Sweet Elicitation

Last week was our first session with our Aymara consultant. In just over two hours we only managed to get 34 words. In a class of 15 people this isn't so surprising. We went back and forth on certain sounds several times: "I thought that was a voiceless lateral fricative." "No, it was more like a postalveolar fricative, but pulled back in a funny way. Not retroflex, maybe laminal?" Lots of that.

The good news is that in only 34 words we were able to get a pretty good picture of the phonemic inventory for this dialect of Aymara. The most interesting thing so far (I'm sure this is well documented somewhere, but we have been forbidden from doing any outside research on Aymara) is that there are no voiced stops. In fact, there is only one voiced obstruent so far (velar fricative with secondary rounding). The distinction is thus not between voiced and voiceless stops, but between unaspirated, aspirated, and glottalized stops.

Last night we worked on only nine words, but five of those were full verb paradigms and we did some paradigms in different aspects as well. From this we were able to get the singular and plural of the pronominal system, the aspect marker for repeated action, and person/number markers. There appears to be little distinction between first and second person, especially in the plural. Probably the most interesting thing to come out of last night is that the glottalic feature appears to spread to a following consonant. It seems like a strange candidate for spreading.

The experience itself is really interesting. It's obviously harder to do elicitation in a committee. There's always somebody who needs to hear the same word "just one more time," or wants to quibble over whether a glide is a secondary feature or a separate phoneme. None of us are free to pursue the elicitation session in our own way, so we don't always get the information we want. I think things would go faster for us as individuals, but then we would miss the valuable input of our peers and professor. We're not ready to be on our own.

Our consultant is ideal. He has some linguistic training, so he understands what we're trying to get at, and is sometimes able to tell us in no uncertain terms whether something is aspirated or not, or other important details that in a large classroom can be difficult to hear. He has endless patience. He is willing to repeat the same word over and over, as many times as we need. After class, my brain feels like the whole thing is bunched up in the front of my cranium. I'd hate to think what he must feel like.

I'm using my Aymara data to do a test run in Toolbox. We'll be using Toolbox for our Zapotec project, so I felt it was a good idea to try to straighten out the learning curve before I get on the plane for Oaxaca. I'm glad too. The tutorials are great, but there's nothing like trying to do your own project to show you what features you will use regularly, and what kinds of little kinks will show up. For example: the IPA keyboard I'm using (for Keyman) doesn't have a superscript glottal stop, so we've been using the apostrophe to show glottalized stops and affricates. Well, it turns out that Toolbox reads the apostrophe as some kind of morpheme break (I can't be sure exactly what it thinks it is, but it doesn't parse correctly). Instead of using the apostrophe on the normal keyboard, you have to use the "ejective" diacritic on the IPA keyboard template. Then it parses just fine. I'm having trouble with some other minor technical things as well, and generally getting used to the idiosyncrasies of the software. I would hate to be doing this in the field.