unbelievable linguistic moments

In Field Methods this semester, we're studying Q'anjob'al, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. (That's an ejective uvular stop and a voiced bilabial implosive in the name of the language, for you linguists out there.) Our consultant has a fourth grade education in Spanish, and taught himself how to read and write Q'anjob'al, which means that his spelling varies like the spelling in Shakespearian English. It's pretty awesome. Here are the crazy cool things that have happened so far:

1) No word for "and." I was going down the Swadesh list, eliciting drink, eat, bite, suck, spit, vomit, blow... no problem. Then I get to "and." He couldn't think of it. It's like "y" in Spanish. You use it in sentences like "Jack AND Jill went up the hill." Nothing. Eventually he gave us a word, [a], that he said was "and," but you could use it in both "Antil a Efraim were laughing" and "a Efraim was laughing." No dice.

2) No words for blue, orange, pink, purple, brown, and gold. Again, we were eliciting the Swadesh list, and had no problem with the colors on the list: red, green, yellow, white, black. Jennifer decided to do some more. Blue. Azul. The color of this chair. "Yeah, I know what you mean, I just can't think if we really have a word for that... I think we say, 'green.'" This is one of those textbook linguistic moments that you never think will actually happen to you. The colors on the Swadesh list are indeed (pretty) universal, and the other ones are (relatively) marked.

3) No voiced stop consonants. In English, we have P and B, T and D, K and G. In Q'anjob'al, they just have the P, T, and K. No B, D, and G. This goes for fricatives too: they have s but no z, and sh but no zh. This means that there are no voicing distinctions anywhere on the IPA chart. Awesome.