Today I met with Erin Chesson again, this time at Awaze Ethiopian restaurant in Cary! In her field studies work at UNC, Erin has been documenting a language from Eritrea, which is a country that boarders Ethiopia and thus has a fair amount of cultural and linguistic overlap. We shared a sampler plate of meat and vegetarian dishes, served in traditional Ethiopian fashion on top of Injera bread. You eat it by pinching the food between a piece of that bread, no utensils required. If you’ve never had Ethiopian, you should definitely check out Awaze— it’s delicious (and only 6 minutes from CA)!Over lunch, Erin walked me through the IPA (discussed in previous post) in more detail, explaining the positions of the tongue that make each sound, as well as showing me which sounds are common in English and which don’t exist in English hardly at all. As we are both interested in language acquisition, we exchanged stories of watching our young nieces and nephews learn to speak and comparing experiences studying abroad and visiting France.
I really enjoyed getting to know Erin, and I’m sure she will continue to be a valuable resource for me as I continue to look into linguistics. I might even get a chance to sit in on her section of Linguistics 101 this coming fall!
