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Martha Tsutsui Billins (host): Hello and welcome to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. I’m Martha Tsutsui Billins, and today’s episode is with Yulha Lhawa. Yulha is originally from Siyuewu Village in Sichuan, China, and is a passionate advocate for her community’s traditions and language. Growing up as a yak herder, Yulha developed an interest in linguistics during high school. This interest fueled her to create the trilingual book, Warming Your Hands with Moonlight, aimed at preserving local history and folklore. Taking her dedication a step further, Yulha journeyed to the United States from the Himalayas to study linguistics at the University of Oregon. Currently, she is pursuing a Master’s in computational linguistics at the University of Washington, hoping to merge her linguistic knowledge with modern technology to contribute to the preservation of her community’s cultural heritage.
I love it when I have the chance to interview someone who is working on their own language, and I know listeners will be interested in Yulha’s story of first getting involved with language documentation as a speaker consultant working with a linguist, to now coming full circle and doing her own work as a researcher on her language, Khroskyabs. If you’re interested in hearing more insider linguists’ experiences, I’ve been lucky enough to interview researchers working on their own languages in every season of Field Notes, but season three exclusively featured insider linguists, so be sure to check out that season if you would like. Also, as I’ve mentioned online and in the show notes, this is the final season of Field Notes, and there will be just a couple episodes left in this season. The latest Patreon bonus episode went into why Field Notes is wrapping up in more detail, so if you’re interested in hearing more about that, you can check out the Patreon at patreon.com/fieldnotespodcast. Bonus episodes are available to patrons at the $5 tier and above.
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Thank you so much, Yulha, for coming on to Field Notes. I’m really excited to talk to you.
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah, I’m excited too. This is great. A nice break and exciting thing to do during my finals week, so I’m excited. Yeah.
MTB: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, I appreciate you taking time in such a busy season. Can you introduce yourself and share where your interest in linguistics first came from?
Yulha Lhawa: Yes, absolutely. So my name is Yulha, and I am from a tiny village in the Himalayas. The province in China is called Sichuan Province, and we are about like 500 people in the village, so a tiny village. It’s a… Tibetan Autonomous Region, and I grew up basically herding yak and sheep with my pastoralist family in the mountains of this rural region before I started school. I am ethnically Tibetan. Linguistically, my mother tongue is called Khroskyabs, which is mutually unintelligible with the other like mainstream Tibetan dialects, and graduated from U of O with a linguistic degree and now doing my master’s at UW here in computational linguistics.
So now that we got those out of the way, [laughs] my interest in linguistics, I think, is deeply rooted. First of all, I think my personality, I am pretty outgoing and talkative, so growing up… I mean, we grew up in a multilingual environment, so you’re exposed to a lot of different groups of people with different linguistic backgrounds, so you kind of have to be outgoing and learning these different dialects and pockets of language communities. So I would say I just kind of really went into that. I was like, “Oh, this is exciting. I want to learn more,” and I think as I went to school and got exposed to larger communities… So as I mentioned earlier, we are linguistically kind of unique within the Tibetan culture, which makes us linguistically marked in some sense. So they would say, “Oh, you’re Tibetan, but you don’t speak Tibetan,” because for a lot of them, if you don’t speak the mainstream Tibetan dialects, which we have three mainstream Tibetan dialects, they would be like, “Oh, what are you speaking? You’re speaking some language that we don’t understand,” and you get a little excluded or treated differently or discriminated to some extent. So as a teenager, as an adolescent, I just kind of like, “Wow, I wonder why.” I even questioned like, “Oh, I wonder why I don’t speak Tibetan. I am Tibetan, so I should be speaking the standard Tibetan.” So there were these kind of doubts and frustrations and confusions. So that kind of really fueled me when I later was interacting with some PhD students who were doing fieldwork in linguistics in rural regions of where I was from. So she was an American, she was doing her fieldwork back there, so I got kind of exposed to learning about IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet, and got exposed to the concept of doing fieldwork and things like that. And it was my first time… I remember very vividly that she helped me to write my name in IPA. And I was like, “Oh, wow, this is so exciting,” because, you know, I come from an oral culture, so having my language written visually, it was very kind of stimulating. And I was, “Oh, it’s possible to write my name down as how it’s pronounced,” and also, I was writing some simple phrases from my language and explaining to her about my language. And that kind of got me really interested, like, “Wow, I never knew that our language could be written down.” So I just kind of like, “Oh, wow, I want to learn more about this thing called linguistics.” And to be honest, at the time, it’s not like, no… I had never heard anybody in my circles studying linguistics, so I actually had no idea what linguistics was and what I was going to be studying. But I was like, “Ah, it’s something related to languages. It must be fun.” So I just applied for a linguistics degree at U of O, not knowing exactly what linguistics was. Yeah.
MTB: That’s so interesting. Why did you pick U of O in Eugene? Did you have some kind of connection to that university? Or, I mean, I know that they have a language documentation program there. But was there something specific that drew you to it?
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah, I think first of all was this PhD student that she was doing fieldwork in around the Tibetan Plateau. So she was a PhD student from U of O, so that was my first connection and my inspiration to linguistics, if you will. And second of all, so I speak a Tibeto-Burman language. So one of the… At the time was the department head of linguistics, Scott DeLancey. He is pretty big in the realm of Tibeto-Burman, Burmanist. So I just kind of like, “Wow, this is double cool. I know someone there already, and I know someone there who cares about the language that I speak.” So I just, yeah, applied there. Yeah.
MTB: Yeah, that’s cool. So you kind of knew like, “Oh, like I’m interested in them, and they’re interested in me. There’s already a program and captive audience for Tibeto-Burman languages at U of O.”
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
MTB: So I have so many questions about like your childhood and how you grew up. So is the… You said there’s 500 people in the village. So within the village, within those 500, lots of different languages. Is that right, or everyone is speaking one dialect, and then on top of that, there’s also the standard Tibetan?
Yulha Lhawa: So within the village is the… We mostly primarily speak Khroskyabs. But on top of that, as you said, ethnically, we’re Tibetan, so we also grew up speaking Tibetan alongside because… So how we call our, actually, the language, we have two-way distinction. So we have down in the valley are the farmer people, so we call farmer’s tongue, which is the one that I speak. And then up in the mountains is where the nomads, where the herders live. They speak one of the standard Tibetan dialects called Amdo Tibetan. So you have close interaction with these two. So you basically, yeah, either community will grow up speaking both of the languages. And yeah, and then if you go off to school or a monastery — that’s the traditional schooling system — then you learn more of like the sophisticated Tibetan and written Tibetan and yeah, all of that, and then Mandarin Chinese as well. Yeah.
MTB: By like “sophisticated Tibetan,” is that kind of like the standard language, or…
Yulha Lhawa: Yes, standard and written, written language. Yeah.
MTB: Ah. Okay. Okay. I see.
Yulha Lhawa: So the villages, it’s like, because of the geography, the valleys and little pockets of communities, if you travel, like, let’s say, 30 or 40 kilometers up or down, they’re going to speak, I would say, a pretty different dialect or language, however you define it. Some of them, if you go further than like 50 kilometers, then you won’t be able to understand completely.
MTB: Okay.
Yulha Lhawa: So there’s, yeah, pretty large, like language diversity within that region.
MTB: That’s cool. Is there much debate about like dialect or language in this area, or is it kind of not such a hot topic? Where I work, using the word “dialect” is kind of… Like, people get kind of upset if you call a language a dialect, because they’re, they… Well, one, the mutual intelligibility is also very low, but also, like, they have been kind of branded with this term “dialect” so long, so people are like, really fighting, like, “No, like, we speak a separate language,” and it’s quite contentious to say “dialect.” Is that like a thing over there, or not so much?
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah, that’s interesting that you ask it, because it might be quite the opposite case…
MTB: Oh, really?
Yulha Lhawa: … for the Tibetan communities, because, one, we are one ethnic group, and there are, you know, different levels of struggle to to maintain this unity, so a lot of Tibetan communities like mine, for example, who speak a very linguistically different… language. I still, I hesitated, because I think, coming from a community and a native speaker of that, I was always like, “Oh, come on, what are you talking about? We speak Tibetan. Don’t try to, you know, divide us, or don’t try to make a new language.” So I, depending on the audience that I interact with, my… actually answer to say, my mother tongue, Khroskyabs, is it an independent language, or is it a dialect of Tibetan? So I am actually, I still struggle with how I present that, because a lot of people, communities like mine, who are linguistically unique, still wants to maintain this larger Tibetan identity, so people really struggle to like, “Oh, we’re linguistically unique, but we’re Tibetans, come on, so let’s just say this is a dialect of Tibetan.”
MTB: I see, I see.
Yulha Lhawa: And then also, I mean, the whole Tibet or the Tibetan Plateau region, where most… majority people are Tibetans, that region has always been kind of regarded as a monolingual region until pretty recent, like in the past, maybe five or six years, then people started like, “Oh, actually, look at this large, like linguistic diversity that we ignored.” Actually, one of my former English teacher at the time — he’s an anthropologist — he documented there maybe around 50, 60 languages on the Tibetan Plateau spoken by these Tibetan communities. So that came kind of out of shock, and not really… Some, there were some pushbacks within the Tibetan communities, like, “Oh, who’s this person? Why he is saying that way?” So it’s still, that is to say, it’s still a controversial topic of, yeah, saying “language” versus “dialect.”
MTB: Yeah, yeah, I see. Yeah, that’s really interesting. So you went to U of O. You did your… So you did your undergraduate degree there, and then now you’re doing your master’s degree in linguistics, right? Yeah, at UW in Seattle. In Seattle, are you at Seattle?
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah, yeah, Seattle. Yeah.
MTB: And are you doing linguistic fieldwork right now for your project, or like, what is your current research looking like?
Yulha Lhawa: Currently, I am not actively doing fieldwork, per se, as, yeah, the constraints of me being out of my community for a while. But when, pre-pandemic, I went back home, and I lived in a city that’s closer to my hometown called Chengdu, which is about six hours’ drive up in the mountains to my home village. And within that three years, I was maintaining some social media accounts, or blogs, if you will. And mostly, I was… So I did a lot of fieldwork, starting around my high school age. So I had a lot of material that I just like, “Oh, wow, I have all these folk tales, folk songs, all these stories that people told me. How can I make use of that?” So I just started this blog on a social media account which is very popular in China called WeChat. And I started to uploading some of these stories, editing them, and make some short description of what’s happening, both in Tibetan, Chinese, so that I can reach a wider audience and kind of popularize the language and the culture, among especially the younger generations. Yeah, so that was mostly what I was doing alongside I was also, I’ve been working on an orthography design for the language, which is based on the existing Tibetan alphabets, and then adding some more letters. Yeah.
MTB: Yeah. Wow, that’s really interesting. What… So you have been doing fieldwork for a long time on the consultant side as well, right? Like you said you met a PhD student who was doing fieldwork, and now you’re the researcher.
Yulha Lhawa: So how, when it all started was, so I attended an English training program when I finished middle school, and I knew that I didn’t want to do the high school in China, because that is three years of you preparing for this standardized test called Gaokao. It’s like a college entrance exam. So I just didn’t want to do that. So I went off to a different province to study English at age 17, and then through that program, we started doing these mini-fieldwork, or quote unquote “homework.” Because at the time, when I would go back in the village with my recorder and camera, and villagers, they were like, “What are you doing? You’re a student, so we don’t understand what you’re doing.” So I just had a hard time explaining what I was doing. So I just said, “Oh, these are my homework given by my teachers.” For the longest time, I just kind of presented them as homework, these mini fieldwork. We would just collect oral traditions, interview people about their life accounts, and things like that. That, I think during those years, my passion for language and cultural, like cultural documentation really fueled up. I was like, “Wow, this is so exciting. I never knew that there is a story about the…” For example, the name of the village, how it came to be. So Siyuewu is the name of my village, which there’s a legend, story around that, just where there was a Tibetan warrior. vsɘjo in the local dialect means, it’s like a… millstone? Millstone? Big millstone, where you sharpen your swords before you go off to a war or something. So in the early 1990s, that stone got destroyed because there was a massive road construction, so I grew up not really knowing that stone, that big stone, so I just didn’t know how the village name came to be, but the elders were telling me these stories. I was like, “Wow, I now know the name of the village and how, like, what’s the story behind it.” And like small things like that that just, I would… So I collect these stories, and then I go back to this English training program and retell these stories to my classmates and teachers in English. So this was like a practice English and then practice doing fieldwork. But through that, I just, I feel like I found something that was, I just felt confident about telling my stories and my community, presenting them to a wider audience. I think that really just gave, as a teenager, I just felt like, oh, I found, I don’t know, I found a purpose to my life or something like that. So that was, yeah, me just starting with this quote-unquote “homework” and finding a passion that I’ve continued till this day, which has been almost 18 years. Yeah.
MTB: Wow, that’s amazing. Are you still working with folktales and musicology, like folk songs, or have you moved on to a different area of interest for your studies now?
Yulha Lhawa: I think it’s a constant work. I don’t think I’ve moved on and shifting gears, but… So one of the interesting things about my community is, as I mentioned, the language is very different, but all the songs were sang in Tibetan, one of the mainstream Tibetan dialect. So no songs were sang in the local language, except some working songs, which are kind of like half-vocal. They don’t have a lot of lyrics or meanings. Those were only sang in the local language. So I think a few years ago, when I started doing this mother tongue videos, I just translated a very popular Tibetan song into the local language, and then I had one of my Tibetan friends playing the mandolin, and I, with my not-so-good singing voice, I just sang that song in the local language, recorded video, and then I sent those videos back to my community. And I just remember the reaction. It was just amazing. People were just like, “Wow, we didn’t know that you can actually sing in our mother tongue.” Now, like one of my cousins, she was saying, “Oh…” Because the song was like a toast giving song. So she was, “Oh, when I go to the parties now, I can just sing in my native language. How cool is that?” So she was just like, she almost burst into tears. She was like, “Wow, this is so cool.” So doing a little more innovative work like that, and trying to boost people’s confidence and trust in the language has been kind of my work of trying to influence people’s attitude, because I think ultimately, that’s what these… what will make people decide whether or not they want to continue speaking a language. So yeah, doing a lot of these short mother tongue videos. Yeah.
MTB: That’s really interesting. I was going to ask you, what is the reaction of your community and your hometown to you working on your language? Because I know that some people I’ve interviewed on the podcast who are either heritage speakers or native speakers of the language that they’re working on, there’s a wide range of reactions and feelings about it from their own communities. Like sometimes people are really supportive, and sometimes the family or the elders are kind of like, “Oh, like, that’s not like a good use of your time,” or, “That’s not like what you should be working on. Like we we sent you away to university to do something else.” So it’s really nice to hear that your community is like, really supportive of your work.
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah, absolutely. From these almost nonsense homework, starting from their people… I think a lot of people just at the beginning were kind of indifferent about me going around and doing this work. But as I was able to bring something back into the community… So I was recording this, and I made documentary films that this was back in 2007 and 2008, and then I would carve them into DVDs. And I remember at the time, maybe people were just getting their DVD players in the village, TVs were relatively new, not like new new, but so I just kind of like, “Oh, it would be cool to have people on like, on TV, and they can watch these.” And it was a really big hit. People… I mean, first of all, people were making fun of each other. They were like, “Look at you, why you look so funny in this video?” Like, I mean, that’s what people do part of the… That’s part of the culture, kind of making fun of each other to show that you love them, which is kind of funny. But I remember that people were just like, “Wow, this is so cool. It’s our first time to see myself and my peers on a TV screen.” So they were like, “Wow, this is a good record.” And I remember 10 years later, people still kept those DVDs, and they said there were, you know, maybe family members who passed away, elder people who passed away, or there were, you know, a festival where people dressed up and doing dance and singing, so they would show it to people… When they have guests coming from outside of the village, they’re like, “Oh, look at this cool thing that we did 10 years ago.” So people it’s like people like, oh, kind of share and showcase to other groups of people. So I think that also gave them a lot of like, “Wow, this is cool,” like something that it’s like tangible that they can, yeah, they can get a grasp on. Yeah.
MTB: Yeah. Yeah, that’s really cool. How is the, like generational transmission of Khroskyabs? Like, are parents still passing it on to their new babies, or… Obviously, like you are very young, but like, are like the next generation speaking the language, or is there any language shift? What is it like?
Yulha Lhawa: So to the larger degree, I would say the village, if you’re in the village, yes, that’s the only language you will speak, and especially if you were born in the village, you’re likely going to be fluent in the language. But recent years, past five, six years, there has been… Like people are moving to towns. There’s like a major, I would say, livelihood-style shift. So people were, you know, traditionally people were farmers and nomads, I was saying. But now people are kind of abandoning that livelihoods and going to towns and doing seasonal work, I don’t know, getting jobs at restaurants and things like that. And then alongside, they’re going to move their families and then raise their kids in the towns and cities. So these kids will interact with other kids who don’t speak the language, even though they might, the parents might speak the language inside the home. But it’s only very limited to that home, so they don’t have a whole community that speaks the language. So I would say even just comparing myself to my younger brother, who is 14 years younger, I grew up like mostly in the village, but he spent a lot of time in the boarding schools with a lot of different other kids. And he didn’t have that much time of like coming back into the village and spending time, I don’t know, herding and living in the village. So I feel like he code-switches a lot compared to me. When I speak, I mostly either speak in Chinese with him, or I speak in my mother tongue, Khroskyabs. But when he speaks to me, he just, yeah, he code-switches almost like 30% Chinese and 70% Khroskyabs. So just within one generation, there is that kind of shift. So it’s pretty scary, yeah. And parents, of course, their concern is, “Can my kids make a living? Can he or she get a good job?” So which oftentimes requires you to go off further and learn a different language and learn a different, yeah, live in a different culture. So yeah, it’s definitely, there’s a break in the transmission between generations.
MTB: So are there other villages that speak Khroskyabs, or is it just your 500-person village?
Yulha Lhawa: Well, to just start with of how it started and… So the language was not even recognized or recognized in a very general sense, even not identified or documented around like 25 years ago. So the language was not known. And the first account was documented by a Chinese linguist. She wrote a grammar, and where the language was referred to as Lavrung. So when I started learning about linguistics, and when I started doing fieldwork, some people would tell me like, “Oh, so you speak Lavrung?” And I’d be scratching my head. I kind of, you know, I was a teenager, so I just like, “Oh, whatever you tell me,” and especially these are people who are, you know, doing linguistic, who’ve been doing linguistics for like years and were kind of researchers, so I was kind of too embarrassed to say that, “Oh, I don’t even know what that term means.” So I kind of went along. And so I published a book doing all these mini-fieldwork during my high school time called Warming Your Hands with Moonlight. So it’s a collection of these oral traditions. In that book, I referred the language as Lavrung. So later on, when I came to U of O and things, I just, like, “Wow, this is not right. I don’t know what this term means, and none of the villagers back home can relate to this term. So there’s something wrong.” So along with my mentor at the time, he is a researcher who does work in my language or neighboring dialect, so we kind of like, “Oh, we need to change this.” So we had to kind of like, “Oh, this term doesn’t mean anything, so we need to change the name to Khroskyabs,” which is like a geographical name of the region, which most people will recognize some of the… You know, if you go to the local town, some of the restaurants, hotels, tea houses have this name, so this is a term that people just kind of know. But at the time, yeah, there’s just starting off with really zero. And in her book, she recorded about… That was in 2003, the book where first the language was being documented, said around 10,000 speakers, and I would say now maybe roughly 7,000 or 8,000 speakers, roughly meaning… Yeah, just because it’s a pretty hard to calculate because some… Yeah.
MTB: Right. Yeah.
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah.
MTB: Yeah. It’s hard. Yeah. I always ask that question, but it’s also kind of like, in a way, it’s almost like, “Oh, why bother? Because like, well, what is a speaker? Like, how do you count?” You know, it’s, I acknowledge that it’s a difficult question to answer.
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah. So I never also really bothered to kind of go in and go into each village. Maybe there are like, I would say, three or four pockets of communities who speak this language. That’s all within the 25-to-30-kilometers radius.
MTB: So when you are in your village or when you are doing fieldwork and collecting data, do you have a set routine for like who you want to talk to and what kind of data you want to collect, or do you just take it day by day?
Yulha Lhawa: I think when I was doing my fieldwork, when I just started off, I had a set of people, or I even went in like, “Oh, I want to interview this person about this thing. I want to interview this person about that thing. I had… Because I kind of just had pre-determined a set of things that I wanted to collect. But I think as years went on, I really learned to be okay with not having a clear target like that. I think that comes from the fact that I am a member of the community. So to start with, it’s kind of really weird to going in and ask people about certain things because we have some common knowledge and I’m just asking them to repeat. So they felt strange. They’re like, “You know this already. Why are you asking me?” And we have these awkward moments of like, “Oh, but I want you to, I want to record you, so I need you to pretend that you don’t know me.” So I had a few interactions like that, which made me uncomfortable, which made them uncomfortable. So I think in the later years, I just really go in and try to understand and try to have a conversation without that intention of like, “Oh, I need to get this on the recorder, and I need to, yeah, I need to document this.” So I learned to… Sometimes I forget to turn it on, which I think is a good thing. I liked not being able to… half-present. I liked people that just tell me stories off of that common ground that we have and not needing to pretend to a recorder. I think people really enjoyed it. So I think in the later years, I would do a mixture of… And still I want to learn about what’s… Because I don’t spend a lot of time in the village. So there’s a lot of catching up at the beginning, a lot of, you know, warming up, or a lot of gossips, or I don’t know, these, you know, small talks. And I try really hard to kind of engage into those things, because people are really excited to share about this new house that they built, how much time it took, and who helped them, and all of that things. I just kind of skipped in my first, you know, fieldwork sessions. I just kind of like went in, I was like, “Okay, today I want you to tell me the story of this king who,” I don’t know, “defeated his enemy,” or “I want you to tell me your story about hunting bears,” or something like that. So I went in just kind of like, “Here’s one, two, three, four I need. Please tell me.”
MTB: Yeah.
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah.
MTB: Are there other challenges that you faced as an insider linguist that you think people who come in from the outside don’t necessarily have to think about or consider?
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah, I think first thing was, when I started off, as I was saying, you know, having your language written down, and having your language, I don’t know, almost like dissecting the language, parsing them, and I don’t know, think of your language in terms of fragments, in terms of phonetic units, thinking about… I think that just really threw me off. As much as it was exciting, I just felt like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so cruel to the language. I’m like just tearing this language apart, and looking at one tiny consonant, one tiny vowel, and what it does, and how it’s different, and how it’s similar.” I think that idea… I think up till now, I think maybe that’s one thing that I still kind of like, “Wow,” with linguistics, is, coming from the background of native speaker, I still struggle to analyze my language in terms of these linguistic units.
MTB: Is it because you feel like it’s so clinical, and it’s not really, like it’s just looking at data, it’s not really looking at the people, and it’s somehow separating the culture from the language in a way, or…
Yulha Lhawa: Yes, absolutely. I think that’s one part, and also, I think the biggest part is me kind of engaging into these kind of really, I don’t know, scientific analysis, and thinking, “Oh, how can this benefit my community?” I’m still oriented towards like, “Oh, how can I give it back to the community? How can I make it useful for the community members?” So I think it’s a balance of that makes me kind of sometimes like, oh, I think that was my decision of not, at the time when I graduated from U of O, I was wondering like, “Oh, do I want to do a PhD? Do I want to write a grammar of my language?” Because that’s, I think, most PhD students at my department at U of O were doing, and I just couldn’t see myself spending the next six, seven years working on writing a thick book, grammar book, which probably will sit on someone’s shelf, maybe the community members even wouldn’t know or wouldn’t have access to because it will be written in English. So I kind of made a decision like, “Oh, I don’t think this is how I want to invest my time and energy into for the next few years.” Yeah.
MTB: Yeah. Yeah, that makes total sense. So I want to talk about proverbs. I think that’s really interesting. How, what kind of work are you doing with proverbs right now? And I was wondering if you didn’t mind if you would like share a couple proverbs with us and explain them, because I just think like oral traditions are so fascinating.
Yulha Lhawa: So that’s a great question. Let me see if I can recall. I mean, the name of the book, Warming Your Hands with Moonlight, so this comes from a proverb, and there’s a story behind how this name came to be. So after I got trainings in how to use a recorder and camera and doing fieldwork, I kind of went off getting really like pumped and like, “Ah, this is going to be exciting! I know exactly what I’m doing. I just need to record people telling folktales, proverb, tongue twisters, all of that. This should be pretty easy.” So I, one evening, I just went off with my recorder, and I saw one of the neighboring uncles who was doing some work in his yard, and I just said, “Hey, uncle, I need some, I need you to tell me some proverbs. I’m doing this schoolwork thing that where I need to record proverbs.” And he just said, “o-mǽlo, ŋæ̂n-kʰe rɣǽ-n=tə sneɣlə́-kʰe jóɣ n-ftsʰɑ́d=je mɲə́d=di.” So basically, I didn’t understand what he said. I just said, I just thought he was speaking some nonsense, and I kind of got a little frustrated. I was like, “But I want you to tell me a proverb,” but he kind of shied away. So I went back home, really frustrated. I talked to my mom. I said, “Do you think that uncle is crazy? I asked him to tell me some proverbs, and he said “ŋæ̂n-kʰe rɣǽ-n=tə sneɣlə́-kʰe jóɣ n-ftsʰɑ́d=je mɲə́d,” which literally, the literal meaning is “warming your hands with moonlight.” So Mom paused for a second, and she said, “Well, there is a proverb for you. There we go.” I was like, “What?” [laughs] So I just kind of like, I didn’t know. I was in shock. I was like, “Which part is the proverb?” So basically, Mom had to explain “sneɣlə́-kʰe jóɣ n-ftsʰɑ́d.” I mean, obviously, you can’t really warm your hands with the moonlight, so for him, it’s like a polite way to refuse me, to say like, “Okay, there might be other people who can maybe tell you, can give you proverbs, but I’m not the one. I can’t warm your hands.” So that just really, I was embarrassed slash… I just was left like, speechless because I just went in and like, I was like, “Whoa, this, I got this,” and then I was so ignorant and completely overlooked that he had given me a proverb. So I kind of decided to name my book, Warming Your Hands with Moonlight, just kind of a reminder of how ignorant I can be in terms of, you know, analyzing or understanding my own culture. So it’s always been a constant reminder as well. When I go into the communities, I don’t… try not to take for granted of things that people tell me or things that people know, because they always surprise me. So yeah, this is one proverb that I can think of off the top of my head.
MTB: That’s such a nice story, because it’s like, not only did he give you a proverb, he gave it to you in like, the correct context as well.
Yulha Lhawa: I think, yeah, me going in as like a member, as well as someone who’s trying to do research and analyze the language and the culture, there’s, you know, good side and bad side, because I just… Because it just never clicked that was a proverb to me. So I just kind of like, “Oh, he’s speaking nonsense.”
MTB: Yeah. That’s so nice. Okay, well, we’re almost at time. Is there anything that I should ask you that I haven’t asked you yet? Anything you want to say more about before we wrap up?
Yulha Lhawa: I am working for the Endangered Languages Project as a Language Revitalization Mentor. So we offer these one-on-one online mentor sessions for people who want to, I don’t know, chat about their language work with us and their journey and their concerns. So I would like to maybe post a little advertisement to say, feel free to schedule an appointment with me if you want to talk to me about anything that’s related to language documentation or revitalization. And we can leave a link down here. So yeah, yeah, I think that’s it.
MTB: Great. And where… So actually, I was going to say, “And where can people find you?” but you just said. Yeah, we’ll include the link in the show notes so that people can reach out to you if they would like to. If they’re interested in learning more about your work or seeing the content that you’ve posted on social media or YouTube, is any of that available over here, or…
Yulha Lhawa: Yes. Some of the video clips that I mentioned I uploaded on my YouTube channel, which I haven’t been updating for a few years, but I can leave those links as well. Yeah.
MTB: Perfect. Okay. Thank you so much, Yulha. I really appreciate it.
Yulha Lhawa: Yeah. Thank you for having me. Yeah. It’s been lovely. I’m always excited and passionate about chatting, this kind of stuff. So yeah, looking forward to meeting some people in these mentor sessions, if you will. Yeah, I would be really happy to talk to you about anything that I mentioned here or beyond.
MTB: Amazing. Thanks so much.
You’ve been listening to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. This podcast is hosted and produced by Martha Tsutsui Billins with production help from Laura Tsutsui. Claire Gawne is our editor, and Luca Dinu is our transcriptionist. Our music is by Lobo Loco, and our logo is by E.Vill Designs. If you have fieldwork experience to share, email us at fieldnotespod@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram @lingfieldnotes. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Also, consider becoming our patron on Patreon to help keep our content ad-free. Thanks for listening!
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