Dettah

59 degrees fahrenheit

Okay friends, here are my exciting travel plans:

Day 1 (Wednesday): Yellowknife to High Level, Alberta, stop in Hay River to see the waterfall (2nd highest waterfall in North America, I’m told).  Get picture taken in front of 60th parallel sign.

Day 2 (Thursday): High Level to Cold Lake, Alberta.

Day 3 (Friday): Present paper at Athabaskan conference.

Day 4 (Saturday): More Athabaskan conference.

Day 5 (Sunday): Cold Lake, Alberta to Estevan, Saskatchewan.

Day 6 (Monday): Estevan to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The thing which sucketh is that the days get shorter as you go south.  So for example right now it’s 11:35pm and there’s a lovely pink and orange glow from the sunset, but in Minnesota it’s been dark for hours.  On the other hand, here you can easily go 4 hours between gas stations whereas down south there’s virtually one every exit.  Also note that Minnesota is now considered “down south”.  Although some people here actually say “up south” and “down north”.  Go figure.

Dettah

52 degrees fahrenheit

Zo….just over a week left to go here.  I’m rushing to finish everything up in a hurry.  There are 3 main things I need to finish up:

1) Dogrib CD’s;

2) Review Chipewyan materials;

3) Finish chapter 3 in Dogrib.

The CDs are actually just a single, short CD (about 19 minutes of recording) which Mary Rose and I recorded yesterday.  It has the alphabet on it with some simple words, and some short dialogues.  For the word lists, Mary Rose pronounces them in Dogrib and I’m the English voice.  Like you usually find if you buy something from the “Teach Yourself X” series–I tried to speak in a nice, deep newscaster voice.  For the Dogrib dialogues, though, Mary Rose is person A and I’m person B (or vice versa).  I definitely have an accent, or so Mary Rose says–she was laughing a lot when we played back the recording.  I notice that I have an extremely sing-song intonation when I speak Dogrib, I think I’m just hyper-exaggerating all my tones.  Betty also has a strong accent though I’m told that when she reads in front of the elders she gets tons of compliments, “oh, you speak Dogrib so well!”.  See, the way we talk is the way the old priests and missionaries used to talk, so speaking the language badly is actually prestigious.  Think, e.g., if the prestige dialect of English were represented by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For the Chipewyan materials, I’m going to make one last-ditch try to get a speaker of the Yellowknife dialect.  We tried another person who refused to work with us because he doesn’t want his voice recorded.  This whole thing is getting frustrating.  I have the whole thing done, it’s just I did it mostly with a person from Lutselk’e, so I’d like to go over it with a Yellowknife speaker and make sure I have the dialect right.

For more about dialect differences, see 4 1/2 minutes into this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD6Yv0rfkRA

“The chief doesn’t understand the dialect you’re using”—brilliant

Oh yeah, and then finally I have to finish Chapter 3 of my Dogrib stuff.  There’s a lot more I wanted to do but that’s what next year is for, eh?  Happily, the daylight has made me hyperactive, so I’ve been up since 3:30 and I’m fresh as a daisy.  So it’ll all get done, I think.

Yellowknife

64 degrees fahrenheit

So, earlier this evening I went out to dinner.  I was going to go to the Monkey Tree for my usual burger and salad, but it looked kind of noisy so instead I went over to the more upscale Diamante restaurant next door.  That’s an Italian place.  For starters I had their caprese salad and the house wine.  I forget the name, but it’s exactly the kind of wine I don’t like: tastes like a mixture of apple juice, vinegar, and rubbing alcohol.

For the main dish I ordered the fettuccine pescatore, or ‘fisherman’s pasta’.  It was pasta served in a bowl with some fish broth at the bottom, and a variety of vongole:  shrimp, scallops, clams, mussels, squid, and octopi.  I ate all of it except the octopi.  I remember back when I worked at the extremely pretentious nouveau riche French restaurant La Fougasse, they had a seafood salad which they would garnish with three or four whole, boiled, miniatire octopi.  They were about 2″ in diameter, including tentacles.  They eventually stopped putting those in the salad because it grossed out the customers.

I know that my relatives in Italy love eating snails.  They’re called bombolini.  They’re served even in the most expensive restaurants, it’s a delicacy.  Question:  Isn’t “delicacy” just another word for “gross”?  Can anyone name a “delicacy” that isn’t gross?  I should perhaps rephrase: something both gross and irrationally expensive.  Ricotta, for example, means “baby vomit” (have you ever seen a baby vomit?  It looks just like that), but it’s not a delicacy, since you can get it for $1.99 at Safeway.

Foo, back to work.  I have to write a reply to address the concerns of my NSF reviewers, but it looks like I may get the money, so that’s progress, eh?  I’m finally starting to gain some credibility, it seems.

Oh, finally, here’s a recent picture, just for fun:

Yellowknife

50 degrees fahrenheit

Hi friends,

Sorry for my recent lack of postings, I was still sick.  This was the worst infection I’ve had in at least 6 years.  But today I’m truly feeling better, finally.  I feel like I could almost go out for a run, in fact.

Yet à propos of the subject heading, I find that all of this flanel and bluejeans, country music, fiddle-dances, and general northwoodsey-ness is getting rather tiresome.  I feel I’m much more of an 18th century kind of guy.  Specifically, I really want a harpsichord, e.g.:

http://www.dwharpsichords.com/

Not just any harpsichord, I want one with split keys.  That means you’ll have, say, 17 keys per octave, so the more commonly used accidentals (C#, Eb, F#, G#, and Bb) are in front, and right behind them you have the more obscure keys (Db, D#, Gb, and A#).  Why all of this?  Well, I’m quite the proponent of meantone temperament.  You can learn more about that here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meantone_temperament

They have sound samples, too, in about a dozen different versions.  I prefer of 1/5 comma modified meantone, myself.  Anywhays, then once I have my own special harpsichord with extra keys tuned in meantone temperament, I’ll dress up in my 18th century costume and get together with all my 18th century friends, and….well, it’ll be kinda like this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxzY3tFTz9k

It would be fun to show up to teach class dressed like that….well, maybe after I get tenure.

Yellowknife

63 degrees fahrenheit

So, I’m all moved in to my new home now, and it’s quite nice (I’ll have to devote a separate post to it, with pictures).  One issue is that, like nearly all homes in Dettah, it doesn’t have city water, but instead you get your water from a water truck.  There’s one truck that brings you clean water (taken straight out of the Yellowknife River), and another truck that sucks out the sewage and dumps it in the “sewage lagoon”.

A friend of mine has told me that he would have reservations about drinking water straight out of the river….well, the area north of Yellowknife is very sparsely populated so there’s virtually no pollution.  Maybe 80 miles or so upstream a grizzly bear took a crap or something, but that’s about it pollution-wise.

However, there’s almost no water left in the tank.  When I moved in to the house, the guy said there was enough water for “two toilet flushes and a cup of tea”.  I’m more inclined towards a shower, but the truck doesn’t arrive until tomorrow, and I’m not sure what time, either.  I’m already starting to look disheveled.  On the bright side, though, if I get water by tomorrow afternoon I’ll be all spiffy in time for my karaoke performance at Hot Shots Pub & Grub.  I’m hoping they have Kenny Rogers this time.

Finally, I attended the meeting of Goyatiko’s language board this evening.  It’s conducted very professionally, with motions, seconding motions, and so forth.  This is done in both Dogrib and English.  Anyway, to record a motion, you say nàyiìdà  “he/she moves it”.  Note your lovely object agreement disjoint anaphor [y] and semelfactive situation aspect expressed by falling tone [iì].  In fact after uttering this word, Mary Rose said, “Alex, this would be a good verb for your paradigms”.

See, some people are very nice to linguists

Yellowknife

52 degrees fahrenheit

So I changed the tire this morning.  I’ve been enlightened about car tires recently…you see, up until this episode I assumed that car tires have a rubber exterior with an inflated inner-tube inside, just like a bicycle.  However, I now know that since about 1980 most tires are “tubeless,” which is to say the rubber is inflated directly, and sealed to the wheel to prevent the air from escaping.  That’s why, if you puncture your tire, they have to replace the whole tire rather than just give you a new inner-tube.

So, it cost me $375.  You’d think that, for that price, they’d actually put the tire on the car, but instead they gave me the wheel with the tire inflated and glued onto it, which I then had to go outside and install myself with the car jack and wrench.  Gotta love this town.  Originally, I was told that it would take 3 weeks to get an appointment for this wonderful tire service (at Kingland Ford), but I went there in person to confirm, and then I heard the manager take someone into the back room:

“He told the customer 3 weeks.  Right.  You know, we’ve lost so much sales because of that dipshit…”

So they got it done the next day.

Today was also the day I moved out.  I had agreed to move out on the 4th, which I assumed meant the end of the business day (i.e. 5:30).  But around 2:00, as I was moving boxes out of my apartment, some other guy comes through the door with the key to my place.  I called the landlord, who said, “oh, but checkout time is at noon.”

I have honestly never heard of this, namely giving the keys to a new tenant before the old tenant has even moved out, and only allowing 4 hours between tenants.  So I called the landlord on the phone, and we had a heated argument:

“I’m sorry to say but I think this is kind of dishonest.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way!”

Or, well, at least that’s heated by Canadian standards.  I have to believe this goes against some kind of rental regulations and it would have given me pleasure to take it up with the RCMP, except I’m also an illegal linguist (as you recall) so I might get deported.

Finally, I got rejected by ELF (i.e. my proposal to develop curriculum for Tolowa), and the comments consisted of just a few short sentences, one of which was “This is not a realistic approach to curriculum development.”  I don’t know how something I’m already doing can be unrealistic, but it’s frustrating to see that I still don’t have much credibility with some people.

Schmoo on them.

Yellowknife

59 degrees fahrenheit

Okay, so let’s recap the current situation:

*my car has a flat tire, will cost $325 to fix, will be ready Tuesday, they have to fly the tire up from Edmonton;

*my internet at home doesn’t work;

*I’ve had the flu for the past 10 days;

*I’m being kicked out of my apartment next week;

*went to karaoke on Friday, it sucked.  They didn’t have any Kenny Rogers, tried Beatles instead, it bombed.

The only silver lining is that in fact I’ve been so sick I lost 8 pounds, which means I’m almost ready to drop a pants-size.  I do strike myself as thin-and-gorgeous when I look at myself in the mirror now.

Oh, and it sounds like I was accepted to the Athabaskan conference which is also positive.  I was actually afraid I would be shut out for political reasons (I’m totally serious) but it appears I was just over-paranoid in this case.  My abstract consisted of cartoons of smiley, angry, and sad faces with Chipewyan syllabics underneath (he is happy, he is sad, he is angry), so perhaps it was not as subversive as I thought.

I think I’ll drag myself to the Indiana Jones movie tonight; I need some kind of a diversion.

Dettah

54 degrees fahrenheit

So, I’m here in Dettah (25km from Yellowknife, across Yellowknife bay), having just gotten a flat tire.  It happened about 10km up the road, near the junction with the highway.  I hitched a ride to Dettah, then Mary Rose’s husband Brian took me back to my car and helped me change the tire; I’m now running with a smaller-sized spare.  I’ll take it to the Ford dealer in the morning to have it all fixed properly.

Anywhays, the flat happened rather suddenly, and we found a nail in the tire.  It’s the same kind of nail that Mary Rose often finds in her tires….see, this clan-feud seems to be getting ugly.  There’s this rival family in town, let’s call them the Johnsons, and the Johnson kids do all sorts of mischief including drilling nails into people’s tires.  It’s possible they drilled the nail into my tire while it was parked at the language center, and it didn’t actually cause the tire to burst until later when I was driving.

I don’t even understand what this feud is about, but I guess I’m part of it now.  Maybe I can start some trouble of my own….toilet paper?  eggs?  I could have fun with this.

Yellowknife

61 degrees fahrenheit

Okay, so I started chapter 3 today with Mary Rose (in Dogrib), and it seems to be coming along okay.  The chapter is called “around town” (kònta k’èts’eddè) and it’s a much easier topic than cooking.  I mean, it’s much easier to construct a dialogue about “I have to take my grandma to bingo at 7:00″ versus “please pass me the elongated rigid instrument with which to slice the compact round squishy object repeatedly.”  So disaster averted.

A lot of the places around town have entertaining names.  The grocery store is the “we-eat house,” the bank is the “money-grows house,” the hockey arena is the “house of metal shoes” and the hospital is the “it-hurts house.”  I also noticed, just walking down the street, that the vehicle licensing office literally says, “we write on paper so that you drive your truck”.  Makes sense, no?

I’m feeling about 90% better now, though still a little lethargic.  I think I’m going to go out for dinner.  For a hamburger.  And a beer.

Yellowknife

55 degrees fahrenheit

I’ve kind of gotten stuck at this point in my fieldwork.  I want more verb paradigms, but there are not that many more verbs left to paradigmatize (< = word I just made up).  There would be plenty more if I started transcribing all the hours of recordings I’ve collected, but that’s boring as hell.  I could make more teaching materials, but I’m kind of stuck there, too…for a while I was just taking the 2 chapters I had done in Dogrib and re-doing them in Dene Suline, but now I’ve done that, and I’m kind of overwhelmed by working on 2 languages at the same time.  It would probably be better if I just worked on Dogrib, but I feel bad just dumping my Chipewyan consultant all of a sudden (especially since she’s quite good).  Also, Chapter 3 was supposed to be on cooking and handling verbs, which is actually quite a difficult subject.  It’s kind of daunting, you know, the thought of showing up at the language center with all my onions, garlic, fresh meat, eggs, flour, yada yada, and then for all I know the whole exercise could backfire and my consultant just gives me 1-word utterances like “flour,” “eggs,” “meat,” etc.  So just today I had the idea of a relatively low-risk proposition, which is to rent the movie Ratatouille and use that for elicitation–that is, just the cooking scenes.  I’m sure I could get some iteratives with all the repetitive slicing and dicing.  “Rat flips pancakes circularly punctually repeatedly with an elongated flat instrument”….something like that, you know.

Anyways, that’s where I’m at.  I really just want to go home as soon as possible now.  Part of it is that I’m still sick and exhausted (my consultant told me today “you look sick”), but I do feel like I’ve reached a kind of saturation point.