The part of town where Yura and Alona live is right out on the edge. The good part of this is that we are right near the forest. The bad part is that we are probably a 3-4 walk from the centre of town. We are in a district of houses a little disconnected from the rest of the town.
To disconnect us a little further our mobile phone company does not work in Baykit. I rectified that today, Yura took me into town and I bought a new sim card. Now we can call people that we have met to arrange to meet with them.
The distance has not stopped us from being occupied thankfully. Yura's mother is staying here too. So far we have sat down with her on a few occasions already to record Evenki language data and further learn the Evenki language. Hopefully we will get many more chances and be able to build up a lot of data.
It has been eye opening to work with an Evenki speaker at 69 years of age. While she is a lot more comfortable with her language than the Chulym appear to be, and she says that she speaks it with her friends, it was surprising to find out that she did not know all the words on our word list. Some of the words missing were sun and squirrel, words that the Evenki definitely have.
I would love to look in secretly to see whether people really are speaking Evenki when no outsiders are around. The act of observation always changes reality in any experiment. Speakers of an endangered language will always switch to the majority language when outsiders are around.
One conclusion that I have come to is that Sergei in Krasnoyarsk probably is a good choice to learn Evenki with. He did not know some words on the list but really knew no less than Baba Anya (Yura's mother). I played her some oral texts that I recorded of him speaking. She said she could understand them well. I hope this is true. It appears that the main differences between the two dialects may surround a few substitutions of sounds. If they really are mutually intelligible then Sergei would make an excellent choice to study with.
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