Audio recordings: Andrew Hsiu. (2017). White Gelao (Judu) audio word list. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1122527
Conference presentations: Hsiu, Andrew. 2013. The Gelao languages: Preliminary classification and state of the art.
Journal entry: July 31, 2012
The Qingkou township 箐口乡 officials knocked on my motel door right before 9 am to give me a ride to Judu village 居都村, Qingkou township 箐口乡, Liuzhi Special District, Liupanshui, Guizhou, China. They went from Duoque township 堕却乡 directly to Judu, since the Qingkou township headquarters was much further to the west. The scenery was breathtaking, as Niupo and Judu villages were in a valley surrounded by steep limestone cliff mountains that nearly rose vertically.
Unlike all of the other ethnic Gelao villages I had been to, in Judu, the Gelao language was actually used far more in daily conversation than Chinese. Even the village officials often spoke Gelao to each other. They took me to the Judu elementary school, where I was to work with my informant, have my meals, and stay for the night. I then played Jerold Edmondson’s recordings of northern Vietnam’s White Gelao to them, and then said that much of it was intelligible, except for some variations in tone and lexicon.
Su Xingming 苏兴明, an elementary school teacher in Judu village, was my informant. I elicited more than 500 vocabulary words. Unfortunately, the static noise from the Minghai H15 unidirectional microphone was quite frustrating to me. I was always making sure my informant spoke loud and close enough to the microphone as to speak significantly louder than the static. However, I still successfully collected excellent data, as Su Xingming was a highly cooperative and literate informant who had worked with field linguists before. He had personally known Li Jinfang and his graduates students Kang Zhongde and Li Xia.