8/7/11 Fieldwork, day 1.
I had a good day today. It went at a somewhat leisurely pace. I woke up having to use the bathroom, which is never a pleasant experience in the field, but hey. I thought I was going to work with Don Francisco at 9 AM, and I should've been on time (I was eating). He came by at 9, but then decided to go do tequio (community work). I should just trust him to be on time. I'm too used to flaky consultants. He's not flaky.
Anyways, we started working around noon, after I had spent some time relaxing and preparing an elicitation list. We worked for 3 hours straight, focusing first on noun paradigms, but then on other grammatical things. I had thought that he had real trouble with paradigms, but then we went back to them and he seemed to really get it. I shouldn't be afraid to explain what I want and why I want to get it. Things went swimmingly afterwards. At 3 we took a break. I decided to have a snack of tuna fish and peanut butter with crackers. Lame I know, but Wilfrido's wife wasn't preparing dinner until like 6 PM, so I had to have something to hold me over. I had just eaten a little bit of bread this morning and I needed some protein. At 5 PM, I worked with Wilfrido for an hour. He's much quicker "getting" what I ask, but seemed less interested. I know that paradigms are boring, but where in a text would you ever find "your star" or "his prickly pear"? These are things that don't come up in conversational speech and relate to tonal alternations in the morphology. Eliciting them has been fruitful so far, so why not finish the task by getting all the possessible nouns' paradigms?
At around 6, I was able to call Paul and talk to him for a bit. This was nice. I'm glad I have such easy access to the internet and that I can see what is going on with him. It's so much less stressful than when I came to the field years ago. After that, I had a dinner of rice, beans, tortilla, and mustard greens. Healthy stuff here.
I worked with Don Francisco for another hour after that, but we were both getting tired. I talked to him about recording a story tomorrow and he seemed really interested. I think this is the type of stuff that really turns people on. I enjoy doing it, but it requires tons of time and I end up having to put off any experimental work on Trique in the meantime. Maybe amidst elicitation, I should do some text recording though. It sounds like fun.
I am a bit worried about having to run my psychoacoustic experiment here. It's almost ready. I just have to change it to Spanish (from French). However, it's REALLY boring and doesn't directly relate to Trique listeners. So, I'm hesitant to even run it with them. I wish that I could instead just run something different, but that requires creating something new and I just don't know if I would have the time to do all the work required for another experiment. Yuck. So, what do I do? My postdoc wants me to run another experiment, but I don't actually find it to be feasible with the speakers. Experimental world, meet rural Mexico. I wish that I had stayed with the older experimental paradigm. That's certainly more of a fruitful enterprise.
Hmm, come to think of it, perhaps I can put something together that simply gets at confusability between tones? That would be both fun and give me some more info about how Trique speakers perceive tonal contrasts. Okay, something to put together tomorrow.
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