Fieldwork and Language Documentation

CLA updates

October 24, 2021

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

We hosted a visit by Wanda Batchelor, Robin Bradley, Clyde Prout III, and Travis Young, with linguist Sheri Tatsch, who together consulted linguistic field notes, file slips, and sound recordings related to Nisenan (Maiduan; CA), especially those by Richard Smith and Hans Jørgen Uldall. Wanda and Robin are the great-granddaughters of speaker Lizzie Enos. During the visit, sponsored by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, we also went over sound recordings, slides, and 16mm film held by the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. We also hosted introductory visits by the Society for Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUgS) and by the students of Linguistics R1B "Endangered Languages: Why does linguistic diversity matter?" taught by linguistics PhD candidate Julia Nee.

O'Hagan on KQED, and obituary of Gerald Weiss

October 21, 2021

Zachary O'Hagan was a contributor on Thursday to KQED Forum's segment "How Preserving Indigenous Languages Revitalizes California Culture, Identity and History" (listen here!), together with Phil Albers (Karuk), Quirina Geary (Mutsun, Tamien), and Jennifer Malone (Wukchumni). This month he also published an academic obituary for Gerald Weiss (1932-2021), an early ethnographer in Ashaninka communities of the Tambo River region of Peru.

CLA updates

October 18, 2021

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

We hosted a visit by Patrick Burtt and Dillon McKay, sponsored by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, to consult archival materials related to Patwin (Wintuan; CA). They worked with the field notes of Elizabeth Bright and Kenneth Whistler (PhD 1980), as well as sound recordings made variously by Peter Abraham (1949, held by the Hearst Museum), E. Bright (1952), Donald Ultan (1961-1962), and Whistler (1975) with speakers Sara Gonzales, Nora Lowell, and Oscar McDaniel.

A sketch of Muniche segmental and prosodic phonology

Lev Michael
Stephanie Farmer
Gregory Finley
Christine Beier
Karina Sullón Acosta
2013

This paper presents a description of the segmental and prosodic phonology of Muniche, a critically endangered Peruvian Amazonian isolate. Using data from team-based fieldwork with a group of rememberers of Muniche, this paper describes the segmental inventory, syllable structure, and stress system of the language, plus a number of prosodically motivated epenthetic processes. A historical overview of the language and its contact with neighboring Kawapanan languages is also presented. Finally, the results of this study are compared with Gibson (1996), the sole previous study of Muniche...

CLA updates

October 10, 2021

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Christine Beier and Lev Michael have added audio and video recordings of 109 texts in Ikíitu (Zaparoan; Peru) to their growing archival collection (see items ending in 002, 027-029, 031-034, 036-037, 039-042, and 049-053). The texts were produced by speakers Hermenegildo Díaz Cuyasa, Ligia Inuma Inuma, Ema Llona Yareja, and Jaime Pacaya Inuma between 2002 and 2017. Some recordings were made by or with the assistance of Cynthia Anderson Hansen, Marcus Berger, Marcelo Inuma Sinchija, I-wen Lai, Sisi Bautista Pizarro, and Alison Zerbe (MA 2015).

CLA updates

October 3, 2021

Here's the latest from the California Language Archive:

Steve Parker (Dallas International University; SIL International) has archived audio and video recordings of Chamikuro (Arawak; Peru) from 28 virtual sessions with speaker Antonio Inuma Orbe conducted in December 2020 and January 2021 (see 009-037), adding them to his extant collection of field notes on the language from the 1980s. With the exception of a few recordings made in 2019 by Lee Bendezú Bendezú of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, these recordings are the only known recordings of Chamikuro: Don Antonio is one of a handful of remaining speakers, two of whom have passed away since May 2020. Funded by the Endangered Language Fund, Prof. Parker's project was originally supposed to take place in person in the city of Yurimaguas and in the riverine community of Pampa Hermosa; the COVID-19 pandemic restricted the project to a virtual format, facilitated by Pedro Pablo Hernández Fonseca, who set up a computer for Zoom calls and external microphones and recorders. Justin Spence (PhD 2013) has added over 270 new file bundles to the collection Materials of the Hupa Language Documentation Project (see 600-820, from 2005-2008; and 1430-1483, from July to September 2021). The materials stem from a longtime collaboration with speaker Verdena Parker, and include sound recordings of elicitation sessions, (re-)transcription and translation of texts (many of them told by others and/or archived previously), discussions of cultural topics, and more. Other research collaborators from the first period include Amy Campbell (PhD 2012), Ramón Escamilla (PhD 2012), Nicholas Fleisher (PhD 2008), Melodie George-Moore, Victor Golla, Silis Jackson, Ophelia Mose, Lindsey Newbold, and Anne Pycha (PhD 2008).

Iquito Dictionary

Christine Beier
Lev Michael
Jaime Pacaya Inuma
Ema Llona Yareja
Hermenegildo Díaz Cuyasa
Ligia Inuma Inuma
2021

Online Iquito-English dictionary in CLLD format, with grammatical sketch and notes

Diccionario Escolar Ikíitu Kuwasíini – Tawɨ Kuwasíini (Iquito – Castellano)

Christine Beier
Lev Michael
Jaime Pacaya Inuma
Ema Llona Yareja
Hermenegildo Díaz Cuyasa
Ligia Inuma Inuma
2019

Iquito-Spanish dictionary intended for use by Iquito community members

Lines in Nanti karintaa chants: An areal poetic typological perspective (An essay in honor of Joel Sherzer)

Lev Michael
2019

This paper argues for a significant typological distinction among lines in indigenous genres of verbal art of the Americas: those which are crucially defined by the size and number of prosodic elements constituting them, and those that are not subject to prosodic restrictions of this type, but are instead delimited by a variety of line edge-marking strategies. I refer to these broad classes of lines as metrical lines and edge-marked lines, respectively. Genres of verbal art studied within the ethnopoetics tradition have mainly...

Rethinking the communicative functions of evidentiality: Event responsibility in Nanti (Arawakan)

Lev Michael
2020

Evidentiality has captured the attention of many socially-oriented students of language because of its relevance to the communicative construction of authority, responsibility, and entitlement. With regards specifically to responsibility, previous work has focused on the role of evidentiality in reducing speakers’ responsibility for the factuality of utterances, an example of a broader phenomenon that I call ‘discourse attribute responsibility’. In this paper I combine ethnographically-informed analyses of interactions among speakers of Nanti, an Arawakan language of Peruvian Amazonia,...