Guatemala Field Station Blog

I wanted to write this blog post about some technical issues of linguistic field work but it turned out to be mostly about the speakers just because all my work would have been impossible without them. On the second day of the field trip this year, I started doing elicitation with my host mother Señora Irma and yes, she is an amazing consultant! As a medical worker, she is very busy during the whole week but she still found time to work with me almost every evening. She was patient and concentrated and, thanks to her, we could work with the most difficult examples using the pictures (try to decide for yourself how many interpretations a sentence like At least three girls saw some cats has ). Pictures for elicitations on quantifiers The f irst elicitation and the first attempt to write in Kaqchikel were hard and exhausting. Th e second elicitation was a surprise: Kaqchikel translations from Spanish provided by Se ñora Irma contradicted almost all the existing data abo...

Our Tz'utujiil contributor Doña Rosario (or Doña Sara, as she's better known in Patzún) is famous in town for her “patines”, a dish from the Tz’utujiil area surrounding Lake Atitlán. Every week, she gets requests to cook the dish, which consists of a spicy tomato sauce and one of several kinds of meat: fish, shrimp, chicken, or “cecina”—beef that has been marinated in pure lime juice overnight. Our last week of working in Patzún, Doña Rosario prepared her “cecina” patines for us, and they were DELICIOUS! The photo below shows the carefully wrapped meal in “maxán” leaves—in Tz’utujiil, the dish is known by the name in (1) below: (1)        Jk’omik           chu-pam                      tz’alem             sauce       ...