At Breakfast This Morning

At breakfast this morning, while talking with our guests, the conversation went to horses.  No surprise there, it often does.  You know how horse people are.

We were discussing what we had learned about horse communication, and how it helped in training our mustangs.  One of our guests asked if we knew whether different herds in the wild used different "dialects" in horse language.  As it turns out he had read several articles on orca (killer whales) and that different pods of whales, even neighboring ones, used different "words" to communicate with their pod members, as compared with the neighbors.  I said I didn't think horses had any particular dialects, as theirs is a visual language consisting of pinned ears, bared teeth, bugged eyes and the like.  Not much room for accents.

The conversation went on to what our guest's current job was.  A freelance cultural anthropologist.  Apparently he was in fairly high demand, as not a lot of US citizens speak much Mayan.

Cool.

We talked for quite some time about his trips to southern Mexico, and how difficult it was to find a good representation of the Mayan language, because, like the killer whales, different villages use a lot of different words.  And now there is a huge amount of Spanish mixed in.

Surprisingly, there is no Mayan word for "internet", or even "telephone".  Who have thunk.

I love my job.

Bill