Background!

I’m a student of linguistics, hoping to one day earn the full title LINGUIST.  At present, I’m part of a team documenting a Mayan language; we’re creating a click-and-hear dictionary online.

Tonight was one of our meetings.  That “our” means me and my Mayans (N, C, & D).  Sometimes we’re joined by a fellow ling-nut, Jax.  Tonight, our Prof JG also joined us.  (Next week our semester starts, at which point it will be the above group and possibly two more, KayL & Elsie.)

Last week, we stumbled across /blue/ in the dictionary.  When I pulled up the entry, my Mayans started talking amongst each other in Spanish (I get about every tenth word) and their Mayan language (which I get about every thirtieth word).  They asked if we could cover “blue” next week.  So today we started covering “blue.”  In actuality, we covered green and red and a bit of blue and black.

But what made it really fun was that Prof JG was there and we covered uvular fricatives and uvular trills.  We had a lot of laughs and it was excellent.

Well, that’s where we are up to this point.  This is going to be my journey through this semester while I take morphology and languages in contact.  It’s also going to track my personal project over the semester…me and my Mayans.

(Originally posted on another of my blogs: http://linguist.tumblr.com)