Ardesen narrates - Ardeseni na isinapinenpe

This is a collection of Laz spoken texts comprising memories, fairy tales, and jokes, which were tape-recorded during a fieldwork trip to Turkey in the summer of 1996. All of the narrators are descended from the city of Arde(en or its surrounding area. Thus, this collection delivers a deeper insight into this dialect of Laz. In respect to the situation of Laz as being an endangered language, we consider the publication of the text collection as a contribution to the urgent task of documenting this language as extensively as possible.

The publication of the texts is based on four languages (Laz, English, German, Turkish). With this arrangement and presentation of the texts we intended to address the Laz-speaking community as well as linguists. Therefore, we split the collection into two parts. The first part consists of the exact transcription of the spoken texts - including notation of speech pauses and intonation - along with German and English glosses and free translations. The second part of the collection presents the transcribed texts in a smoothier, more readable version. Adjacent to each of those texts is its Turkish translation.