asakiyume: (shaft of light)
I've started listening to Denis Bertet's 2021 Tikuna classes. OMG great French review because he says everything in French and then translates into Spanish, so if there's something I don't remember, I can catch it the second time around.

First class he shared a video of a man sitting in his house, introducing himself, and asked the students for things they noticed about the language on first hearing (although the class included both people who were familiar with the language and/or culture and absolute beginners), and also things they noticed in the situation.

One of the students mentioned about the microphone that the man is wearing, and Prof. Bertet says that it's a super great microphone, really good for situations like this, because it picks up just the speaker's voice (or mainly just that), whereas there's a lot of ambient noise--hens, dogs, children, birds, rain--which can interfere with hearing.

And I was thinking HOW MUCH I LOVE that about getting WhatsApp messages from my tutor, how it makes me smile, how it makes me feel that much closer. Someone drops a cup in the background and I can hear it bouncing on the floor. Chicks are peeping as they're fed. The rain is coming down. The birds are singing.

It is definitely valuable to be able to hear clearly what someone is saying, and I'm going to learn a lot from these recordings, I can tell already (not to mention other cultural stuff, like that daytime-use hammocks are called--in Spanish--chinchorro... looking online I find that the name comes from a type of hammock made by the Wayuu people), but if I had to choose only one way of learning, I'd choose learning with my tutor in a heartbeat. ... But I don't have to choose. Both are possible! And not just both but many. Multiplicity! So many different ways of doing things. In any given moment, we may have to choose one method or thing or another, but at some other moment we can choose something else. A little of this, a little of that. Or a lot of this for XX years... and then something different.
asakiyume: (yaksa)
"We thought that the jambato toad was gone forever until one morning in Angamarca, Ecuador, a boy found one in the grass by his house."

This beautiful song by the group (family, actually) Jacana Jacana is about Atelopus ignescens, a little black toad with a golden belly: he carries his own sunshine with him. It was believed that this toad went extinct in the 1980s, until 2016, when, as the quote says, a boy discovered one by his house.

Near the end of the song, the chorus is sung in Kichwa (Quechua), a common spoken language in that part of Ecuador, and at the very end, a voice says, "May the little black toads return and gladden us with their song." The credits tell us that that's David Jailaca--the boy (well, man, now) who found the toad that proved that Atelopus ignescens were not extinct after all.

rough and ready translation of the lyrics )

The story of Atelopus ignescens is moving all on its own--to see that against all odds the small and fragile creatures of the world sometimes recover and return, even when we think they're gone for good. But the lyrics add an almost religious sense of faith: "although nobody had seen you, I knew you were alive, and so I searched for you--and then I found you." The black toad with the heart of fire is like a divinity who withdrew from us for a while... and then came back. ~ ~ Gratitude ~ ~



The family comprising Jacana Jacana (a couple and their daughter--here's an article about them), specialize in songs about the natural world--they sing about insects and amphibians and mangos, and wherever they are, they get the children in the area to join in the singing and the videography, and their songs feature words in the indigenous languages of the places they're visiting. So they're celebrating and lifting up multiple types of diversity.

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