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.