THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

learn the Yakha language, our progress was keenly observed. Some people
said it would take two or three full years to learn Yakha correctly, In
our surveys, those women who had migrated through marriage from a
community speaking a different language had generally taken about five
years to become competent in Yakha. Some claimed that Yakha was easier
than Tibetan or Limbu, and while all three languages have very
complicated conjugation patternr, and pronominalization, in view of the
particular complexity of the verb endings in Limbu presented in van
Driem (1987) we would be inclined to agree with them in the latter case.
One man suggested that Yakha would be easier for us to learn than for a
Nepali-speaker, since one needed a thin tongue for Nepali but a thick
tongue for both Yakha and English, Nevertheless, we struggled on but
quickly decided that our Yakha would never become good enough in the
time available for the survey and other work we hoped to carry out. We
therefore concentrated on recording the Yakha language, learning to
speak as much as we could, but depending on Nepali for most of our day-
to-day interaction. Since every Yakha-speaker we met spoke at least
some Nepali (and most were fluent in both languages) this did not seem
to be as much of a disadvantage as I had at first feared.
Some of the disadvantages of doing fieldwork in Tamaphok
(particularly during the monsoon) became apparent as our f ieldwork
progressed. In common with many other communities in East Nepal,
habitation in Tamaphok was extremely dispersed. Most houses were
located on their own, or in clusters of two or three, They were spread
out between 4,000 and 7,000 feet (see Fig, 1 1 This made 'dropping
in' on people beyond our local area something of a major undertaking.
Furthermore, in the monsoon season people spent large amounts of their