asakiyume | only connect

Holy moly, a person from the Tukano Amazonian people just friended me on Bluesky, and she's learning Tikuna too! I was able to say to her that I thought Tikuna was tagarü mecuraum (a beautiful language). I apologized for my poor orthography (Tikuna is rendered into letters differently in Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, but what I write is not even correct by the Colombian orthography because my teacher is pretty random about spelling). This woman then kindly gave me the correct (for Brazil) orthography, plus a grammar correction: Tága rü nã mecüraū (I left out the ña... not entirely sure what it does/means, but learning is a slow and wondrous thing).

Truly, the internet remains a wondrous place for connecting with people! And now I know the Tukano word for cassava: kií. (Tikuna is a language isolate, so the chances of my Tikuna helping me know Tukano are slight, except for common loan words they both might have from, e.g., Tupi.)

I have other things to post about but I'm going to put the different flavors on different plates (i.e., save it for another post)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

osprey_archer

Oh, how fun! How cool that learning Tikuna is facilitating all these connections for you. (I originally wrote "fascinating all these connections," which doesn't exactly make sense but does seem somehow apt.)

asakiyume

It does seem apt!

From my vaguely related experience with Tetun, I doubt this will go anywhere very far, but I don't need it to--this much is delightful and plenty!