Transcribing the obscure

摘要

In grad school, I had this idea that would go on to get a PhD in field linguistics. We were doing these projects to figure out the phonetic structure of a language unknown to us based on our own transcriptions from a native speaker, and I picked the most obscure one I could find. There was a girl I knew from Gabon who spoke a language she called Bateke, which was also the name of her minority ethnic group there. The language had no alphabet, she said. Nothing was written down in her language, at least that she knew of.