Our first attempt at bible translation

Today was our last full day in Baikit. We spent much of it on and off learning Evenki, either with Yura or Baba. Melody is right when she says that we don't have much opportunity to learn Evenki, like we have had in the last couple weeks. And really we have made the most of our opportunities. We have probably spent at least two hours a day working on the language. This is a lot. (If you have ever learnt another language you will understand. It is taxing on the brain.) Most of it has been collecting data though, which we will have to sort through and practice at a later date. Even though our opportunity has been priceless, we are still human, and we have found ourselves tiring. Today we spent many more than two hours.

We were able to record a song that Yura had written in Evenki to the tune of a popular Russian Christian song. The chorus is very similar to the Russian song, but the verse he has written in such a way as to make it appropriate for Evenki culture. We satbdown and translated this song out of the Evenki back into Russian.

Baba had been trying to arrange for us to meet a lady who is an Evenki teacher. This lady lives just around the corner, but has been pretty much drunk the whole time we have been in town. Baba was disappointed that we never met her. But it may not have gone so well. This lady probably would have expected to teach us in a formal way, that could have moved very slowly. Where as Baba has been happy to fit in with our model of eliciting language from her, even if she has not always quite understood what we have been doing.

Melody collected 11 sentences all based around knife to search for grammatical variation.

We spent part of yesterday and today translating various words and phrases to tell the story of creation in Genesis 1. With some more touch ups tomorrow we would be capable of telling this story to people in Evenki. We are not highly conversational, but it is exciting to think how far we have come in the last two weeks. It has been exciting for Baba too. We will have to practice the story on Evenki speakers back in Krasnoyarsk.