Aymara Sessions 3 and 4

Things are going very well with our Aymara speaker. The elicitation is moving along faster, and is getting more and more targetted. there are times during the elicitation when people get little flashes of intuition/inspiration. You can see it on their faces as they raise their hands eagerly hoping to ask the next question.

This has led me to rediscover the importance of memory. Everybody says that it's important to come prepared for elicitation, that you need to analyze your data after every session so that you know where to work from in the next session, etc. I've noticed though that memory for your data is absolutely necessary if you are to have those little flashes of insight. The insight comes from recognizing a pattern. To see a pattern, you have to have more than one example. If you are to see a pattern "in the moment," that is to say during the elicitation, you have to be able to recall the data that you've acquired from previous sessions. If you can do this, it allows you to redirect the elicitation on the fly, and to run down any avenue that presents itself.

I've noticed two important thing about language in general so far. The most obvious is the clutter. I'm used to performing morphological analysis on data that has been substantially cleaned up. Natural language it turns out, is really really messy. I have said that we are very lucky to have a consultant who is well educated and knows a bit about linguistics. Yes and no. Yes because it helps him to understand what we're trying to get at, but no because he is aware of a lot of variation in his own language and will give us multiple forms of the same thing, sometimes prefacing with "Well, I think it's really supposed to be x but some people say it y and I say z." What the hell am I supposed to transcribe for that? I want to transcribe one dialect, not three.

This experience has also really brought home to me the notion that human languages just aren't that different from one another. I've studied a few Indo-European languages and Japanese, and I don't see much in Aymara that differs too radically from anything I've experienced before. It's comforting in a way to see that a language that should be about as foreign as you can get (to me) still has derivational and inflectional endings, a pretty normal counting system, and verb constructions similar to Japanese and German.

I'm loving every minute of it.