Lev Michael and I,
Chris Beier, are thoroughly enjoying our current sabbatical year, which began in June and will end in August 2020. This sabbatical, which we are spending almost entirely in Peru, is dedicated to doing the culminating fieldwork, analysis, and writing necessary to produce major outputs of the long-running
Iquito Language Documentation Project, which we launched in 2002.
So far, we have reached two major milestones:
• First, in August, we released a new Iquito–Loretano Spanish "students dictionary" and delivered it on paper to the Iquito heritage community. At almost 400 pages, it is a much better resource than its predecessors, and everybody in the community seems very pleased with it! We have also made the PDF available
free online, at the Cabeceras Aid Project
website.
• Then this week, we submitted a final (we hope) draft of our
Iquito–English Dictionary to our publisher,
Abya-Yala. This dictionary is about 650 pages and is quasi-encyclopedic in its content, so we are equally happy to have finished it! We'll be back with more news once it is actually published and available for distribution.
• Last but not least, and simultaneously, Lev is back on campus briefly (December 10 to 17) for the first in a series of workshops that are part of an exciting new three-year NSF-funded project, "Nasal segments and nasal harmony in South American languages: Field phonetics and typology", which he,
Susan Lin, and
Myriam Lapierre are co-leading.
