Asakiyume mita

Happy 2026 ... the microfiction prompt word today was "champagne." I ended up in South Dakota on Google Street View, and then downloading the New Lakota Dictionary to hear how a word was pronounced but ... have a microstory:

Driving through Bullhead, South Dakota, Mike noticed a sign on a roadside stand: "Bullhead Champaign."

He pulled over. Bottles with fancy labels in both English & Lakota stood in a row.

"You know you can't call something champagne unless comes from Champagne, France, right? Also, isn't this area too cold for wine grapes?"

The seller regarded Mike coolly.

"This is made from sandcherry. Aúŋyeyapi in our langauge. And it's p-a-i-g-n, not p-a-g-n-e. Totally different."

From this blog I learned the Lakota name, as well as an alternative name, tȟaȟpíyoǧiŋ, and this fun piece of lore: that you should pick the fruit facing the wind to ensure they'll be sweet.

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)

The Tikuna language has five genders (these aren't genders like people having genders; these are just linguistic genders--like how French and Spanish have two** and German has three. Speaking of, it's fascinating to me when Spanish and Portuguese genders don't agree, like for "computer," which is masculine in Portuguese but feminine in Spanish. And "tree" is the opposite: masculine in Spanish but feminine in Portuguese.)

Anyway, Ticuna's five genders are feminine, masculine, neuter, salient, and nonsalient. What's interesting to me is that the prefixes for these only come in three variations: one for feminine, one for masculine, neuter, or nonsalient, and one for salient. It's a taxonomy that would make Borges smile! There are things in the feminine category, things in the masculine/neuter/nonsalient category, and things in the salient category. (Things owned by the emperor would be .... let's guess salient.)

... This information comes from the 2020 online course, not from work with my tutor. She, however, continues to teach me fun words and phrases, like michi pucuum na muum--the cat is afraid of the rain.

**Not so fast, Asakiyume--and readers! mount_oregano points out that actually Spanish has five genders (see her comment here; she links to an explanation.)

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.

I dreamed there was a book, an Edwardian guide to the meanings of buttons, the way there are guides to the meanings of flowers. I was looking at the cover, which had lovely old lettering and slightly bad printing (colors not quite aligned). I knew without opening it that it would say what bone buttons mean, and wood, cloth-covered ones, metal ones, clay and ceramic. What it means if the pattern is a crest of arms or flowers, nautical themed or woven.


"There was a guy, the buttons on his jacket were bits of rebar from the Twin Towers, inset with Etruscan glass. I recall too that he had feather earrings. He bragged they were pinfeathers from a royal northern albatross."

My friend Francy is looking for work, and I am eager to learn Tikuna without taking advantage of her, so I proposed to pay for a month or so of lessons (I don't want to saddle her with a long-term obligation and don't know how long I can afford to do this) as a source of income while she looks.

I should have known from how graciously and easily she taught me words when I was visiting that she'd be an excellent teacher, but I've been truly blown away. She's made me two diagrams of the forest field site where I got to join in the fariña roasting, labeling everything in both Spanish and Tikuna, and she sent me a video where--as the rain beats down on the roof overhead--she goes over how to pronounce each word, slowly and clearly.

Here's a portion of the diagram: you can see the yuca plant with the big tubers, the fariña being sieved through the cernador (in Tikuna, cuechinü), and that figure is me !



I also should have known she'd be an excellent teacher because she's taken one of her nieces in hand, helping her with school work. (This is one of the kids who was so eager to show me her notebooks ^_^)



There are NOT a lot of resources in Tikuna. When I visited the community of Mocagua (a community with three indigenous peoples living together, Tikuna, Cocama, and Yagua), I got to see some textbooks that the kids in the community used, but they were few and consequently very precious: they had been created through the work of a foundation, Codeba, itself the creation of one remarkable Cocama woman, Emperatriz Cahuache. When she passed away, no one kept the foundation going, so there haven't been any more textbooks made.

The books share Tikuna traditions, and also provide general instruction in both Spanish and Tikuna. Here, an explanation of the water cycle:

( The water cycle: explanation in two languages )

I asked if there was a Spanish-Tikuna dictionary, and they showed me a children's picture dictionary. Behold a káurë bird, *just like in my story*. It's so vindicating when research doesn't lie to you.



And some more ^_^



I don't know how for-real for-real I can learn Tikuna. But I am really loving trying. It's a language for speaking about a life so totally different from my own! (And the sounds are more-different from English than the sounds of any other language I've ever learned.)

In the Peace Corps manual for learning Tetun, there's a very good piece of advice: Don't ask people, "How do you say XX in Tetun?" Don't do this, because if you ask like that, they will offer you a word-for-word version of how to say that... even if culturally speaking, such a thing is never said. (A big example relates to condolences: in Tetun you never say "I'm so sorry for your loss"--it sounds as if you're saying you're taking some kind of responsibility for it.) Instead, ask, "In XX situation, what do people usually say?" Then you'll learn something culturally appropriate.

I am thinking that's going to be what I need to ask ALL THE TIME for however we do lessons together.