<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; "><font face="Georgia" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Georgia">The first time Jose Freeman heard his tribe's lost language through the crackle of a 70-year-old recording, he cried. "My ancestors were speaking to me," Freeman said of the sounds captured when American Indians still inhabited California's Salinas Valley. "It was like coming home." </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Georgia; min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; "><font face="Georgia" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Georgia">The last native speaker of Salinan died almost a half-century ago, but today many indigenous people are finding their extinct or endangered tongues, one word or song at a time, thanks to a linguist who died in 1961 and scholars at the University of California, Davis, who are working to transcribe his life's obsession.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Georgia; min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; "><font face="Georgia" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Georgia">Linguist John Peabody Harrington spent four decades gathering more than 1 million pages of phonetic notations on languages spoken by tribes from Alaska to South America. When the technology became available, he supplemented his written records with audio recordings — first using wax cylinders, then aluminum discs. In many cases his notes provide the only record of long-gone languages.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Georgia; min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; "><font face="Georgia" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Georgia">Martha Macri, who teaches California Indian Studies at UC Davis and is one of the principal researchers on the J.P. Harrington Database Project, is working with American Indian volunteers to transcribe Harrington's notations. Researchers hope the words will bridge the decades of silence separating the people Harrington interviewed from their descendants.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Georgia; min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 15px; "><font face="Georgia" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Georgia">Freeman hopes his 4-month-old great-granddaughter will grow up with the sense of heritage that comes with speaking her ancestors' language.</font></div>
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