New direction
My work in Iquitos this week has only partially been focused on matters Omagua, as I prepare for the next, non-Omagua-related portion of my summer time in Peru. First Omagua, then everything else --
Omagua:
Our work this week has been with speaker Amelia Huanaquiri Tuisima, the elderly female speaker with whom we worked before our time in San Joaquín. It is obvious that her fluency is increasing with every passing week, and despite the fact that she is not able to produce fluid speech at the same speed as our SJQ consultant Lino Huanío (who is six years younger), she clearly has a deeper grammatical control over the language, and is able to provide more nuanced judgments on lexical items and manipulate morphology (e.g., suffixes) without 1) confusing herself, or 2) claiming that all permutations convey the same meaning. As an example of the latter phenomenon, I have been working with her on the combinatorics of two suffixes, -ta CAUSATIVE and -ka RECIPROCAL, ATTENUATIVE, DISTRIBUTIVE. An example of several permutations follows:
saku 'be hot'
saku-ta 'cause to be hot'
saku-ta-ka 'cause to be hot [various things]' (distributive)
saku-ta-ka 'cause to be hot a little bit' (attenuative)
saku-ta-ka 'cause each other to be hot' (reciprocal)
saku-ka 'heat up [oneself]'
saku-ka-ta 'make heat up [another]'
saku-ka-ta-ka 'make each other heat up'
These judgments display a level of control that no other speakers with whom we have worked are capable of. Her judgments also provide evidence that there are multiple homophonous suffixes -ka, not just one suffix that gets different readings in different environments, as -ka may appear multiple times to convey a combination of the different readings above:
yapana-ta-ka-ka 'make run around a little bit' (distributive & attenuative)
Unfortunately, the most elderly speaker of Omagua, Lazarina Cabudivo Tuisima, has been unwilling to work with us up to this point. On Monday afternoon we visited her daughter and her family with our consultant Amelia (they are cousins). Her family expresses a desire for her to work with us, though she is currently living with another son in Iquitos. The same afternoon we visited Lazarina there -- she and Amelia talked for some time, but we were unable to convince Lazarina to even really pay attention to us. (As a side note, it is fascinating to listen to their conversations and reminiscences about San Joaquín in the past and family members that have come and gone. A favorite lamentation from Amelia: "Yo estaba gorda pero ya no estoy gorda" [tr. "I used to be fat but now I'm not fat anymore"].) When she did, she said, "no quiero saber nada del omagua" (tr. "I don't want to know anything about Omagua"). Her granddaughter is attempting to convince her to work with us, and we are hoping she will have done so when I call back later this afternoon. Our hope is to collect the most fluently spoken stories from her, as her fluency appears to far surpass that of any other speakers. She was born (in 1919) at a pivotal time in the history of Omagua -- the 1920s appears to have been a decade in which children stopped learning Omagua as a native language, or as a co-native language with Spanish, as children after this point were not born to parents who were dominant in Omagua, i.e., parents of children born after the 1920s appear to have been serious second-language learners of Spanish (even if Omagua was once their dominant language), such that by the time they were raising their children, they were dominant in Spanish, and as such the children were dominant in Spanish, even though they may have had to have had competence in Omagua to communicate with others such as grandparents (more on this in a later blog post).
In order to better pinpoint the moment in time at which Omagua really ceased being transmitted as a native language to children, I have been trying to determine the ages of our consultants and their parents/grandparents with greater accuracy. We have acquired numerous informal stories about relatives and their impressionistic degrees of fluency in Omagua, and this information, combined with specific dates of birth and/or marriage, allow us to begin to paint a picture of language obsolescence. I have visited the office of the Vicariato Apostólico de Iquitos, the highest jurisdiction of the Catholic church in this area, in order to locate copies of as many baptismal records from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as possible. This has for the most part been very fruitful, and we hope to use this data for a future paper on the death of Omagua.
Everything else:
After Clare leaves on July 31st, I will remain in Iquitos a few extra days to export, edit and print several copies of our Omagua dictionary to have returned to San Joaquín. My original plan was then to spend the rest of the month of August traveling along the Marañón and Tigre Rivers in search of speakers of Yameo (thought to be extinct) and Taushiro (with a rumored one remaining speaker). However, while in San Joaquín, I learned in a passing conversation from a local schoolteacher, who had taught farther upriver in bilingual Spanish-Kokama schools on the Marañón River and its tributaries, that a local priest had recently found a family living in a community on the Urituyacu River (a tributary of the Marañón) who still speak Omurano. Omurano, like Yameo, is a language that has also been thought to be extinct, but is one for which there is substantially less linguistic data. The only known data is a 1920s list of 250 words by the German anthropologist Günter Tessmann. Its classification has remained a mystery, having been proposed to be a Zaparoan language (i.e., related to languages such as Iquito & Arabela), related to Candoshi (now thought to be a language isolate), related to Taushiro (see above), or related to both Candoshi & Taushiro. I am hoping to get in contact with the priest who works in this area (he is currently on vacation) before I leave for work on Yameo, with the goal of seeking out this Omurano family (hopefully with his help) and doing the beginnings of what is essentially the first documentation of the Omurano language. It's important, however, not to get my hopes too high, as it is still entirely unclear what their level of control of Omurano is.
This means that I will likely not have the time to seek out the remaining speaker of Taushiro, Amadeo García García. I hope to do that work perhaps next summer. As it stands, I will be flying to Cuzco on August 26th, to work briefly with a Kakinte college student named Miguel, and then travel down the Urubamba River valley with the goal of reaching the village of Kitepámpani, an entirely Kakinte community located in the Department of Cuzco. From there I will leave via boat and bus to Lima, where I return to the United States. I will have more details on the Omurano and Kakinte trips as the dates come nearer.
Iquitos:
Life in Iquitos is the same. Many of the streets in the area of town near the hotel have been dug up to lay new sewage lines, so on dry dies there is an immense quantity of dust in the air, and on wet days and immense quantity of mud. Last night Clare & I took the night off from work, and ate at Restaurante Fitzcarraldo on the Malecón, the local promenade which borders on the Itaya River and is the center of Friday and Saturday nightlife in Iquitos. I had caiman, with chonta, manioc and a bottle of wine. A large group of Danish tourists recently checked into the hotel, and they have already overwhelmed the common space on the patio and in the small kitchen. I think they're leaving for the jungle soon, so that should bring some calm back over the hotel.
Omagua:
Our work this week has been with speaker Amelia Huanaquiri Tuisima, the elderly female speaker with whom we worked before our time in San Joaquín. It is obvious that her fluency is increasing with every passing week, and despite the fact that she is not able to produce fluid speech at the same speed as our SJQ consultant Lino Huanío (who is six years younger), she clearly has a deeper grammatical control over the language, and is able to provide more nuanced judgments on lexical items and manipulate morphology (e.g., suffixes) without 1) confusing herself, or 2) claiming that all permutations convey the same meaning. As an example of the latter phenomenon, I have been working with her on the combinatorics of two suffixes, -ta CAUSATIVE and -ka RECIPROCAL, ATTENUATIVE, DISTRIBUTIVE. An example of several permutations follows:
saku 'be hot'
saku-ta 'cause to be hot'
saku-ta-ka 'cause to be hot [various things]' (distributive)
saku-ta-ka 'cause to be hot a little bit' (attenuative)
saku-ta-ka 'cause each other to be hot' (reciprocal)
saku-ka 'heat up [oneself]'
saku-ka-ta 'make heat up [another]'
saku-ka-ta-ka 'make each other heat up'
These judgments display a level of control that no other speakers with whom we have worked are capable of. Her judgments also provide evidence that there are multiple homophonous suffixes -ka, not just one suffix that gets different readings in different environments, as -ka may appear multiple times to convey a combination of the different readings above:
yapana-ta-ka-ka 'make run around a little bit' (distributive & attenuative)
Unfortunately, the most elderly speaker of Omagua, Lazarina Cabudivo Tuisima, has been unwilling to work with us up to this point. On Monday afternoon we visited her daughter and her family with our consultant Amelia (they are cousins). Her family expresses a desire for her to work with us, though she is currently living with another son in Iquitos. The same afternoon we visited Lazarina there -- she and Amelia talked for some time, but we were unable to convince Lazarina to even really pay attention to us. (As a side note, it is fascinating to listen to their conversations and reminiscences about San Joaquín in the past and family members that have come and gone. A favorite lamentation from Amelia: "Yo estaba gorda pero ya no estoy gorda" [tr. "I used to be fat but now I'm not fat anymore"].) When she did, she said, "no quiero saber nada del omagua" (tr. "I don't want to know anything about Omagua"). Her granddaughter is attempting to convince her to work with us, and we are hoping she will have done so when I call back later this afternoon. Our hope is to collect the most fluently spoken stories from her, as her fluency appears to far surpass that of any other speakers. She was born (in 1919) at a pivotal time in the history of Omagua -- the 1920s appears to have been a decade in which children stopped learning Omagua as a native language, or as a co-native language with Spanish, as children after this point were not born to parents who were dominant in Omagua, i.e., parents of children born after the 1920s appear to have been serious second-language learners of Spanish (even if Omagua was once their dominant language), such that by the time they were raising their children, they were dominant in Spanish, and as such the children were dominant in Spanish, even though they may have had to have had competence in Omagua to communicate with others such as grandparents (more on this in a later blog post).
In order to better pinpoint the moment in time at which Omagua really ceased being transmitted as a native language to children, I have been trying to determine the ages of our consultants and their parents/grandparents with greater accuracy. We have acquired numerous informal stories about relatives and their impressionistic degrees of fluency in Omagua, and this information, combined with specific dates of birth and/or marriage, allow us to begin to paint a picture of language obsolescence. I have visited the office of the Vicariato Apostólico de Iquitos, the highest jurisdiction of the Catholic church in this area, in order to locate copies of as many baptismal records from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as possible. This has for the most part been very fruitful, and we hope to use this data for a future paper on the death of Omagua.
Everything else:
After Clare leaves on July 31st, I will remain in Iquitos a few extra days to export, edit and print several copies of our Omagua dictionary to have returned to San Joaquín. My original plan was then to spend the rest of the month of August traveling along the Marañón and Tigre Rivers in search of speakers of Yameo (thought to be extinct) and Taushiro (with a rumored one remaining speaker). However, while in San Joaquín, I learned in a passing conversation from a local schoolteacher, who had taught farther upriver in bilingual Spanish-Kokama schools on the Marañón River and its tributaries, that a local priest had recently found a family living in a community on the Urituyacu River (a tributary of the Marañón) who still speak Omurano. Omurano, like Yameo, is a language that has also been thought to be extinct, but is one for which there is substantially less linguistic data. The only known data is a 1920s list of 250 words by the German anthropologist Günter Tessmann. Its classification has remained a mystery, having been proposed to be a Zaparoan language (i.e., related to languages such as Iquito & Arabela), related to Candoshi (now thought to be a language isolate), related to Taushiro (see above), or related to both Candoshi & Taushiro. I am hoping to get in contact with the priest who works in this area (he is currently on vacation) before I leave for work on Yameo, with the goal of seeking out this Omurano family (hopefully with his help) and doing the beginnings of what is essentially the first documentation of the Omurano language. It's important, however, not to get my hopes too high, as it is still entirely unclear what their level of control of Omurano is.
This means that I will likely not have the time to seek out the remaining speaker of Taushiro, Amadeo García García. I hope to do that work perhaps next summer. As it stands, I will be flying to Cuzco on August 26th, to work briefly with a Kakinte college student named Miguel, and then travel down the Urubamba River valley with the goal of reaching the village of Kitepámpani, an entirely Kakinte community located in the Department of Cuzco. From there I will leave via boat and bus to Lima, where I return to the United States. I will have more details on the Omurano and Kakinte trips as the dates come nearer.
Iquitos:
Life in Iquitos is the same. Many of the streets in the area of town near the hotel have been dug up to lay new sewage lines, so on dry dies there is an immense quantity of dust in the air, and on wet days and immense quantity of mud. Last night Clare & I took the night off from work, and ate at Restaurante Fitzcarraldo on the Malecón, the local promenade which borders on the Itaya River and is the center of Friday and Saturday nightlife in Iquitos. I had caiman, with chonta, manioc and a bottle of wine. A large group of Danish tourists recently checked into the hotel, and they have already overwhelmed the common space on the patio and in the small kitchen. I think they're leaving for the jungle soon, so that should bring some calm back over the hotel.
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