R. ‘AM A LINGUIST epeeCover illustration: What native title means to us. A collaborative piece from La Grange Remote Community School, Broome West Australia. The artwork was the Western Australia state winner (years 7-9) 2001-2002 in the art competition “The Art of Delivering Justice Arts Prize’ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dixon, Robert M. W. Tama linguist / by R.M.W. Dixon ; with a foreword by Peter Matthews. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-19235-5 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-19405-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Dixon, Robert M. W. 2. Linguistics. I. Title. P85.D59A3 2011 410.92—dc22 [B] 2010040736 ISBN 978 90 04 19235 5 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninldijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. MIX Paper from responsible sourcas FSC FSC* C004472 PAINTED BY DRURKERI WILCO I1.V. - AMERSFOONT, THE NETHERLANDSPara minha amante my muse, my inspiration. Through slings and arrows, taking arms against dun-coloured mediocrity, together we ever reach towards the stars._ Co mH AU RW DW 11 12 13 14 15 16 CONTENTS List of plates Ix Foreword by Peter Matthews x1 Preface x11 Skeleton xv A day in the field 1 What is linguistics? — a journey of discovery 23 Getting there 41 Discography, and a bit of fiction 67 Into the field 83 Frustration and fulfilment 95 The role of universities 129 More lovely fieldwork, and some comparison 153 The science of linguistics, and other approaches to the study of language 167 Fijian, English and some novels 191 Academic standards 215 The delegate from Tasmania 245 Into the Amazonian jungle 267 God and Magog in Brazil 293 A productive partnership 317 Living a life 339 Solutions to problems from the end of Chapter 6 355 Bibliography 359 Index 38310 11 12 13 14 15 16 LIST OF PLATES The author (1996) The thatched hut built for me in the village of Casa Nova by my Jarawara friends in 1993. It was eaten by termites about five years later. Chapter 1. Bakoki, Okomobi’s elder brother, butchering a pirarucu fish. Chapter 1. Manowaree, Jarawara storyteller (and Mioto’s father} with two of his sons. Photographed in the missionary’s house. Chapters 1 and 2. Mioto, Jarawara teacher and friend, in the missionary’s timber house. Chap- ters 1 and 13. Okomobi. village chief and teacher without peer, helping to transcribe a text in my hut. Chapters 1 and 13. Kamo (sitting), married to Okomobi’s sister, and Botenawaa (standing), Okombi’s elder brother. Chapters 1 and 13. Motobi (Okomobi’s younger brother), dear friend and guide on a trip to the Jamamadi village. Sadly murdered in 2000. Chapters 1, 13 and 14. Father, William Ward Dixon (1904-1990), in his forties. Chapter 3. Mother, Isabel Dixon, neé Greenhalgh (1908-1968), in her twenties. Chapter 3. Chloe Grant (c1903-1975) in 1964. Teacher of the Jirrbal and Girramay dia- lects of Dyirbal, and valued friend. Chapters 5 and 8. George Watson (c1899—1991) with wife Ginnie, outside his house on Palm Island just after he had insisted on inviting me in, breaking settlement rules (see page 93). Chapter 5. Albert Bennett, last speaker of Mbabaram. outside Mrs McGrath’s general store in Petford. Chapters 5, 6 and 8. The author (6’ 3%” or 1.92 m. in height) with diminutive Rosie Runaway, Jirrbal speaker. Chapter 8. Dick Moses, dedicated and erudite teacher of Yidifi, at Yarrabah. Chapter 8. Tilly Fuller (left), Yidifi storyteller and teacher, with half-sister Katie Mays, outside the converted canecutter’s shack in which they lived at Aloomba. Chapter 8.X 1AM A LINGUIST 17 Sepo (Josefa Cokanacagi) — host, mentor, guardian and teacher without peer. Here Sepo comes home with vegetables from his garden plot and scales for weighing copra. Chapter 10. 18 The author before a map showing locations of the 250 Aboriginal languages of Australia. Taken when awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters at the Australian National University in 1991. Chapter 10. 19 Elia Gavidi (my Mooomoo Levu ‘big uncle’), wise and benevolent chief of Waitabu village. Chapter 10. 20 The Fijian village of Waitabu, from a high hill to the north-east. Chapter 10. 21 Working on the grammar of Boumaa Fijian with Sepo on an unusually cool day. Although I had a table (rare in the village), Sepo preferred to work sit- ting on the floor. Chapter 10. 22 Molly Raymond, last speaker of the Ngajan dialect of Dyirbal, in her mid- nineties. (She lived to be 102.) Chapter 12. 23 Spider Henry, Jirrbal Gubi (‘wise man’), who was left a substantial inheri- tance and not told about it. Here he sings in Gugulu style. Chapter 12. 24 Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, against a background of an Australian Aboriginal bark painting, an Amazonian basket and a Papua New Guinea bilum (or string bag). Chapters 15 and 16.FOREWORD Few if any linguists have displayed such insight in the field and back home in their study, and have published so much of such lasting value, on so many top- ics, as Bob Dixon has in the past forty and more years. He mentions me most generously at the end of Chapter 11, in company with the late Ken Hale. But the truth is this: that if Hale»s talents could miraculously have been combined with mine, we might have formed a true all-rounder in linguistics, as Bob actually is. It is an honour to be asked to write a foreword for him. His memoir is the testament not only of a brilliant scholar, but of a man whose heart is in the right place and whose actions show it. I will not pretend that I share all the views to which his own experience of life has led him. But where I differ it is as from many others, as intelligent as Plato or as naive as Tom Paine, who have been good people and have meant well by mankind. As a student of language I cannot commend his stance too highly. I urge younger linguists in particular, to mark all he says about their subject, to empathise with all his triumphs of analysis, and find inspiration in his example. There is a primrose path, if I may speak to them directly, that can lead safely to a Ph.D. Just choose whatever theory is in vogue, and let it select the data that are relevant. But why, for crying out loud, should you want to constrain the springtime of your creativity in that way? The same path can lead you on to tenure. Cleave doggedly to some speciality, as a phonologist, as a syntactician, as a semanticist, or whatever. As if language can be carved up into modules on the model of exam papers! Better still, do not be a phonologist but (at the time I write) an Optimality Theorist; not a syntactician but, to make life easier, a Minimalist. Dogmas like these have a shelf-life long enough for you to get promoted. But do you really want to be left stranded, when their time comes and, like many linguists who have met this fate before you, you are still in middle age? The signposts to an illusory paradise surround you. But do, I beg you, follow Bob and turn away before it is too late. The steps you take may well be wandering and slow. Your way will often be solitary. ButXil 1AM A LINGUIST the world of language will be all before you, where to choose how you can truly advance human understanding. Like Bob, I have no religion. But I mention this because, in his case too, it has no bearing on anything else. His picture, in Chapter 14, of the Summer In- stitute of Linguistics is one of the most balanced and detached that I have read or heard. I hope that its members will recognise that it is so. If not they will, of course, confirm the others. Peter Matthews (Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University of Cambridge)PREFACE This is an intellectual autobiography of the author as a student of the science of linguistics, working within the university system. There is also brief mention of my lifelong involvement with discography, and of two forays into fiction- writing (in Chapters 4 and 10). Only a little information is included on private and family life. To illustrate what it is like to actually ‘do’ linguistics, in the scientific sense, the first chapter describes a day’s fieldwork in a small Indian village deep in the Amazonian jungle. Chapter 2 then explains what the science of linguistics is, and Chapter 9 contrasts this with other approaches to the study of language. Also interwoven with the memoir are fairly outspoken discussions of the role of universities (Chapter 7) and of the standards that apply in an academic or quasi-academic milieu (Chapters 11 and 14). It was my privilege to create a world-class teaching-and-research depart- ment of linguistics at the Australian National University, in the 1970s and 1980s (Chapters 6, 8 and 10), which trained a good number of linguists of the high- est quality. During the past fifteen years I have collaborated with Alexandra Aikhenvald in organising nine International Workshops, each of which has resulted in a volume hailed as being on the cutting-edge of theoretical endeav- our (Chapter 15). The greatest intellectual satisfaction of all has come from intensive field- work on several of the indigenous languages of Australia (Chapters 5, 6, 8 and 12), on the Bourmaa dialect of Fijian (Chapter 10) and on Jarawara from Brazil (Chapters 1, 13 and 14). My everlasting gratitude is to speakers of these won- drous languages, for their friendship and their inspired instruction. I am grateful to my first great teacher of linguistics, M. A. K. Halliday for permission to reproduce, in Chapter 3, his letter to me of 24 February 1961. And thanks to Norbert Wiener for putting the idea into my head, half-a- century ago, with his memoir I am a mathematician.SKELETON PERSONAL Born in Gloucester, England, on Wednesday 25 January 1939. Brought up in the nearby Cotswolds town of Stroud. In 1947, moved to the village of Bramcote, five miles from Nottingham where father was principal of the People’s College of Further Education. From 1949 until 1957, attended Nottingham High School, a day ‘public’ (that is, private) school. In 1957, gained admission to Oxford Uni- versity to study chemistry, but immediately switched to mathematics; obtained a second class honours degree in 1960. Began a PhD in mathematics at Oxford but abandoned it after a year, to go to Edinburgh and become a linguist. Married, April 1963 — January 1986. Three children — Eelsha (born Sunday 12 January 1964), a corporate treasury analyst; Fergus (born Monday 6 June 1966), an electrical engineer; Rowena (born Thursday 21 September 1967), an airline pilot for Qantas. In June 1992, at the University of Campinas in Brazil, met Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald (born in Moscow, Sunday 1 September 1957). She moved to Canberra in February 1994 on being awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the Australian Research Council. Gained a de facto stepson, Michael Rudov (born Tuesday 4 Au- gust 1981), a student of Asian (and other) languages, an artist and a charity worker. DISCOGRAPHY Began discographical study in 1955. Joint compiler of the standard work (re- ferred to as ‘the bible’) — Blues and gospel records, 1902-1942. First edition 1964, later editions 1969, 1982 and 1997, with coverage then having been extended to 1890 - 1943. Joint author of Recording the blues (1970, reissued 2001). FICTION During the 1960s, published two science-fiction short stories under the name Simon Tully (and two fact pieces in science fiction magazines under my ownXVI | AM A LINGUIST name). Had two detective novels published, under the name of Hosanna Brown: I spy, you die (1984) and Death upon a spear (1986). LINGUISTICS Research Fellow in Statistical Linguistics in the Department of English Lan- guage and General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, July 1961 — Sep- tember 1963. Paid scant attention to the statistical side; simply became en- tranced by linguistics. From September 1963 until September 1964, employed by the Australian In- stitute of Aboriginal Studies (a most odd organisation) to undertake fieldwork in north-east Queensland. Recorded materials on ten languages, but focussed mainly on Dyirbal. Back in England, Lecturer in Linguistics at University College London from October 1964 until July 1970. Further field trip to north-east Queensland in March-April 1967; submitted grammar of Dyirbal as PhD thesis in December 1967. During 1968-9 was Lecturer on Linguistics at Harvard University. From July 1970, Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the Australian National University in Canberra. Trained many first-class un- dergraduate and graduate students. Twenty further field trips to north-east Queensland, 1970 - 1992. Published lengthy grammars of Dyirbal (1972) and Yidifi (1977); and shorter grammars — gathering what material I could from the last speakers — of Warrgamay (1981), Nyawaygi (1983) and Mbabaram (1991). Published texts, place names and thesaurus/dictionary of Yidifi (1991). Together with musicologist Grace Koch, produced a book and CD on Dyirbal song poetry (1996). Wrote many papers on theoretical topics, including “Noun classes’ (1968, reissued 1982), ‘Where have all the adjectives gone’ (1977, reissued 1982) and ‘Ergativity’ (1979; revised and expanded into a monograph, 1994). Published general survey volume The languages of Australia (1980). Completely re-thought and revised as Australian languages: their nature and development (2002), the culmination of almost 40 years work. And popular volume Searching for Abo- riginal languages, memoirs of a field worker (1984, American edition 1989, Eng- lish reissue 2010). In 1985, six months fieldwork in a basically monolingual village on the island of Taveuni in Fiji (with further short field trips in 1986, 1989-90 and 2007) — a tropical paradise (although with no electricity or running water). Published a grammar of the Boumaa dialect of Fijian (1988).SKELETON XVII Work on analysis of my native language resulted in A new approach to English grammar, on semantic principles (1991). This was revised and expanded as A semantic approach to English grammar (2005). Co-authored a study of the 400 words borrowed from Australian languages into English (1990, revised and enlarged second edition, 2006). Relinquished headship of department in December 1990 (after 20 years in the job) and at the same time (coincidentally) was awarded the first of a se- quence of three five-year Senior Research Fellowships from the Australian Re- search Council. Feeling in need of a mid-life challenge, began fieldwork among the Jarawara Indians, deep in the Amazonian jungle. An intellectual wonderland, in a physi- cally testing environment. Seven field trips, 1991 - 2003. Lengthy grammar pub- lished in 2004. Selected by the Australian Research Council for a Special Investigator Award — $200,000 per year for three years (1997-9) for any research purpose I chose. Together with Alexandra Aikhenvald, created the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, at the Australian National University, in December 1996. Published The rise and fall of languages (1997) setting out a punctuated equilib- rium model for language development. In January 2000, Aikhenvald and I relocated the RCLT to La Trobe Univer- sity in Melbourne, where we were at first accorded ideal working conditions. Between 1997 and 2007, we organised nine International Workshops on criti- cal grammatical topics, each resulting in a volume hailed as state-of-the-art. Unhappy with the direction in which La Trobe University was heading, we re- signed in 2008 and relocated to the exciting new Cairns Institute, for advanced study on everything to do with human populations in the tropics, within James Cook University. In 2010, published Basic linguistic theory, Volume 1 Methodology, and Vol- ume 2 Grammatical Topics (Volume 3, Further grammatical topics, is currently in preparation). Described by the publisher, Oxford University Press, as ‘the triumphant outcome of a lifetime’s thinking about every aspect and manifesta- tion of language and immersion in linguistic fieldwork’ ‘The present volume was in embryo for many years — I had long planned to start it at about the age of 60. The chapters have been written here and there and wherever (in between academic tasks) between 2001 and 2009.bes Ss 3 : ac ama if 2. The thatched hut built for me in the village of Casa Nova by my Jarawara friends in 1993. It was eaten by termites about five years later. Chapter 1 3. Bakoki, Okomobi's elder brother, butchering a pirarucu fish. Chapter 14, Manowaree, Jarawara storyteller (and Mioto's father) with two of his sons. Photographed in the missionary's house. Chapters 1 and 2Ja ii | 5. Mioto, Jarawara teacher and friend, in the missionary's timber house. Chapters 1 and 13 6. Okomobi, village chief and teacher without peer, helping to transcribe a text in my hut. Chapters 1 and 137. Kamo (sitting), married to Okomobi's sister, and Botenawaa (standing), Okombi's elder brother. Chapters 1 and 138. Motobi (Okomobi's younger brother), dear friend and guide on a trip to the Jamamadi village. Sadly murdered in 2000. Chapters 1, 13 and 149. Father, William Ward Dixon (1904-1990), in his forties. Chapter 3 10. Mother, Isabel Dixon, neé Greenhalgh (1908-1968), in her twenties. Chapter 311. Chloe Grant (c1903-1975) in 1964. Teacher of the Jirrbal and Girramay dialects of Dyirbal, and valued friend. Chapters 5 and 812. George Watson (c1899-1991) with wife Ginnie, outside his house on Palm Island just after he had insisted on inviting me in, breaking settlement rules. Chapter 5 13. Albert Bennett, last speaker of Mbabaram. outside Mrs McGrath's general store in Petford. Chapters 5, 6 and 814. The author (6' 34" of 1.92 m. in height) with diminutive Rosie Runaway, Jirrbal speaker. Chapter 8S Des — sae i 2 15. Dick Moses, dedicated and erudite teacher of Yidin, at Yarrabah. Chapter 8 16. Tilly Fuller (left), Yidifi storyteller and teacher, with half-sister Katie Mays, outside the converted canecutter's shack in which they lived at Aloomba. Chapter 8i 17. Sepo (Josefa Cokanacagi) — host, mentor, guardian and teacher without peer. Here Sepo comes home with vegetables from his garden plot and scales for weighing copra. Chapter 10wT (Bra 7 | , ne */ as = ae Sie i oe c er ~ 4 5k, ee ae AP at oe - WHT | | HH = | we Cs 53 18. The author bef a map dhowing lereatiomns of the 250 Aboriginal lan- guages of Australia. Taken when awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters in 1991 from the Australian National University. Chapter 10So Sal th ron > 19. Elia Gavidi (my Mooomoo Levu ‘big uncle’), wise and benevolent chief of Waitabu village. Chapter 10 a ee20. The Fijian village of Waitabu, from a high hill to the north-east. Chapter 10 21. Working on the grammar of Boumaa Fijian with Sepo on an unusually cool day. Although I had a table (rare in the village), Sepo preferred to work sitting on the floor. Chapter 1022. Molly Raymond, last speaker of the Ngajan dialect of Dyirbal, in her mid-'nineties. (She lived to be 102.) Chapter 1223. Spider Henry, jirrbal Gubi (‘wise man’), who was left a substantial inheritance and not told about it. Here he sings in Gugulu style. Chapter 12 24. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, against a background of an Australian Aboriginal bark painting, an Amazonian basket and a Papua New Guinea bilum (or string bag). Chapters 15 and 161 | ADAY INTHE FIELD The word ‘linguist’ has several faces. A polyglot — someone who uses lan- guages but does not enquire concerning the how or why. Or a real linguist, a curious person who takes a language to pieces and puts it back together, to see how it works. A blueprint is produced in two parts, grammar and dictionary. Plus a collection of texts, examples of the habitual activity of the language. The well-known languages are well enough known. Working on one is like adding a bit of shading here and there to the map of some familiar land; this is a comfortable task, which can be combined with a comfortable lifestyle. But, far away from electric power and flush toilets, there are languages of strange and wonderful mien. Writing a grammar of such a language is like exploring a new continent — rocks of a kind not imagined, plants with a leaf-shape which mocks prediction, stippled fish in an inland sea. No task is more mentally ex- hilarating than studying a language of unthought nature. There will be novel meanings — in which the culture is etched — expressed through words which can be of odd shape. The ways in which words are linked may at first appear ersatz but — once the linguist learns how to use the language in everyday ex- change — are simply natural and efficient. The best way to understand something is to experience it. Come, share with me a day in the field in the mid-1990s. The Jarawara tribe numbers about 150 people, spread over seven small villages deep in the rain forest of southern Amazonia (at about 65° W and 7° 10’ S). You go upstream from the mouth of the Amazon for about 1,400 kilometres, turn left into a major tributary, the Purts (which is longer than both the Danube and the Indus). A bit more than 1,000 kilometres upstream you alight on the left bank of the Purts, walk for about an hour through jungle to the Cainaa River, paddle up it for a couple of hours. A further walk of around sixty minutes along a narrow forest track brings you to Casa Nova, the biggest Jarawara village. Its 45 inhabitants divide into four extended families, each of which has its own hut, up on stilts. A little way off is the larger house of Alan Vogel, a missionary2 | AM A LINGUIST linguist from the USA who belongs to Wycliffe Bible Translators (also known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics), an evangelical christian body. Alan and his family only spend a couple of months each year in the village, and his house is locked up just now. My small thatched hut (plate 2) stands on the edge of the village. The Jarawara built it for me, entirely from split timber and tying vines from the nearby forest. This was in exchange for the gift of a chainsaw, which they wanted largely for making dug-out canoes, scooping the inside from half of a giant tree trunk. It’s mid-morning, and it’s hot. I sit at the rude wooden table, made in the village, on a folding metal chair, one of three which were bought in a second-hand shop in the nearby town of Porto Velho. I’m checking my transcription of the account of a funeral which took place a few months before, playing back the tape, mak- ing sure that what I hear corresponds to what is written down in the notebook. My mind is jumping with delight at the richness of the grammar. For any statement you make in Jarawara, it is necessary to specify the evidence — whether you saw it happen yourself, or know about it in some other way (for example, you inferred it or someone told you). The storyteller says: “Wero got down from his hammock and went outside’ For ‘went outside’ he uses the eyewitness form of past tense, suffix -hiri, because he saw it happen. For ‘got down from his hammock’ he uses the non-eyewitness form of past tense, suffix -no, since he didn’t actually see it happen, but just inferred it. (Wero must have climbed out of the hammock before going outside, but if you didn’t see it hap- pen then this has to be stated — the grammar demands it.) Wouldn’t it be great if we had obligatory marking of evidence in English? Surely this would be a boon for the police force, and perhaps an embarrassment for some politicians! There’s a towel round my neck, to pick up the sweat. It’s not that I mind the heat all that much (I don’t really mind hot or cold), just that it’s hard to work when drops fall onto the notebook, making pages soggy. There’s a call from outside. Like most languages outside Europe, Jarawara doesn’t have any words corresponding to our ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’. It has different kinds of speech for- mulas. No one will enter a house without being specifically invited. So I call out Tikijomahi! ‘You enter!’. This is made up of ti- ‘you (referring to one person, if there were more than one I'd say tee)’, -ka- ‘be in motion’, -ijoma ‘through gap (here, referring to doorway)’ and -hi marker of positive immediate imperative. ‘Ah, Mioto, do sit down!’ Just about everyone in the village comes to visit from time to time (the women and children always in groups), mostly just to be convivial and to watch what I’m doing. Everyone chats in Jarawara and corrects me if I make a mistake in replying. But about half-a-dozen of the men are myA DAY IN THE FIELD 3 main language consultants. They'll tell stories, help to transcribe them, explain the meanings of words and how to use them, and answer my grammatical ques- tions. From analysis of the material I’ve collected over the past three seasons of fieldwork, I try to puzzle out how to frame a complex sentence like ‘I want to go to the Jamamadi village’ (that’s the next tribe along, speaking a mutually intelligible dialect). I construct a Jarawara sentence and put it to someone like Mioto. It may sound okay to them, in which case J ask them to repeat it to make sure they would say it exactly that way. Or else it may not be quite right. ‘I see what you're trying to say, they tell me, ‘only you have to say this instead of that’, perhaps moving a suffix from one word to another. Mioto is about twenty, with high cheekbones and all his teeth; see plate 6. (Most people have a lot of gaps. When] first arrived in the village and was find- ing it hard to remember who was who, it occurred to me that I might achieve this by noting how many teeth each person has, and where in the mouth they are.) He is thoughtful and intelligent, really tuned in to the work I’m engaged in. The Jarawara village lies beyond the limit of social institutions in Brazil. There is no medical post, or store, or school — no one but about 45 Indians, a here-and-away missionary, and now me. But Mioto has learned to write Jarawara, with the help of the missionary’s wife. And when he comes to see me, he expects to work on the language. Just now I’m focussing on homonyms. These are words with the same sound but different meanings, like money bank and river bank in English. Languages differ in how many homonyms they have. The first language on which I did fieldwork — in 1963 — was Dyirbal, in the rain forest of north-east Australia. (I published a 444-page grammar of the language, in 1972.) Dyirbal has virtually no homonyms. In contrast, Jarawara has abso- lutely oodles of them. For example, the word jifo can mean ‘hammock’ and ‘fire’ and ‘murity palm (Mauritia vinifera)’. Gender helps a bit — ‘fire’ is feminine and ‘hammock’ is masculine — but not a whole lot, since ‘murity palm’ is also masculine. Just now I’m looking at the verb taro, which can be used to describe two quite different kinds of action. Firstly, waving a hand back and forth in front of the face to clear away the insects (it’s hard to imagine any place with more biting insects than Jarawara territory; they’re much more troublesome than the heat). Taro is also used to describe kicking a football, the national game of Brazil being a major cultural importation into this region. My task is to establish whether there are two separate words taro — homo- nyms — or whether this is one word with two senses. I read out all the sen- tences from the taro page of my dictionary. ‘It’s the same word, Mioto is quite definite. (Later I check with other speakers and they say the same thing.) Ah4 1AM A LINGUIST yes — my brain clicks — now I see it. Taro describes a rather general type of activity: making something move as quickly as possible away from you, using some part of the body to do this. If the object of the verb is ‘a football’, then taro describes kicking the football (using feet); if the object is ‘insects’ then taro describes knocking them away from the face (using hands). I ask Mioto if he has a bit of time to spare, in order to help transcribe the last bit of the funeral story. Sure, he'll be glad to. Siko, an old shaman, had been friendly and helpful to me, although his speech was punctuated by a wracking cough and expulsions of sputum. During the time since my last field trip, the tuberculosis had finally claimed its victim. The story of what happened had been recorded by Mioto’s father, Manowaree; see plate 4. Wero, his cousin, had seen Siko stagger out in the middle of the night, to go to the toilet, and not return. Wero had gone out and found him dead. They had taken off the dead man’s clothes and dressed him in new ones. A messenger was sent to fetch Siko’s relative Kowi from the village of Yemete, about an hour’s walk away. Then a decision had to be made — quickly — on where to bury Siko. Normally, a shaman is buried where he dies, with the rest of the community relocating, building themselves a new village a fair way off. This has benefits, making available new sites to clear for gardens, and a new patch of jungle to hunt in. But now there was a missionary at Casa Nova. He had built an airstrip to bring in him and his family and — most important of all for the Indians — a supply of medicines. Planes are also used to take really sick Jarawara to hospi- tal in Porto Velho (at the missionary’s expense). Siko’s is the first death of an important person since the airstrip has been in place. What to do? It might not be such a good idea to shift the village several kilometres away. With an admirable sense of compromise, the people of Casa Nova decided to bury Siko at a former village site, three quarters of an hour’s walk away, where an old friend of his — called Boniwa — had been laid to rest. That way his spirit should be appeased, and not return to worry them. And the people did move, but only a short distance. The old village was pulled down, and a new one erected on the other side of the airstrip (next to the missionary’s house). I play back to Mioto the first part of the story. Half-a-dozen men set off in mid-afternoon, bearing the corpse on their shoulders. They pass by an old garden where there is growing kona, the tingui vine (Paullinia pinnata), a fish poison. The previous summer I took part in an expedition to the Fahabiri River (an hour’s walk away). Kamo (plate 7), the most extrovert man in the village, had sung out as he placed a basket of pounded kona bark in the river. All the fish, stunned by the bark, floated up and were easy targets for the arrows of theA DAY IN THE FIELD 5 men and boys. Meanwhile the women tended a fire on the bank, to cook some of the fish; others were salted for later use. It takes a couple of hours for Mioto and I to work through the remainder of the story. On reaching the old village site they dig a grave, line it with sticks, lower the body, throw dirt over it. Candles — supplied by the missionary, who had been in the village at the time — are stuck around the grave and lit. We lis- ten to the story, phrase-by-phrase, using the pause button. I repeat what I hear, Mioto corrects (if necessary) and says what it means. I write the Jarawara on the first line, a gloss (in a mixture of English and Portuguese) below each word on the second line, and then a translation of each full sentence on the third line. The funeral party returns to Casa Nova, subdued by the aura of death and by thought of the spirit of a dead shaman. Manowaree recounts how he tells the younger men — using a negative imperative — Tee kakome rima na ‘Don’t you be afraid’. Then he uses a type of construction I’ve never heard before: Ee kakome-tee-ri-mone ama-ke. This has the reported marker, -mone, added to a nominalised clause as subject of a copula verb. Only a rather rough translation into English is possible, something like: ‘It is said that we are not the sort of people who are often afraid’ And then the formula used to close off each story in Jarawara (rather like “The end, in English): Faja mata ama, which means ‘That’s enough for now’. Mioto shares my sense of satisfaction that we've fin- ished transcribing the story. He’s ready to leave. There is a speech formula for that too. Okomabone oke, ‘I'd like to go’, from Mioto brings forth the standard response from me Tikamahi, ‘you go!’ He departs, to help clear undergrowth for a new garden. My hut differs in just one way from those of the Indians. It has close-meshed wire netting wrapped around it — under the floor, up the walls and across the space between the top of the walls and the thatched roof. Without this it would be impossible for anyone not brought up in the region to survive. The main scourge by day is swarms of piums (or buffalo gnats), two-winged insects almost too small to see. They make no noise and can go unnoticed by a linguist deep in the mysteries of Jarawara grammar. Until they bite, suck up a portion of blood, and leave a small red spot that itches like mad. By night there are swarms of carapana, a bulky mosquito which spreads malaria. And don’t forget the mutuca, a large biting fly, or the chigger (which carries scrub typhus), a large flea that burrows under the skin and produces a small but persistent red weal. Jarawara has almost a hundred suffixes which can be added to a verb, most existing in both feminine and masculine form. There are eleven suffixes show- ing tenses and modalities (including three divisions of past time); about fifteen6 1AM A LINGUIST mood suffixes (including four used in commands, and three employed in ques- tions); and others such as ‘only’, ‘again’, ‘still’, ‘in the water’, ‘in a clear space in the forest’, ‘upstream’ and ‘do without stopping’. One of my favourites is -mahite, which means ‘do it all along the way’. I’d first heard this used with the verb bori ‘touch bottom in a stream’. A narrative — recorded by Okomobi, the village chief — tells of a journey along a shallow stream where they could touch bottom (bori) with an outstretched paddle all along the way (-mahite). The suffix has come up in other contexts: people talking to each other all along the path, or laughing all the way home. It strikes me as a novel and useful bit of grammar. A scuffling noise outside. Three children have come to call, the eldest help- ing her younger brother clamber from rung to rung up the short ladder leading to my front door. ‘Hey, close the door before too many piums come to visit too!’ ‘Yobeto, they ask (the name Robert becomes Roberto in Portuguese and then Yobeto in Jarawara) ‘where’s nikiniki?’ A couple of years back I brought to the village a squeeze torch (or flashlight to North Americans). This has no battery — just a small handle that you squeeze and squeeze again, powering a little motor that lights up the bulb. Pretty handy in case one happens to run out of batteries for the regular torch. The fascinating thing was the way in which the Jarawara devised a name for the squeeze torch. There’s a regular process in the language of forming the name for an object from a verb which describes what one does with the object. This involves repeating all or part of the verb. A type of trumpet is called hohori from the verb hori ‘to blow’; a whip is called kokosi from the verb kosi ‘to whip’. Now the verb niki ‘squeeze’ describes what you have to do to the squeeze torch to light up the bulb. When I first produced this new object, some people called it niniki but others repeated the whole verb (not just the first syllable) and said nikiniki. | watched what happened, as these two labels — niniki and nikiniki — competed with each other in the mouths of speakers. Within a few days, nikiniki won out (maybe because the torch has to be squeezed an awful lot) and is now the established name used by everyone. The squeeze torch has become something of a symbol. When relatives from other villages come to call they will often be brought to inspect my nikiniki. The ritual of playing with nikiniki having been completed, the children take out some large illustrated books that I keep for them, and chatter over the pic- tures, There’s one of a large jetliner. They ask a question we've had before, but it’s good to go over it again. ‘How big?’ I explain that there’s room in a Boeing 747 for all the Jarawara people, plus all members of two adjoining tribes, the Jamamadi and the Banawa.A DAY IN THE FIELD 7 ‘Hey, make a bit less noise, I have to say, “Jama hani rawi o-ke, ’'m writing: Trying to puzzle out the secrets of verbal suffixes. Let me try to explain a bit of what I am doing (simplifying things rather a lot, since the system is pretty complex). Onto any verb root — for example ka- ‘be in motion’ — one can add many kinds of suffix. With suffix -waha ‘now’ you get ka-waha ‘be in motion now’. With suffix -ke ‘coming’ you get ka-ke ‘come’. And with -ma ‘back’ you get ka-ma ‘move back, return’. Now a verb can take a whole string of suffixes and I am looking for the principle (or principles) which determine in what order they occur. The first thing is to gather together all the examples in my data. There are quite a few examples of -waha followed by -ma and of -ke followed by -waha. But I’ve also found a few instances of -waha followed by -ke. According greater weight to the larger number of examples, this part of verb structure appears to be: verb root, plus -ke ‘coming’, plus -waha ‘now’, plus -ma ‘back’ There are a couple of other suffixes which appear to go in the same slot as -ma; they are -make ‘following’ and -wite ‘away’. A verb can only include one of -ma, -make and -wite. The formula for verb structure can now be revised: verb root, plus -ke ‘coming’, -ma ‘back plus -waha ‘now’, plus one of -make ‘following’ -wite ‘away’ Or, since I have noted examples of -waha preceding -ke, would it be more ap- propriate to have -waha preceding -ke in the structure? This -waha is a curious suffix; it seems to be able to move around in a verb, with slight differences in meaning. The whole thing is a bit of a puzzle. There’s a shout from the other side of the village which I can’t quite make out. “Okomobi kake, the children tell me, ‘Okomobi has come. Good, we can now find out what’s been happening. About a week ago, Izaki had come to visit. He’s the local official — from the nearby town of Labréa — of the Fundagao Nacional do Indio (FUNAI), the Indians’ protection agency. Izaki had heard reports of some Brancos (non-Indians) fishing within the territory assigned by the Brazilian government for the sole use of Indians. He’d gone off with Okomobi (as village chief) to accost the fish poachers. It seemed to me — and to other people in the village — a rather dangerous kind of expedition, and it was certainly good to hear that Okomobi had returned safely.8 1AM A LINGUIST I'd visited Casa Nova briefly in 1991, recorded just a few words, met the people and — with their permission — decided that I wanted to return to work intensively on Jarawara. Over the next year (back in Australia), I learnt a bit of Portuguese and went through the cumbersome process of obtaining a research visa from FUNAI (being sponsored by Professor Lucy Seki of the University of Campinas, who is the leading Brazilian scholar working on indigenous lan- guages). In 1992 I arrived back in Casa Nova and the first morning wandered down to Okomobi’s house, wondering how to start on the work. He was sharp- ening an axe. Now by one of those strange coincidences, the name for axe in Jarawara is bari, the same as its name in Dyirbal, the Australian language I’ve done lots of work on. So I remembered this word, which broke the ice. ‘I don’t speak much Portuguese, I said, in that language. ‘Neither do we, grinned Oko- mobi. Then and there he recorded a short text in Jarawara, helped transcribe it, and began on the serious business of teaching me his language. Just about everyone else in the village joins in, but Okomobi is my main advisor. That’s another reason it’s good to have him back. I continue working on suffixes, the children comparing notes on picture books. Then the dogs around my hut start yelping. ‘Okomobi, tikijomahi (Oko- mobi, come on in), I say. He sits in a chair next to me. Okomobi has the de- meanour of a chief — thoughtful, articulate. Aged in his early forties (at a guess), a slight moustache, hair beginning to recede at one side, and only a few teeth missing; see plate 6. In fact the office of chief is a recent innovation, and the title, ‘towisawa’, comes from Lingua Geral, a creole used until a genera- tions ago for contact between Brancos and Indians. The job of a towisawa is not to tell people in the village what to do, but just to be their representative in dealings with Brancos — with FUNAI, and for trading with Brancos living on the Purts, who buy manioc flour, salted meat and rubber from the Indians and sell them in exchange (at inflated prices) sugar and salt, clothing and bat- teries, and suchlike. Okomobi has the most perspicacious mind of all my friends at Casa Nova. Mioto and the others are good. They will spend long hours transcribing stories, answering questions about words and about grammar, explaining the language to me. But Okomobi is the tops. Whenever he goes away I accumulate a little store of unsolved problems; when he returns, a couple of hours serves to sort them out. If he’d been brought up in the same environment as me, Okomobi could be a professor of linguistics. As it is, he’s just trying to guide his people, at the edge of an expanding European-style culture, trying to help them survive as an ethnic group for a few decades more.