Day 5 (by Vidhya Elango and Natália Londoño)
On our second day of elicitations, we took off in the cold and rain to Museu do Indio, arriving just before ten. We had two new faces in our group today. The first, Anari is a new consultant. She is a speaker of Patxohã. It had gone extinct, but the community had reconstructed it and it has been taught in schools since the 1990s. Anari wrote about this process in her master’s thesis. It is especially interesting to work with Patxohã since it is a reconstructed language, and very little linguistics research has been done on it. Suzi worked with Anari on the count-mass questionnaire.
The second new face was Ohanna, our TA. She is an expert on count-mass and will be helping us with our elicitations. She worked with Ivona, Cal, and Tiffany on the animacy questionnaire with Francy, our Nheengatu consultant.
As for the rest of us, Karoline and Natália continued to work on the animacy questionnaire with Sandra (Guaraní Ñandeva) and Vidhya and Suzi kept working on count-mass in Marubo with Nelly.
The day went by quickly as we gathered our data. We often remarked at how much data we were getting from a single day (some of us are going to need to buy new notebooks soon). Fieldwork is a challenge – it’s difficult to prioritize and ask the right questions – but also immensely rewarding.
Natalia Tiffany and Suzi went to CCB (Centro Cultural do Banco do Brazil) to see an exhibition on Tropicália in honour of the genre’s 50th anniversary. The art and music exhibit showcased the genre’s most important singers, poets, and songs. The installations were thorough, they were aesthetically pleasing and in line with the genre. It was a great experience for both, hard-core fans, and first timers.
Research Excursion Program 