Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes Read Online Free PDF Page B

beginning my “informant” work. I followed several different field guides and set measurable language-learning tasks for myself. My first couple of days back in the village, I made crude but useful drawings of the locations of all the huts in the village, with a list of the occupants of each. I wanted to learn how they spent their days, what was important to them, how children’s activities differed from adults’ activities, what they talked about, why they passed their time the way they did, and much more. And I was determined to learn to speak their language.
    I tried to memorize at least ten new words or phrases per day and to study different “semantic fields” (groupings of related items such as body parts, health terms, bird names, etc.) and syntactic constructions (looking for active versus passive, past versus present, statements versus questions, and so on). I entered all new words on three-by-five-inch index cards. In addition to transcribing each new word phonetically on a card, I also recorded the contexts in which I had heard the word and a guess as to its most likely meaning. Then I punched a hole in the upper left corner of the card. I put ten to twenty cards on a ring (taken from a three-ring binder, so it would open and close) and put the ring through a belt loop on my pants. I would frequently test myself on the pronunciation and understanding of the words on my cards by working them into conversations with Pirahãs. I refused to let the Pirahãs’ constant laughter at my misapplication and mispronunciation of their language slow me down. I knew that my first linguistic goal was to figure out which sounds of those I was hearing in Pirahã speech were actually meaningful and perceptible to the Pirahãs. These are what linguists call the phonemes of a language, and they would be the basis for devising a writing system.
    My first big breakthrough in understanding how the Pirahãs see themselves in relation to others came during a trek into the jungle with some Pirahã men. I pointed at the branch of a tree. “What’s that called?” I asked.
    “Xií xáowí,”
they replied.
    I pointed again to the branch, the straight portion of the branch this time, and I repeated,
“Xií xáowí.”

    “No.” They laughed in unison. “
This
is the
xií xáowí,
” pointing toward the juncture of the branch with the tree trunk and also to a smaller branch’s juncture with the larger branch. “
That
” (what I had pointed at, the straight portion of the branch) “is
xii kositii.
”
    I knew that
xii
meant “wood.” I was pretty sure that
xáowí
meant “crooked” and that
kositii
meant “straight.” But I still needed to test these guesses.
    On the jungle path walking back toward home at the end of the day, I noticed that one long stretch of the path was straight. I knew that
xagí
meant “path,” so I tried “
Xagí kositii,
” pointing toward the path.
    “Xaió!”
came the immediate response (Right!).
“Xagí kositíi xaagá”
(The path is straight).
    When the path veered sharply to the right I tried
“Xagí xáowí.”
    “Xaió!”
they all responded, grinning.
“Soxóá xapaitíisí xobáaxáí”
(You already see the Pirahã language well). Then they added
“Xagí xaagaia píaii,”
which I later realized meant “Path is crooked also.”
    This was wonderful. In a few short steps I had learned the words for
crooked
and
straight.
I had already learned the words for most body
    parts by this time. As we walked along, I remembered the words that had been given to me by the Pirahãs in their language for
Pirahã people
(
Híaitíihí
),
Pirahã language
(
xapaitíisí
),
foreigner
(
xaoói
), and
foreign language
(
xapai gáisi
).
Pirahã language
was clearly a combination of
xapaí
(head) and
tii
(straight), plus the suffix
-si,
which indicates that the word it is attached to is a name or a proper noun: “straight head.”
Pirahã people
was
hi
(he),
ai
(is), and
tii
(straight),