in karenga there are people and things

i met with ilukol isaiah again today.

it's interesting how different speakers have different skills. it seems from the first data that i've collected that ilukol has a lot of trouble recalling vocabulary items. however, it seems like he is a lot more sensitive to the internal structure of words than komol is. my hope is that the combination of the two of them will provide far more insight into what the language was like than work with just one of them would. additionally, i hope that they work together well, as getting them to work together will be one of my main goals. that said, it seems like a desirable outcome from this project will be, in effect, two language descriptions--one for the variety of the language produced by komol, and one for the variety produced by ilukol. generalizations across the two varieties will surely be possible, but i think that it will be impossible to be true to the data without presenting them separately.

i also have a few photos. this boy is walking up to a shop a few hundred yards from the mission. the main road through "town" is behind me. i took this photo while holding my camera at hip-level and without looking--i feel like it came out alright.



these guys are the nyangea mountains on the western edge of town. lobalangit, where komol lives, is on the other side of them. there's a 10 or 11 mile road that goes through a pass to the right of this photo that i walked back and forth on ad infinitum last time i was here. i should have a motorcycle by the end of the week, and komol and i are gonna cruise. it'll be way better than last time, except for no stephen buerger. this was taken from the main road pretty close to the town center--a stretch of road at a junction that has a slightly higher density of shops than the rest of the town. it's probably about half a mile from the mission where i am staying.



i played a half of soccer last night. it was pretty fun, but a little disappointing after the games that i played in last time. it seems like they've gotten more serious about pageantry, but haven't made the games more fun or with a higher quality of play. i miss the really big guy who just liked running everybody over. do you remember his name, stephen?





a funny thing is happening with my lens selection. i've had a perfectly good 50mm f/. 1.8 lens for six and a half years that i occasionally use in way low light situations or in other specialty-type spots. buttt i couldn't find it when i was packing for this trip, so i threw an old fully manual 50mm lens in just in case. that thing has hardly come off of my camera. apparently i just needed something with no autoexposure or autofocus to get me to use it. sigh. (but thanks, mom and dad, for buying me the bag of loot that the lens was included in!)