Linguistics fieldwork: learning to say no

Part of my linguistics class requires fieldwork. We have to find a friend who speaks a language that we don't speak and have never learned and do linguistics experiments on this friend. One of my friends in the class is from Thailand and he suggested that we become partners. I thought this was a great idea since if we're both in the class, neither of us would feel like we're taking up the other person's time. Anyhow, I was surprised (I probably shouldn't be) at the relative ease of a class of 70+ people at finding a person who speaks a different language (at a native level).

We met up on Saturday and proceeded to do the assignment which was to find out negation (how to say not) in the other person's language. And not just what the word itself is but also how it works (does it come before the verb? after the subject? etc.). It was a lot of fun. We haven't learned the IPA yet so we just made up our own "system". My "system" chopped up Thai like never before... Anyhow, we ran into a lot of difficulties because in order to figure out the negation, we have to have the other person say a sentence and then the opposition. So for example, "She is sitting." and then "She is not sitting.". We quickly found out that neither Thai nor Cantonese really permits sentences like "She is not sitting.". It just sounds really stupid because people would usually just say what the person is doing instead of what she is not. And trying to say eating and cooking was really awkward in both languages too since there is the word "rice" involved, which means "a meal" in addition to the actual rice itself.

Anyways, it was really fun. I actually found out a lot about Cantonese since I've never studied it formally as a language. Cantonese actually has infixes for the present progressive (-ing) tense. My friend was really confused until I explained it. And even though I had claimed that negation is really easy, it's actually not so apparent since there are like 3 forms. The professor had written on the homework sheet that we should explore sentences with "is" and "have" since they have interesting forms. And to the great distress of both of us it was true! Anyways, I enjoyed it a lot. Look forward to learning more about languages. I think this class is really useful since it gives some structure to something that I've always thought as a very touchy-feely thing.