CHAT: Ability of Americans & Europeans to locate each others cities (was Re: The [??] attribute)

Christophe wrote:


>En réponse à Roger Mills <romilly@...>:
I once had _two_
>> students from The Country Whose Capital is/was?  Ouagadougou, a
>> beautiful
>> word-- fascinating language too, More [mOre]-- and difficult (we used it
>> in
>> a Field Methods class).
>>
>
>Ouagadougou is the capital of Cameroun (at least when written with the
French
>orthography), former Haute-Volta. I still remember it because such a name
sound
>so silly in a French ear that it's unforgettable :)) .
>
At the time of my 10-yr-old sick-in-bed geography readings, I thought it was
["uga'dugu], possibly even more silly.

ObNatlang:  One clever student in the class found a couple articles on
More... IIRC the author posited a remote relation to the Bantu languages.
There were 5 or 6 noun classes, distinguished by their sing/plur _suffixes_,
but verbal class-agreement.  When we started eliciting sentences, there
turned out to be someting tonal going on too. Very difficult to puzzle out
in a mere 10-week "quarter".  Pity I've lost my notes...I do recall that
/-dugu/ was one of the plural markers, so apparently the city's name is a
plural of something... it would be more or less ['wa.ga.du.gu] with the
medial /a/ and /u/ very short.