20 The Linguist Vol/58 No/3 2019
ciol.org.uk/tl
FEATURES
The good
Working on any language will reveal many
stimulating and potentially challenging
details about the grammar, lexicon or social
grounding of a language and its community of
speakers. In a very real sense, every day in the
field is filled with wondrous revelations and
eureka moments. While working with speakers
of Tofa, a moribund Turkic language spoken
in east-central Siberia, I realised that one
particular suffix, –ZIg, means 'to smell of ____'.
Revelations may even come in the form of
identifying a previously hidden language. The
Hruso Aka of Arunachal Pradesh, India, for
example, described another local community
as "exactly the same as us, just a little bit
different in dialect", but when working with
speakers of that other 'dialect' I realised that
this was a distinct language used by a
community who had self-invisibilised into the
other larger one. They spoke Koro Aka, a
language that had previously escaped the
notice of trained professional linguists, and
thus was new to scientific investigation.
These kinds of revelations are the bread
and butter of linguistic researchers in the field.
From eureka moments to violent encounters, Gregory Anderson
considers the good, the bad and the ugly of linguistic fieldwork
W
ith over 30 years of fieldwork
experience on every inhabited
continent (sorry Antarctica!) and
across the islands of the Pacific, I have had an
enormous range of experiences across the full
emotional spectrum. Elation, exhilaration, joy,
sadness, remorse, loneliness, despair and fear
have all been my fellow travellers. All have
helped shape me into the person and linguist
I am today; you cannot take the good without
the bad or the ugly in linguistic fieldwork.
Ideally, every experience helps you learn how
to do things better – and what to avoid.
Intrepid explorer
©
DR
K
DAVID
HARRISON/L
IVING
TONGUES
INSTITUTE
FOR
ENDANGERED
LANGUAGES
