Yellowknife

54 degrees fahrenheit

So, it’s official, I’m evicted.  I don’t think I ever said I was moving out on June 4th; probably the real reason is that the landlord raised the rents by $200 as of the 1st of the year and I was still paying last year’s rate, so she wants to kick me out and let in some diamond prospector who can afford $1950 a month (I absolutely shit you not).  This is exactly what happened in San Francisco in the 1990’s: poor people being evicted to make room for techies, who benefit from globalization.  To summarize: staying in an apartment with its own bathroom, living room, TV, and kitchen may have been rather bourgeois, but being evicted is very proletarian.

I’m pretty sure, though, that one of the Yellowknives Dene will take me in–either in a spare room, or maybe even a vacant house if someone is going away for the summer.  It’ll be a good way to learn the language as well…I was thinking of doing it, anyway.  So I will now be moving into a set of “alternative” indigenous relations of production (e.g. I met one woman who said, “I never buy meat at the grocery store, I shoot everything myself”).  So all is well in my Marxist fantasy-land.

Also, my infection has moved from the gastrointestinal to the otolaryngological, which is to say that I don’t have abdominal pains anymore but I do have a very sore throat and bad cold.  I haven’t eaten anything all day, although I have been having orange juice with extra lemon juice squeezed in–sort of like how they pour an extra shot of expresso into black coffee at Starbuck’s, I forget what that’s called.  I’m also taking Cipro.

Foo.  I need to go have dinner.

Yellowknife

46 degrees fahrenheit

There seems to have been some sort of misunderstanding with my landlord.  A bit of background:  since I’ve been here, I’ve been staying in a fully furnished 1 bedroom apartment near downtown.  I’m rather embarrassed by this, since proper northern fieldwork should be conducted in a log cabin, with no electricity, no running water, and a wood stove.

But anyway, apparently when I presented my last rent check I must have said something that made it sound like I was moving out on June 4th, when in reality I had intended to stay until August 4th (though recently I was intending to stay until July 4th).  To make a long story short, she promised my apartment to someone else.  But, she said she’d look into it and call me by the end of the day tomorrow.

Strangely, I’m unphased by this whole situation.  Perhaps it’s the endless daylight which makes me feel invincible…in the worst case scenario, I’ll just move to Dettah and stay in a room in somebody’s house, and store all my things out in my car.  That would be good for my fluency, although I’m starting to get fluent anyways.  People are impressed, I hear, with how much I’m picking up.  I even use purpose clauses in the optative–shèwohti gha Sombak’è nahtla, ilhè sadzee jo nahtla ha “I’m going into Yellowknife for lunch, be back in an hour.”  There’s not too many white guys that know their optatives!

In other news, I have been debating over the past couple days whether or not I should go to the hospital over these sharp pains I’ve been having in my right abdomen, which I’m afraid might be appendicitis.  Even breathing hurts.  As you know, they have socialized medicine up here, so I could experience some nice socialized surgery firsthand.  However, I’m now suspecting that it may be just gas.  A far less sexy disease, I know.  But I’ll head over to the pharmacy now and see if I can get some socialized Gas-X. 

Yellowknife

57 degrees fahrenheit

This business is feast or famine, it seems.  Right now I have more data than I know what to do with.  See, after trying to work with people who are 90+ years old, hard of hearing and speak little English, I’m now working with two professional translators, Mary Rose (Dogrib) and Emerance (Chipewyan).  My notebooks are bursting (perhaps bursting is not the right image….torn up with scribble-marks?) and I need time to organize my affairs before proceeding further.  So I’ve cleared my schedule ’till the end of the week, just to type up all my verb paradigms in a nicely laid-out word document.  I think there’s plenty there already to write a dissertation with, at least phonology-wise.  Then if people want more phonetic evidence I’m probably going to have to design some sort of controlled phonetic experiment, which will probably have to wait until my next trip.

Speaking of my next trip, no word yet on NSF or ELF grants.  I’m thinking “no” and “yes,” respectively.  Interesting how it’s easier to get language money from a diamond company than it is from the US government.  Oh well, I’m building credibility, so hopefully this will be easier in the future.

Yellowknife

46 degrees fahrenheit

Zo, today some surprising news…it appears my funding is running out (all of a sudden– long story), so anyway, the new plan is for me to hurry up and finish up everything by the end of June (I had been planning to stay until August 4th), head down to the Athabaskan conference in Cold Lake at the beginning of July, and from there drive home.  On the bright side, I talked about this with Mary Rose and she’s willing to work with me several days each week to hurry up and get everything finished: I need a whole bunch of verb paradigms for my dissertation work, and I promised Yellowknife Catholic Schools 4 chapters of my teaching materials (2 are done already), plus Goyatiko wants a Chipewyan version of everything too.  But I’m from Stanford, so I’m used to the idea of everything being due 3 times faster than humanly possible.

Today I also bought a new tan-colored suede jacket.  Actually I ordered it last week, and it arrived today.  I love it!  That, combined with my suede hat (pictured above) makes me feel like the most adventurous linguist north of 60.  Maro said I look like Indiana Jones.

Speaking of pictures, you may have noticed the lack of picture postings recently, which is because my digital camera is broken.  Could be because I left it out in the car a few nights when it was 45 below zero, or maybe it was just a Chinese piece of crap.  We may never know.

Oh, and last thing: I just got back from singing karaoke at hot-shots.  Wearing the aforementioned Indiana Jones outfit.  I sang “Lucille” by Kenny Rogers, which was very well received, since I had the whole bar singing along with me (you picked a fine time to leave me Lucille…).  Tomorrow I’m going to a country music “jam session” at the Gold Range.  We’re all blue collar, all the time!  Except when we’re watching French costume dramas.

Yellowknife

64 degrees fahrenheit

It’s sure warmed up, eh?  Today we had a rainstorm with heavy downpours and gale-force winds, which is more typical of mid-summer around here.  Global warming, I suppose.  Oh well, we needed the rain.

Sorry for the lack of postings recently, I’ve been most busy.  I’m working on re-doing all the teaching materials I’ve done in Dogrib so far in Chipewyan (Dene Suline).  It’s actually going extremely rapidly, which one might expect, it’s like taking something done in Italian and re-doing it in Spanish.  In fact I can hardly keep up with my consultant: she was a professional translator in her youth, so I’ve actually had the problem of running out of material to cover during our sessions.  But that’s a better problem to have than some of the other people I’ve worked with, where it’s like pulling teeth to get virtually anything.  The most extreme case was where I worked with a very elderly man who was legally blind, hard of hearing, and spoke no English.  That didn’t last long.

I’ve also been helping the language center with writing proposals for funding for the courses they want to teach over the next few months.  It sounds like they’re actually going to use my teaching materials to put on an evening language class at Goyatiko starting in the Fall.  It’s going to be a joint class: both Dogrib and Chipewyan.  I know it’s kind of unusual but that’s what one does when resources are lacking.  Kind of like a one-room schoolhouse.  But they’d have 2 teachers co-teaching, and they can break the students up into small-group activities, so it should work.

I’ve finally started to get homesick.  I’ve been calling my friends back home almost every day, which is unusual for me (I’m not that sociable!).  This is one of the most pristine and beautiful places on earth, but still it’s not home.  When I get back, no more flanel and hiking boots!  I’m going to be an urban socialite.  Whatever that is.

Yellowknife

46 degrees fahrenheit

So, last night I went out for a run at 10:30pm, which was great, because it was still daylight, and back home I can’t go running at 10:30.  Ran around the perimeter highway (about 7km, I think), got back around midnight, still daylight.  Took a shower, read Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” (those neoliberal bastards!) until about 2am.  Still daylight.  Went to bed.  Couldn’t sleep.  Tossed and turned until almost 4am, now even brighter daylight, finally got to sleep.  Alarm went off at 7:30, bright sunshine shining through my window.  Went over to Javaroma, got a medium latte to stay awake.  Not that I need it really–right now it’s…you guessed it…broad daylight.  Not even overcast or partly cloudy; sapphire-blue skies and in-your-face sunshine 24/7.

I think all this sunshine is starting to get on my nerves.  I mean, it’s cool for going for a run at 10:30 or barhopping downtown at 1am, but in other respects it’s rather tiresome.  I think I’ll have to take up some heavy drinking.

Other suggestions?

Yellowknife

45 degrees fahrenheit

So, I’m waiting to hear back on various grants that I applied for a while back.  I’ve been waiting for 6 months to hear back on an NSF grant for next year through Arctic Social Sciences, but still no word (I just emailed the program director last week).  I’m also waiting to hear back on a $3,000 grant from ELF to work on Tolowa (northern California), and I have a couple other small, local grants here in Yellowknife in the works.

It’s so frustrating how this system seems biased against young linguists, i.e. you are presumed incompetent until proven otherwise.  For example, in my last NSF proposal (which was rejected) one of the comments questioned my ability to produce teaching materials, something like, “materials produced by formal linguists are not the same as those by people trained in second language acquisition.”  This despite the fact that I taught my own Italian class for 2 years, am trained in second language acquisition, and of the Dogrib materials I’ve produced so far, comments range from “the best I’ve seen in 30 years” to “the best I’ve seen ever.”  In another incident, I actually had an older professor send me messages bordering on hatemail, calling me a whole variety of epithets.  Don’t get me started.

Now, academia is a competitive business, so the criticism and belittlement per se is not so surprising, only that I’m attracting so much of it at a young age.  I’ve been told I should take this as a compliment.  Somehow I’m not flattered.

Yellowknife

37 degrees fahrenheit

Hi friends,

I just made an interesting discovery like 30 seconds ago: the prefix lhe (“lh” means barred-l) is “ungeminable,” a word I also just made up about 10 seconds ago.  This means that under no circumstances do you get a geminate (i.e. long) consonant following this prefix, no matter how much the language may want to.  So you get lhek’à (not *lhekk’à) for ‘he is fat’, lhediìk’à, (not *lheddiìk’à) ‘two of us are fat’, etc.

I had already independently noted that you don’t get gemination after clitics, because those are added postlexically (e.g. wek’enayetle), but lhek’à historically comes from the barred-l classifier, so that’s just the opposite case: it should be more part of the lexical word than other prefixes, not less (it used to be attached to the stem, is what I’m saying).

And then the light goes on: it’s ungeminable because the vowel is epenthetic.  In California Athabaskan, which allows every manner of crazy cluster (e.g. stlhxvt–try pronouncing that), the form is lhk’i, with no vowel in there.  So there’s your answer–esoteric fact linguist gets all excited about.

In less technical news, Mary Rose and I have decided we’re going to stop trying to track down people who speak the Yellowknife dialect of Chipewyan.  A bit of background, it has become apparent recently that the Yellowknife dialect of Chipewyan is in fact in a critical state of endangerment, and there are only 5-6 fluent speakers left.  One of them lives just a few doors up the road but won’t talk to us due to some sort of clan-dispute.  Another one of the speakers is actually Mary Rose’s father, who doesn’t want to work with us for fear that people will accuse them of nepotism (!).  You know the stories of languages with only 2 speakers and they won’t talk to each other…that’s what we have here.  So we’ve decided we’re just going to work with speakers of Lutselk’e dialect, of which there are hundreds, and not exasperate ourselves with this monkey-business.  It’s sad to give up like this, but the dialects are really quite similar and it’s not worth going crazy chasing people down over a long vowel here, a contour tone there.  We can always try and re-visit this in a couple months, when the dispute will have cooled down (we hope).  I’m not sure what people fight about up here, anyway–there’s nothing but trees.  And the occasional black bear.

Yellowknife

43 degrees fahrenheit

No, we’re not referring to my own overwhelmed-exhausted-agitated-ness, but rather word stress in Dogrib.  See, last week I realized that variable geminates are attributable to variable stress, e.g.

(k’éne)gu ~ k’e(nég)gu ‘you walk’ (accent marks stress here, not tones)

But then the people who don’t believe in geminates in the first place are just going to come and say, well, you just found a counterexample to where your geminates are supposed to be, so you just made up this whole variable stress thing to get out of it.

So then I went and measured the stress in Praat.  A bit of background: stress isn’t something you can just measure automatically, as in pushing a button “show stress”.  But what I found was that if you take, for a vowel, amplitude * duration, that corresponds exactly to what I’m hearing.  So a vowel that’s 60dB (decibels) and 100ms (milliseconds) long comes out as 6 (6 of what I don’t know, I need to come up with a name for this), whereas 58dB * 90ms comes out as 5.2.  So the vowel that’s “6″ sounds more stressed than the vowel that’s “5.2″.  This sounds a bit crude, perhaps, but it works and corresponds perfectly to where we infer stress to be on distributional grounds.  So anyways this is a very happy discovery.

In other news, the internet at my apartment isn’t working.  Must call landlord (I’m at Frostbyte right now).  Also I feel kind of nauseous, which I suspect is from these blueberry biscuits I bought at Extra Foods for breakfast.  I threw the rest of them away (as much as I hate wasting food), they must have had some sort of hydrogenated cholesterol lard extract in them or something.

Poll: if you were a molecule, would you rather be a lipoprotein or a fatty acid?

Yellowknife

43 degrees fahrenheit

Boy, it’s sure warmed up lately.

I’ve been feeling rather lethargic, though–I just got up from a 4 hour nap, for example.  One theory is that I just need to change my bed linens.  No, you dirty-minded people, it’s mostly the result of this yellow flax-seed crap from Aveda that I put in my hair.  It makes all the pillows scuzzy.  Contrarily, dirty dishes make me agitated, as does a floor in need of vacuuming.

You may have noticed that I’ve deleted my recent anti-mental postings.  I’ve decided that we’re going to keep this a friendly blog from now on, which will talk about happy things:  little people, verb paradigms, middle east politics, the Church of Scientology–you know, uncontroversial stuff like that.  Or let’s put it this way: no one ever got turned down for a linguistics job because they didn’t believe in Galactic Emperor Xemu.

Finally, for your pleasure and edification, here is a picture of Yellowknife viewed from the ice road, taken a couple days before it closed.  You know, I miss the ice road.  Strangely, I wish everything would just freeze again.  Oh well, I only have to wait until…what…September for that?  And I could commute back and forth from Yellowknife to Dettah with a dinghy boat, which actually was my original plan, though I’m not sure how a dinghy boat fits into the research budget.  Also if my laptop falls in the water I’m kind of screwed.  We’ll have to think about this.