Exploring speech experiences: Linguists, speakers, sounds and meanings

I’ll describe my sensory experiences of an oral, unwritten variety of the isolate language Aymara, known as Muylaq’ Aymara, spoken in the Andes. I’ll show how my sensory experiences and previous knowledge shaped my descriptive linguistic fieldwork. I’ll outline how over roughly seven years, I progressed from a couple recordings and rough transcriptions to a thorough grammatical description of this language. I’ll address how meaning is embodied in speech sounds within a language and how speech can be transcribed and reproduced. Some readers may question the motivation of a chapter on speech sounds. After all, speech can be part of soundscape (Chapter 4) and music (Chapter 6). Plus, at least at a certain level of description, both music and speech can be said to be composed of a structured and discrete inventory of sounds, organized into different melodies or rhythms to intentionally convey something.

In D. Dubois, C. Cance, M. Coler, & A. Paté (Eds.), Sensory Experiences (pp. 169-211)