Log 3: First days

First day of learning, REAL learning. Classes started at 8:30 since the entire Tecpán wakes up early. It’s nothing like my usual routine, especially if you add making tortillas at 7am. But we’re still running on adrenaline. (wait ‘til posts from later this month)

We started off by getting our Mayan names. One of the traditional ways of assigning them is to combine a Mayan name for a day of birth and the year according to the Mayan calendar. So my Kaqchikel name is Waqxaqi’ Ey. It’s fun and a tricky way to prepare us for learning Kaqchikel numerals. And some of the more advanced learners managed to find a hidden meaning behind their names. Chris is a bunny apparently, or a seed.

We also learned about Wuqu’ Kawoq from its director Anna Kraemer. She told us the story of how Wuqu’ Kawoq started from recognizing the urgent need to fill in the gap in the areas of health care where neither government nor NGOs were present. And interesting enough, it was started by an doctor, anthropologist and two linguistics. A truly great mix and an amazing example of what people can achieve when they collaborate across disciplines. We talked about what are the immediate things that we, as group of enthusiastic language scientists could help. A simple but genius idea already being piloted by Wuqu’ Kawoq is an app to assist midwives with delivering births – it does not require literacy skills and sends the gathered info back to Wuqu’ Kawoq’s database so various risks are evaluated. Plenty of room for contribution from computational linguists and Mayan dialectologists.

There was also proper language class as we know it. The approach taken by our three instructors is to listen, speak and act out as much as possible. We have not taken any notes and we have not looked into a textbook at all. It is challenging but certainly very involving. We learned the basics of greetings and some phonology. We’re already noticing dialectal differences among our three instructors. There is a very curious discrepancy between their distinction among lax and tense vowels. Conservatives varieties of Kaqchikel have up to 10 vowel qualities – tense a, i, e, o, u and lax ä ï ë ö ü. For others, only a and u have tense-lax distinction. And where there’s a dialectal/generational variation, there’s  a great opportunity for a sociolinguistic study.

Other cool experience from the class on pronunciation was the struggle with devoiced sonorants. You wish you could hear us try them out or even perceive the distinction. Dear Kaqchikel babies, how on earth would you ever acquire these?!

Since the classes go until 4pm, we had a nice lunch together. Not to confuse with a lunch BREAK since many of us still practiced the newly learned phrases. And coffee, lots of coffee.