First day of the Caucasus Conference I arrived there at about 9:30, when many of the caucasologists were already at the welcoming talk and the introduction. So I missed that... but I was busy anyways: Martin Müller and I had the task to fill plates with cookies and fruits and bring them down – along with glasses, tumblers and waste bins – into the MPI's foyer, where the guests were supposed to get some drinks and snacks. That was our main task. We also brought the stuff back into the institute's kitchen and prepared more. It's amazing, how quick and how much those people eat! Alex's comment on this:
"Wahrscheinlich kommt Kaukasus gar nicht von 'Kasus', sondern von 'kauen'!", unfortunately this pun doesn't work in English, as the region is called Caucasus, not Chewcase. ;)
There were also some minor other things to do... nothing too difficult, but it prevented me from attending some interesting talks. At least I grabbed some of the handouts.
I actually was at two talks:
• Reference-tracking in Hinuq (by Diana Forker) — I missed the first half, so I didn't get everything. In fact, I had no idea what reference tracking really was. Now I know: It means something like "to keep track of a certain referent in a discourse", so it refers to the distance between the introduction of a new referent and its next mentioning and of what kind it is... a full noun or NP, a direct object or a pronoun, or as in Hinuq (the language closest to Tsez, by the way): the noun-class prefixes. The outcome of the talk was, however, that there is nothing too special going on. But as I said: I missed the beginning.
• Imperative Converb in Archi (by Nina Dobrushina) — Archi is a Nakh-Dagestanian language as well, and it appears to have an interesting type of imperative morphology for sentences with two verbs: one being a verb with an imperative converb suffix and then a verb with a plain imperative null-morpheme (the bare stem, as in many languages). Knowing the system of converbs from languages like Tsez or Sakha, this doesn't seem to me that unusual, but it appears to be quite rare among languages. Interesting.
What I regretfully missed was Zaira's talk about Khwarshi, two other talks about the phonetics and the homophony, respectively, of Kabardian/Adyghe. I also missed an interesting talk on the Udi orthography.
But preparing the cookies and fruits wasn't that bad either, my expectations were much worse and after all I
did see/hear some talks. And I also introduced myself to
Yakov Testelets. I also took some photos and asked Sven if he knew why so many languages have or had some kind of [s] vs. [h] alternation, either in their phonetic realization or at some point in their history, or diachronically (as in the Latin/Greek prefix
semi vs.
hemi). Sakha has this for every intervocalic /s/. So quite often the language is pronounced
[ha'χa], depending on the preceding word. Amuhing, ih it not? He didn't know either... he found it kind of strange as well...
And speaking of Sakha! We had our Sakha test today! I didn't prepare much for it besides sorting out and ordering all my data sheets. The "Hakhaklauhur" turned out to be not overly difficult, but indeed somewhat tricky, especially concerning the vast amount of consonant assimilation and the occasional vowel shortening, not to speak of stem crippling. A verb stem like
ihit may change to
ist- before a suffix and in one case, the stem
sas became
hahabït. Luckily this is quite predictable. I was also proud that I glossed
tuoχtūr correctly as underlying
tuoχ–LĀ–Ar (what–
VBLZ–
PRS.PTCP), literally "whatting". ;) Cornelia had the same. However, the time was a little short... I didn't manage to translate the last sentence into English and I could barely finish glossing it. I think no one was able to finish it in time... but I have a good feeling.
Ereger türk tïllar tuhāččïlarïgar alamaɣay. ;)
nostalgic
tired
