Warao archive
This collection contains audio recordings of elicitation session conducted with speakers of Warao. The sessions were conducted throughout the project but most of them were recorded between August and September 2018, when Dr. Rybka was collecting data for a grammatical sketch of Warao (Romero-Figueroa and Rybka n.d). “Elicitation sessions” are be understood here specifically as sessions during which Warao grammatical and lexical structures were elicited with any of the following methods. First, the participants may have been asked to provide Warao equivalents of English words and clauses produced by the researcher. Second, the participants may have been instructed to react in Warao to a...
This collection includes the recordings of sessions that were centered around stimuli designed to elicit particular type of linguistic structures, in particular the language of space and the ideophones.
This collection includes recording of Warao people talking about different topics from everyday life. Many of the recordings center around culturally salient topics, such as subsistence practices, in particular the cultivation of manioc and its processing into edible byproducts, the processing of the moriche palm into twine, and the production of hammocks and other tools from the twine. Other narratives are of a more personal nature, whereby the consultants speak about their families and their life.
This collection contains audio recordings of traditional Warao stories. Many of these stories have been also documented in written form among Venezuelan Warao though there are few audio or video recordings of these oral traditions being told. It is also noteworthy that many of the Warao stories, including those collected here, are also known among the linguistically unrelated neighboring groups: the Lokono and the Kari’na, representing the Arawakan and the Cariban language family, respectively.
This collection contains songs sung in the Warao language. The Warao are known for their music tradition described by researchers such as Olsen (1996) for the Venezuelan dialect. The songs documented here can be compared to those of the Warao from Venezuela. It is noteworthy that all of them (the first three, 2018) were voluntered by the consultants.
This collection contains audio recordings of translation session conducted with speakers of Warao. During “translation sessions”, the consultants are typically engaged into one of the following two tasks. First, the Warao consultants may have been asked to listen to a playback of a Warao recording to help the researcher translate the recording into English. As a norm, the first translation is provided by the author of the recording right after the recording session. It is common, however, that another translation session follows, during which the same story is translated by another consultant in order to fill in gaps and so that the researcher can ask clarifying questions. Second, at the...