a new language

I'm trying to gear up to blog about Guatemala (which I'll probably do by starting a new blog and double-posting here or linking, since some people that are not typical readers of this blog have asked to be updated on my travels.)

I'm going to a remote village in the mountains for four weeks or so to do fieldwork on an underdocumented Mayan language, Q'anjob'al. I have a Tinker grant to do so (people in any academic field at all: if you want your first fieldwork experience in Latin America or Spain to be paid, look up Tinker! They're awesome.) It'll be cold up there, and it's the rainy season, and there are mosquitoes, but it's a free trip to the mountains and away from Illinois!

I'll be volunteering on Lwin Pedro Mateo's child language acquisition project, translating Q'anjob'al transcriptions into Spanish (with a native speaker). Also, I'll be doing my own project on kinship terms, and maybe a separate one on directionals.

Today's fabulous fact about Q'anjob'al is: exactly like English has good connotations for "right" (as in "the right-hand side" AND as in "correct,") Q'anjob'al uses "watx'," the word for "good," to mean "right-(hand)." That's CRAZY.