Yellowknife

20 degrees fahrenheit

So, I’m making progress with my text collection.  Today I got a story (still from my 95 year old consultant) about how people used to travel up to the Arctic Ocean.  His speech difficulties are bothering me less.  In part I think he has realized that he needs to enunciate better if I’m not going to have to re-play each sentence 20-odd times when we’re transcribing, so anyway, his speech really does sound clearer.  Also, a lot of the expressions used in storytelling are formulaic (or so it seems), and so I’ve seen a lot of them before so I can recognize the formulae even if some particular words were a bit mumbled.  Part of his enunciating well may involve giving me some kind of “foreigner-talk,” i.e. simplifying his grammar, which in a way would be good, since I’m also going to try and turn some of these into childrens’ lessons.  However, I did nevertheless get a real howler today: wonaninhwo, literally, “I have started to think about it over and over again for some time now,” or a perfective durative iterative inceptive with object agreement (!).  Normally the next step would be to get a whole paradigm of those, but for some consultants getting paradigms is like pulling teeth–you just have to let them say what they want to say.

I never did meet with the guy who was going to tell me about the little people.  He never showed up to our scheduled meeting.  I could try calling again, but I am pretty busy, I guess it’s moved down my priority list.