Andrew’s World

Surprise, surprise! Tomorrow I'll be gone for almost two days (Friday and Saturday) to Austria! To Braunau am Inn, to be exactly, the city were Adolf Hitler was born over a century ago. Reason is, I "discovered" (indirectly) a native speaker of Hinuq who also claimed to speak Tsez, there. Now we – that is Sven G., Diana F., Arsen A. (the Tsez) and I – will visit him and his family to maybe record some texts and ask questions. As for me, I might practise my Tsez and Russian on the trip, I hope...

By the way, I'm currently reading Dan Everett's book "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes", which I enjoy... but I wonder about the many illogical inconsistencies in his transcription of Pirahã words... I'm not talking about alternative pronunciations of consonants and words here, but about quite obvious errors, which are not too rare in the book. An example is a proper name in Pirahã, which occurs as Xaíkaíbaí, Xaikaíbaí, Xaikaíbí [sic!] and Xaikáibaí (of which the latter is the most frequent and thus perhaps correct). A different name can be found as Xaogíoso and Xaogióso here and there. Another curiosity is the spelling of some words that seem to start with vowels, where he leaves out the glottal stop (written in his orthography as <x>) in words like abikwí, which also contain a <w>, which puzzles me, as it is not part of the Pirahã phoneme inventory; sowá is another such word. Then, I remember having found the word kaoáíbogi ("evil spirit") somewhere in some glossed examples by Everett – not in the book, but in one of his articles – now I find him writing that word as kaoáíbógí in his book. Why?
There are more of such inconsistencies... but maybe I am wrong and words may start with vowels in Pirahã. Plus, there's really alot allophony and allomorphy going on. Vowels may be dropped, diphthongs may be monophthongized, tones can change and even jump to other syllables — at least that's my impression from reading his examples. I really really want to read something about Pirahã phonology someday. Maybe I'll ask Sven or Eugenie or even Dan Everett himself if they could recommend some articles or books. I will probably have to buy that Portuguese book from that Brasilian vendor after all... I'd do that if I could find a trustworthy Brasilian with a Paypal account. :/

By the way, some useful Pirahã phrases include:
• Tii kasaagá Xoogiái. = "My name is Xoogiái."
• Kaoáíbogi hi sabí xáagahá. = "Evil spirits are mean."
• Hiaitíihí hi tigisáaikoí. = "Pirahãs are hard."

Quote of the Day
André: I'm reading a book on the Pirahãs.
Timwi: Does the book have page numbers? :))))))