdf called Marense notes by chapter subsection. It includes notes, sometimes just lexical items repeated from the spreadsheets, for inclusion in a chapter on eastern Songhay now being written. Finally, the work includes several short recordings, on topics specified in the file names, mostly about past versus present practices. Heath has no plans to transcribe the recordings and they are being deposited for future use by anyone. Audio recording files are: Marense_2025_0940_riddles.wav Marense_2025_0930_agriculture_1.wav Marense_2025_0931_marriage.wav Marense_2025_0932_life_in_the_old_days.wav Marense_2025_0933_education_of_children.wav Marense_2025_0934_travels.wav Marense_2025_0935_taxes.wav Marense_2025_0936_hunting.wav Marense_2025_0937_circumcision.wav Marense_2025_0938_agriculture_2__pests_etc._.wav Marense_2025_0939_dyeing.wav