Vallelz Noun Class Word Search

Keith Slater and Trey Jones

Friends, what is fieldwork? What is satisfying about it? Is it not an activity that combines all the best of human capabilities? The search for data, the analysis of data, the throwing out of once promising “data” that turns out not to be data at all...

This puzzle emulates all the stages of fieldwork, without the inconvenience of leaving your friends, colleagues, and familiar restaurants behind. You must find data. You must evaluate the suitability of the data, throwing out what turns out to be irrelevant. You must analyze the data. Based on this analysis, you must repeat the cycle, discovering new data and throwing out old hypotheses. Finally, you must write up a tolerably insightful, reasonably complete, decently clear, passably convincing, adequately lengthy and satisfyingly pithy account of what the data tells you about the language and the minds of its speakers.

Below is a small corpus of data from the language Vallelz, representing fourteen of its numerous semantically-grouped noun classes. The Vallelz glosses provided are for the unmarked, indefinite singular form of each noun. The sub-list of capitalized words at the beginning of the first column of the corpus is comprised of language names, some of which you may not have been familiar with.

Below is a word search grid, containing the Vallelz definite singular forms of each of the nouns above. The definite forms of the various noun classes are marked with various affixes, which are also subject to various phonological rules. Your task is to find the Vallelz nouns in the word search grid, determine the affixes used to mark the noun classes, and then provide the following information:

• For each noun class:
  • the nouns included in the class
  • the citation form of the affix which marks the class
  • a brief description of the semantic category the class represents
• For each noun:
  • the affix-marked definite singular form found in the word search grid
• For extra credit:
  • a brief description of any phonological rules you observe at work

If you manage to get all that done by June 15th, 2010, then send your answers to the editors of SpecGram, and you could win a SpecGram magnet. The information described above and the contest winners, if any, will be announced in an upcoming issue of Speculative Grammarian.

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