Kotlik days 11-13

Unfortunately, I was unable to go camping the last few days, some things don’t always work out but that’s okay. So, I just stuck around the village this weekend. On Thursday morning I went over to see some friends and met a famous dog Musher from St. Michaels. He has run the Iditarod 3 times and completed it twice, and run in many other races as well. It was fantastic talking to him and just getting to meet him. He had also brought one of his puppies with him. When I showed up the puppy was sitting outside and I sat there and hung out with him for a while. He couldn’t be more than 3-4 months old. He still had short fur and was shivering so I let him cuddle up against me for a long while; he was a beautiful little husky puppy, and it’s too bad they only stuck around for a few hours.

The rest of Thursday, and Friday for that matter, were pretty uneventful, my friends from the Kuskokwim region left so I’m alone at the school now. As such, I successfully creeped myself out last night (I’ve always been good at doing that.) Being alone in the school with the random mechanical noises sporadically interrupting the otherwise perfect silence. Adding to that, last night was the first time I’ve seen anything close to resembling darkness in nearly 3 weeks. It was more like dusk compared to what I’m used to but it was still dark comparatively, it only lasted about 45-60 minutes at around 3am and then it got light again. On top of that the wind was also blowing pretty heavily. So all this combined proved to be an interesting night, at least I know definitively now that k-12 teachers are not aliens and do not sleep in the school, at least not this far north. I can’t imagine what it’s like here in the dead of winter though, when it’s dark out 24-7 with snow falling heavily across the tundra, the rivers freezing over, and the temperatures dropping far below zero. It’ll be interesting to see that one day. Hopefully, I also find myself for a short time somewhere that still practices dog sledding during the winter and I’ll be able to try that out! It’d be a lot of fun.

As for everything else, I have been working the recordings I’ve already made, I read some of the book I brought with me and surfed the web a bit (though I can’t get on Reddit at the school, and Facebook is sometimes touchy, and Youtube just doesn’t work here.) Tonight, I’ll be going over to a friends place and he might start making his new spears so that’ll be cool to see! Otherwise its pretty calm right now (rather cold, but calm), and I won’t work with the elders again until Monday afternoon so I’m just chillin’ and seeing what happens.

So I thought I would talk about the Yugtun language a little bit and discuss why I love it so much and explain some of what I said in my last post. The language is fascinating because it’s characterizes what is called a polysynthetic language structure. This term can be difficult to understand and is applied by many different linguists to many different languages using different definitions, many of which are wrong and most of the others are testing the limits but it’s a cool word and we really don’t know how to handle it yet. To understand the polysynthetic structure it’s best to put it into context, and to do that you have to understand that all languages are comprised of highly systematic and organized structures. The easiest to understand would be an isolating language like Hawaiian or Chinese, where each concept is expressed with a new and independent(-ish) word. Ignoring much of the overlying structure, if English was isolating the sentence “I checked out the books” would look like this: “I check Pasttense out the book plural.” On the other side of the spectrum are the synthetic languages like Turkish, or Finnish, or Arabic. The same sentence in a synthetic language might look like this: “Icheckedout thebooks,” where several concepts (or morphemes) are combined to create a single word. Synthetic languages can also be divided between agglutinating (Finnish) and fusional (Arabic) language types, but the distinction between the two is harder to demonstrate. Languages however, are not always so clear-cut; English for instance has some synthetic characteristics (check-ed, book-s, art-ful-ly) but falls further on the isolating side of the scale than many other languages.

Polysynthetic languages then are characterized by being able to cram tons of information into a single “word,” these words are not comparable to English words however and are better compared to English Sentences (“Icheckedoutthebooks”). I’m sure everyone has heard of the Eskimo Snow Myth, you know “the Eskimos have a thousand different words for snow.” Well this is both true and false. It’s false in that the Eskimo have no more concepts for snow than English does (snow, slush, flurry, powder, sleet, ect…) but none of these concepts can stand alone and they have to placed into a “sentence-word” to make sense. So just as there are an unlimited number of sentences in English that can be produced with the word “snow” in them, Yugtun and the other Eskimo Languages are the same. But as an entire sentence in these languages can be expressed in what we would consider to be a single word in English, the Eskimo therefore have an unlimited number of words that can express some concept related to snow. That’s how the myth is also in some way true. But these words are much more expressive than an English word and change just as an English sentence does. So the Yugtun word: “neryuumiitellruunga” means “I didn’t want to eat.”

Ner-yuumiite-llru-unga

Eat-not.want.to-PAST-I (INDICATIVE.INTRANSITIVE.1.SG)

“I didn’t want to eat.”

A single word, which expresses a lot of information. That is the very basics of how polysynthetic structures work.

So on my last post when I said I had begun to get morphologically complex words, this is what I’m alluding to. There is no pure concept in Yugtun for the English words “warm,” or “blue.” The parts of the word (or morphemes) for these are roughly [poxluniq-] and [chungava-] respectively (these are extremely poor transcriptions using no special characters and in no real way accurately reflect the pronunciations of these words, but they will work for my purposes here and now.) These morphemes though make no since alone, speakers don’t even think of these parts like this (kinda of like how the sentence “I -ed you” makes no sense), so when I ask what the word for warm or blue is they tell me: [poxlluniqtuq] and [chungavatuq] or “it is warm,” “it is blue.” Similarly when I ask for verbs like: “to fall” they give me the word [ikokullutin] or [ikotutin] which I think, but am probably wrong right now, means “I’m falling” and “I fall-down” respectively. So right now I’m getting a lot of words from the elders but I’m having to piece each one apart and figure out what each individual piece means in order to understand what I’m actually getting and some of the pieces can be very, very abstract in meaning like “present tense,” “first person acting on a third person,” “noun-like,” “statement of fact” and so on.

In terms of theory, I’m interested in these languages because they’re relatively unexplained, and opinions differ. Some people think it’s unimportant, others overextend the term, some under-extend it, and some like me relish the challenge of figuring out what’s going on and how it fits in with the larger scheme of how we believe languages work. Even better still, the predominate linguistic framework is very good at explaining isolating languages, and can work with synthetic languages, but fails in its attempts to explain polysynthetic languages, and I love that. Not that Generativist framework is a bad theory (I mean it is a theory of loop-holes built on top of loop-holes built over more loop-holes designed to disguise the fact that the theory failed a long time ago) after all it does have some explanatory powers and is valuable to the field of cognitive science. So basically the ultimate question I secretly seek is “what is polysynthesis? And how can we fit it into a new theory of linguistics, which explains how all languages are structured and the reasons for it.” It’s a big question, but it’s a good one.

Anyways I’ll stop there for now because we’ve only begun to simplistically scratch the surface and I could continue along these lines forever (I only get two weeks while teaching LING102 and its far from enough time, as even I find it too complex sometimes.) If you got anything from this though it should be this: Language is complex and language is awesome!

In the end I’m doing well in Kotlik, have a lot of good language data to work with, and am excited for the next two weeks of adventure and data gathering.

Tschuss!