Fieldwork: Tuva 2003
Tuvan is my first love and the language I have spent the most time working on. I lived with nomadic herders in Tuva for nearly a year in 1998, and have returned many times since. I am studying the rich Tuvan tradition of verbal arts, stories, songs and epic tales, as well as the sound patterns and grammatical structures of the language. My doctoral dissertation, written at Yale University, explored the phonology and morphology of Tuvan.