From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 2 15:18:34 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 08:18:34 -0700 Subject: Using Technology to Preserve Endangered Tribal Languages, Culture (fwd) Message-ID: Using Technology to Preserve Endangered Tribal Languages, Culture http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/505883/ Newswise — Efforts to help preserve native languages through the use of technology can be considered a "matter of life and death." Thanks to the work of Native Americans from the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT), the University of Arizona and funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, two more languages are closer to preservation. Susan Penfield, of the UA department of English has devoted more than 30 years of her professional life to working with endangered languages. More recently, she has been the principle investigator in a project funded since January 2003 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to train tribal members in the use of selected technologies that support language revitalization. This grant has provided funds for the collaboration between the CRIT and the UA. The CRIT Reservation is located on the Colorado River, just south of Lake Havasu on the Arizona/California border. CRIT is home to four culturally and linguistically different tribes: Mohave, Chemehuevi, Hopi and Navajo. Goals include the training of CRIT speakers of Mohave and Chemehuevi in the use of software and Internet tools which will support preservation and instruction related to these languages. Mohave, a Yuman language, is spoken by 33 fully fluent speakers at CRIT. Most of these speakers are at least age 70 or older. Chemehuevi is spoken by only about 10 fluent speakers who are 60 years or older. "The need to take action on these two most critically endangered languages of the four CRIT cultures was apparent," says Penfield. While the preservation of native languages ultimately rests with the members of the tribes themselves, Penfield and a group of specialists from the UA have initiated a project to train tribal members from the CRIT communities in the use of computer software and other technologies to help tribal members in this task. As part of the project, six fluent speakers of Mohave and Chemehuevi learned how to record, preserve and digitally manipulate samples of their language with the help of special software installed on the laptops purchased with the grant money. Participants were already involved with language work either as teachers, librarians or consultants who were available to train on the UA campus. One of the first sessions was on the use PowerPoint® and Audacity® to create language lessons. Pictures from coloring books of Mohave and Chemehuevi were scanned and transformed into electronic images which were later combined with sound files created by the participants with the help of Audacity®. These skills and language lessons encouraged the native speakers to learn additional computer skills and to use more complex software such as MaxAuthor, used for rarely taught languages and the MOO developed at the UA for multi-user conference space accessed through the Internet. While the grant money is running out and funds are needed to continue the work, Penfield says that the project "has met its goals of training members from CRIT to develop a model for the use of technology-enhanced language revitalization. I'm very grateful to the participants from CRIT who interrupted their lives and work to train with us and who continue to fight for their languages. We learned a lot from them and the experience of working together was enriching for everyone." Penfield would like to establish a one-week computer camp on the UA campus which would provide three units of credit in indigenous languages and technology. Also, more assistance is needed for additional hardware and software development. She says that "it's vital to recognize that the field of indigenous languages and technology is new and largely untapped." "Computers, video cameras and recorders can't save languages; only people can do that," says Penfield, "but technology can support revitalization efforts." Compiled from various sources and edited by Julieta Gonzalez, News Services. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 2 15:25:03 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 08:25:03 -0700 Subject: A Packrat's Path to Indian Past (fwd) Message-ID: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-harrington2jul02,1,979787.story?coll=la-home-headlines COLUMN ONE A Packrat's Path to Indian Past A California linguist's mountain of scribbled notes is the key to nearly forgotten Native American languages. By Mike Anton Times Staff Writer July 2, 2004 Few understood the true significance of John Peabody Harrington's work when he died at age 77. For some 50 years, the linguist and anthropologist had crisscrossed California and the West, cheating the grave by finding the last speakers of ancient Native American tongues and writing down their words and customs. Secretive and paranoid, Harrington was a packrat who stuffed much of his work into boxes, crates and steamer trunks. After his death in 1961, the papers turned up in warehouses, attics, basements, even chicken coops throughout the West and eventually made their way to his former employer, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "Six tons of material — much of it worthless," recalled Catherine A. Callaghan, now 72, a linguist who sorted through the Harrington papers when they arrived at the Smithsonian. "There was blank paper, dirty old shirts, half-eaten sandwiches. The low point came when I found a box of birds stored for 30 years without the benefit of taxidermy …. But mixed in with all of that were these treasures." Forty-three years later, Harrington's massive legacy is regarded as a Rosetta stone that unlocks dozens of all-but-forgotten California Indian languages. But the work of deciphering it is far from over. Researchers at UC Davis, backed by a National Science Foundation grant, are transcribing Harrington's notes — a million pages of scribbled writing, much of it in code, Spanish or phonetic script — into electronic documents that can be searched word by word. The job is expected to take 20 years. "I very much doubt I will see the end of it," said project co-director Victor Golla, a 65-year-old professor of linguistics at Humboldt State. "Like Harrington's original project, you do this for the future benefit of other people." Harrington's work has been used by California's Indians trying to establish federal tribal recognition, settle territorial claims and protect sacred sites from development. It has also played a crucial role in reviving languages. The Muwekma Ohlone tribe in the Bay Area, for instance, is using a dictionary compiled from Harrington's research to teach its members the Chochenyo language, which had been dead for more than 60 years. "They've gone from knowing nothing to being able to carry on a short conversation, sing songs and play games. Now they're starting to do some creative writing," said UC Berkeley linguistics professor Juliette Blevins, who works with the tribe. "We are reconstructing a whole language using his material." Scholars of Indian anthropology are drawn to Harrington's archive as the definitive work of its kind. There's only one problem: His handwritten notes are as comprehensible as Aramaic. "It's impenetrable," said Martha Macri, director of the UC Davis Native American Language Center and co-director of the effort to computerize Harrington's papers. "It's too hard to read his handwriting. Few people can tolerate looking at it for long periods of time." The significance of Harrington's work lies not in individual great discoveries, but in the preservation of millions of words and customs. His archive is a detailed inventory of the everyday. He pumped his subjects — often the last speakers of their languages — for everything they knew on topics ranging from astronomy to zoology. His papers describe centuries-old ceremonies. Medicinal cures. Songs, dances and games. Family histories. Even gossip. "You've got a RICH lot of information there. Just record them all DRY…. Get all that each one knows," Harrington wrote to one of the many assistants he hired, often with his own money, to record Indian elders. "Get all the old people, get ones I never heard of and all who are about to die." Consider the thousands of pages Harrington devoted to the Luiseño Indians of Southern California. Some of the material, gathered in the 1930s, is straightforward. "Hu-ka-pish," reads one entry, "a pipe … made of clay, and has no stem, it is necessary for a person to lie on his back to smoke it." More typical are the rambling, hard-to-read descriptions of games, stories and sacred rites. One of Harrington's "informants," Maria Omish, told him about two smallpox epidemics that ravaged the tribe. "When the smallpox came 1st time," Harrington wrote, "the Inds. were having a big fiesta at Sjc. [San Juan Capistrano], and a man came who had smallpox, & the people were talking of making him go away, but he threw a cloth that had small pox matter on it into the fire, & then all of them got it, pretty near all of them died." There's the description of a religious ceremony involving two men who slowly dance while quickly playing flutes made from the shin bones of a deer. The legend of a dying man who asks not to be buried and who returns to life as an elk. The behavior of a particular black beetle that crawls away quickly when placed in the hand of a generous man — and plays dead in the hand of one who is stingy. "For Harrington, it was all about getting the information down on paper, and he lived in fear that he couldn't get it done in his lifetime," Macri said. "He wasn't heavy on analysis. His gift was to record what he heard." When Gloria Morgan, a member of the Tejon tribe in Kern County, read that UC Davis was seeking Native Americans to help computerize Harrington's work, she jumped at the chance. Morgan discovered that Harrington had recorded her great-great-grandmother Angelita singing songs in the Kitanemuk language, of which there are no fluent speakers today. "I didn't grow up exposed to my own culture, so this is such a huge thing," said Morgan, 30, a 911 dispatcher. "I had never even heard of Harrington before this." Typing Harrington's notes into a spreadsheet is tedious work. But with each page, Morgan has learned something. A description of a death ceremony. How paint was made using deer marrow. That her ancestors had words for 40 different native grasses but didn't know what a shark was. "A hundred little things that wouldn't mean anything to anyone," Morgan said. "Except if you're a Tejon." Harrington, born in 1884 and raised in Santa Barbara, studied classical languages and anthropology at Stanford University and graduated at the top of his class in three years. He turned down a Rhodes scholarship and studied anthropology and linguistics at universities in Europe. Professors marveled at his flawless ear. He also had the ability to write down every word said to him. "He was able to take phonetic dictation at conversation speed, like a court reporter," Golla said. He returned to California to teach languages at Santa Ana High School. But Harrington had a wanderlust. He wanted to follow the ethos of anthropologist Franz Boas, who promoted the then-radical idea that "primitive" societies were as complex as those in Europe. As modernity overtook the West, advocates of Boas saw the preservation of Indian cultures as nothing short of a rescue mission. In 1915, Harrington landed a job as a field linguist for the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology. Over the next 40 years his travels took him from California and the Southwest to Canada and Alaska as he immersed himself in a world that was evaporating before his eyes. "I thought he was a little nuts at times. But I never met anybody who was so devoted to his work," said Jack Marr, an 83-year-old retired Fullerton engineer who worked for Harrington as an assistant, beginning as a teenager. "He'd travel into a remote area by bus and get off and walk miles by himself to a trading post and ask, 'Where can I find the Indians?' " Harrington was a recluse who didn't care about money, dressed in tattered clothing and slept on the dirt floors of his interview subjects' homes. He rented Marr's grandmother's home in Santa Ana and used it as a base for several decades, turning it into a warren of papers and boxes that left little room to walk. He had no phone and would routinely not answer the door. While in the field, Harrington routed letters to his bosses in Washington, D.C., through Marr's mother, so they would bear a Santa Ana postmark and would not reveal where he was. Marr was instructed never to tell anyone where he or Harrington were going or what they were doing. In contrast to others in his field, Harrington was not the least bit eager to publicize his discoveries. Quite the opposite. Marr said Harrington once told him of a tribe in the Sierra that had discovered the skeleton of a Spanish conquistador in full armor in a cave. Fearful that the find would attract reporters and other anthropologists, Harrington told Marr he had the Indians bury the body and swore them to secrecy. Harrington's life was full of contradictions. He was sensitive to the nuances of native cultures but revealed himself in his private letters as a fervent anti-Semite. He was a workaholic who never quite finished a project. A social misfit who had no close friends but could charm suspicious strangers into divulging their most profound secrets. "He preached it to me over and over: If we didn't do this, nobody else will, and these languages will be lost forever," said Marr, who hauled a 35-pound recording machine powered by a car battery around the West during the late 1930s and early 1940s, sometimes through mountains on horseback. "We'd be gone for a month or two at a time, living off cases of dried beef and chili and crackers…. It was quite an adventure for a 17-year-old guy." When Marr took trips on his own, Harrington wrote long, rambling letters exhorting him not to come back empty-handed. When one of his aged subjects took ill, Harrington exhibited sheer panic. "Tell him we'll give him five dollars an hour, it'll pay all his doctor bills and his funeral and will leave his widow with a handsome jackpot," he wrote Marr regarding a sickly Chinook Indian elder in Washington state. "DON'T TAKE NO. Hound the life out of him, go back again and again and again." When another subject, a Chinook man nearly 100 years old, suffered a stroke, Harrington was heartbroken — for himself. "Have just gotten over crying … this is the worst thing that ever happened to me," he wrote Marr. A few sentences later, though, Harrington encouraged him to remain optimistic. "You know, a paralysed person often GETS OVER the first stroke, it is the third stroke that carries them off. And between strokes they get well and sit up and talk." Harrington was married once, to a linguistics student. He immediately turned Carobeth Tucker into an assistant, dragging her from one dusty outpost to another, even late in pregnancy and with their newborn daughter in tow, she recalled in a 1975 memoir. She divorced him after seven years and went on to become an accomplished linguist and ethnographer. Harrington's bosses at the Smithsonian accommodated his eccentricities because of the quality of the reports he sent back. It was only after his death that the extent of his material became known. It took the better part of the 1960s to bring most of the stuff together. Managers of storage units shipped boxes of notes to the Smithsonian seeking unpaid rent. Forgotten stockpiles turned up in post offices that were about to be razed. The material eventually filled two warehouses. In the mid-1970s, Gerald R. Ford was president when work began to transfer the written collection to 500 reels of microfilm. When the job was completed, Ronald Reagan was leaving office. The size of the archive makes a mockery of time. Spend a month plowing through what took a lifetime to compile, and you haven't even scratched the surface. A Smithsonian editor who worked for years to commit the archive to microfilm wrote, in a 10-volume overview of the collection: "One can easily fall prey to the 'Harrington Curse': obsession." After six months of separating Harrington's papers from his dirty laundry, Catherine Callaghan had an epiphany. "I could see myself becoming more and more like Harrington. I had wanted to devote my life to pure research as he did," she said. "But I realized I could not survive as a human being that way." For a man who worked so desperately to save something, Harrington gave surprisingly little thought to how his stuff would be used — or whether it would, in its vastness, simply be admired. "He thought these languages were dying off so rapidly that he could not afford to take the time to publish any of his findings," said Macri of UC Davis. "I don't think he envisioned [his archive] being used by Indian people. I don't think he thought Indian people would be as resilient as they've been." Joyce Stanfield Perry, a Juaneño tribal leader in Orange County, discovered the depth of Harrington's legacy in 1994 as she and others searched the Smithsonian for documentation to support federal recognition for their tribe. On a dusty shelf, they found a box of recordings one of Harrington's assistants made in the 1930s. On them was the voice of Anastacia de Majel, a tribal elder then in her 70s and one of the last speakers of the Juaneño language. Her words were preserved as if in amber. "We wept," Perry said. "It truly was like our ancestors were talking directly to us." Perry, who also runs a nonprofit Indian education and cultural foundation, estimates that 10,000 pages of Harrington's notes refer to her tribe. As they are entered into the database, a dictionary of her native language is emerging. So far, it contains 1,200 words. Through Harrington, Perry has made discoveries about her ancestors' way of life that have affected her profoundly. "I didn't know that animals would talk to my ancestors and that my ancestors understood them. I didn't know that the stars communicated with my ancestors or that when a crow flies overhead that I'm supposed to say certain words to them," Perry said. "It was humbling to acknowledge how much our ancestors knew." Perry's backyard garden is full of rocks that represent people in her life, a tradition she learned from Harrington's archive. Every room in her house has something in it that her ancestors told Harrington it was important to have — sacred items that Perry won't reveal to outsiders. "Harrington is our hero," she said. "There's something magical about his work…. It changed how I pray and how I see the world." From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Fri Jul 2 16:51:50 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 09:51:50 -0700 Subject: Mobilizing For Justice (event) Message-ID: The Pitt River Tribe and the International Indian Treaty Council NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT. On July 7-11, 2004, the Pitt River Tribe is hosting the International Indian Treaty Council~Rs 30th Anniversary Conference, ~SIndigenous Nations Mobilizing For Justice, Sovereignty and Protection of Sacred Homelands~T, near Fall River Mills, CA., in furthering our efforts to protect Saht-Tit-Lah (known to Pitt River people as Obsidian Knife Lake. aka as Medicine Lake). The primary goal of the Conference is to build support for Pitt River and other Indigenous Nations~R current struggle to protect our sacred Medicine Lake, used since the beginning of time when the creator bathed and left great powers there. It is currently targeted for geothermal energy development by the Calpine Energy Corporation, backed by $50 million in California Energy Commission state subsidies. A proposed Calpine industrial complex in our pristine Medicine Lake Highlands would produce 18 tons of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas each year, and other heavy metals such as arsenic and mercury. The Pitt River Nation and others have filed lawsuits against Calpine Energy Corporation to halt the proposed mining plans. A boycott of all consumer items linked to Calpine is underway, as well as a shareholder divestment strategy. Other panels and presentations will focus on: defending cultural rights; treaties and land rights, environmental protection; right to food and food sovereignty; subsistence rights and impacts of environmental contamination; youth organizing; international work for the rights of Indigenous Peoples; and struggles for recognition and restoration of land rights by California Indian Nations which have been terminated by the United States government. Participants will include Indigenous leaders from throughout the United States and Canada, as well as Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, Guatemala, New Zealand, Panama, India, Africa and Peru. In will also include Indigenous members of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Organization of American States. The Conference site is outside and lots of camping area available. We will provide all meals during the conference time. Also, we will be running to Saht-Tit-Lah on Wednesday (July 7) morning to let the lake know we are having this gathering. WE NEED PEOPLE AND WE NEED MORE HELP in volunteering for security, daycare, assisting elders, translation, sweats, watching fire, making water runs, kitchen, etc. Due to the shortness of this request, you can get more information by logging on to IITC~Rs web page at: www.treatycouncil.org or call the Pitt River Tribal Office at (530) 335-5421. I will attach the latest agenda for your review. With Respect, Radley Davis, Illmawi Councilman Pitt River Nation (FYI: The Pitt River Tribal Nation is opposed to the current Rainbow Gathering being held in our country and we have a Resolution to that effort directed at the Federal Agencies who issued permits for such a gathering in the Hammawi Territory) From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Wed Jul 7 00:04:54 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 17:04:54 -0700 Subject: Harrington (language) Message-ID: >7/2/04 Dear fellow Harrington aficionados-- Mike Anton's article on Harrington finally appeared today in the LA Times. You can read it online at: http://www.latimes.com/la-me-harrington2jul02,1,711575.story but you'll have to register to get access. The full text is appended below if you don't want to go through that rigamarole. --Victor ======================================================================= COLUMN ONE * A California linguist's mountain of scribbled notes is the key to nearly forgotten Native American languages. By Mike Anton, Times Staff Writer Few understood the true significance of John Peabody Harrington's work when he died at age 77. For some 50 years, the linguist and anthropologist had crisscrossed California and the West, cheating the grave by finding the last speakers of ancient Native American tongues and writing down their words and customs. Secretive and paranoid, Harrington was a packrat who stuffed much of his work into boxes, crates and steamer trunks. After his death in 1961, the papers turned up in warehouses, attics, basements, even chicken coops throughout the West and eventually made their way to his former employer, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "Six tons of material ~W much of it worthless," recalled Catherine A. Callaghan, now 72, a linguist who sorted through the Harrington papers when they arrived at the Smithsonian. "There was blank paper, dirty old shirts, half-eaten sandwiches. The low point came when I found a box of birds stored for 30 years without the benefit of taxidermy ~E. But mixed in with all of that were these treasures." Forty-three years later, Harrington's massive legacy is regarded as a Rosetta stone that unlocks dozens of all-but-forgotten California Indian languages. But the work of deciphering it is far from over. Researchers at UC Davis, backed by a National Science Foundation grant, are transcribing Harrington's notes ~W a million pages of scribbled writing, much of it in code, Spanish or phonetic script ~W into electronic documents that can be searched word by word. The job is expected to take 20 years. "I very much doubt I will see the end of it," said project co-director Victor Golla, a 65-year-old professor of linguistics at Humboldt State. "Like Harrington's original project, you do this for the future benefit of other people." Harrington's work has been used by California's Indians trying to establish federal tribal recognition, settle territorial claims and protect sacred sites from development. It has also played a crucial role in reviving languages. The Muwekma Ohlone tribe in the Bay Area, for instance, is using a dictionary compiled from Harrington's research to teach its members the Chochenyo language, which had been dead for more than 60 years. "They've gone from knowing nothing to being able to carry on a short conversation, sing songs and play games. Now they're starting to do some creative writing," said UC Berkeley linguistics professor Juliette Blevins, who works with the tribe. "We are reconstructing a whole language using his material." Scholars of Indian anthropology are drawn to Harrington's archive as the definitive work of its kind. There's only one problem: His handwritten notes are as comprehensible as Aramaic. "It's impenetrable," said Martha Macri, director of the UC Davis Native American Language Center and co-director of the effort to computerize Harrington's papers. "It's too hard to read his handwriting. Few people can tolerate looking at it for long periods of time." The significance of Harrington's work lies not in individual great discoveries, but in the preservation of millions of words and customs. His archive is a detailed inventory of the everyday. He pumped his subjects ~W often the last speakers of their languages ~W for everything they knew on topics ranging from astronomy to zoology. His papers describe centuries-old ceremonies. Medicinal cures. Songs, dances and games. Family histories. Even gossip. "You've got a RICH lot of information there. Just record them all DRY~E. Get all that each one knows," Harrington wrote to one of the many assistants he hired, often with his own money, to record Indian elders. "Get all the old people, get ones I never heard of and all who are about to die." Consider the thousands of pages Harrington devoted to the Luiseño Indians of Southern California. Some of the material, gathered in the 1930s, is straightforward. "Hu-ka-pish," reads one entry, "a pipe ~E made of clay, and has no stem, it is necessary for a person to lie on his back to smoke it." More typical are the rambling, hard-to-read descriptions of games, stories and sacred rites. One of Harrington's "informants," Maria Omish, told him about two smallpox epidemics that ravaged the tribe. "When the smallpox came 1st time," Harrington wrote, "the Inds. were having a big fiesta at Sjc. [San Juan Capistrano], and a man came who had smallpox, & the people were talking of making him go away, but he threw a cloth that had small pox matter on it into the fire, & then all of them got it, pretty near all of them died." There's the description of a religious ceremony involving two men who slowly dance while quickly playing flutes made from the shin bones of a deer. The legend of a dying man who asks not to be buried and who returns to life as an elk. The behavior of a particular black beetle that crawls away quickly when placed in the hand of a generous man ~W and plays dead in the hand of one who is stingy. "For Harrington, it was all about getting the information down on paper, and he lived in fear that he couldn't get it done in his lifetime," Macri said. "He wasn't heavy on analysis. His gift was to record what he heard." When Gloria Morgan, a member of the Tejon tribe in Kern County, read that UC Davis was seeking Native Americans to help computerize Harrington's work, she jumped at the chance. Morgan discovered that Harrington had recorded her great-great-grandmother Angelita singing songs in the Kitanemuk language, of which there are no fluent speakers today. "I didn't grow up exposed to my own culture, so this is such a huge thing," said Morgan, 30, a 911 dispatcher. "I had never even heard of Harrington before this." Typing Harrington's notes into a spreadsheet is tedious work. But with each page, Morgan has learned something. A description of a death ceremony. How paint was made using deer marrow. That her ancestors had words for 40 different native grasses but didn't know what a shark was. "A hundred little things that wouldn't mean anything to anyone," Morgan said. "Except if you're a Tejon." Harrington, born in 1884 and raised in Santa Barbara, studied classical languages and anthropology at Stanford University and graduated at the top of his class in three years. He turned down a Rhodes scholarship and studied anthropology and linguistics at universities in Europe. Professors marveled at his flawless ear. He also had the ability to write down every word said to him. "He was able to take phonetic dictation at conversation speed, like a court reporter," Golla said. He returned to California to teach languages at Santa Ana High School. But Harrington had a wanderlust. He wanted to follow the ethos of anthropologist Franz Boas, who promoted the then-radical idea that "primitive" societies were as complex as those in Europe. As modernity overtook the West, advocates of Boas saw the preservation of Indian cultures as nothing short of a rescue mission. In 1915, Harrington landed a job as a field linguist for the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology. Over the next 40 years his travels took him from California and the Southwest to Canada and Alaska as he immersed himself in a world that was evaporating before his eyes. "I thought he was a little nuts at times. But I never met anybody who was so devoted to his work," said Jack Marr, an 83-year-old retired Fullerton engineer who worked for Harrington as an assistant, beginning as a teenager. "He'd travel into a remote area by bus and get off and walk miles by himself to a trading post and ask, 'Where can I find the Indians?' " Harrington was a recluse who didn't care about money, dressed in tattered clothing and slept on the dirt floors of his interview subjects' homes. He rented Marr's grandmother's home in Santa Ana and used it as a base for several decades, turning it into a warren of papers and boxes that left little room to walk. He had no phone and would routinely not answer the door. While in the field, Harrington routed letters to his bosses in Washington, D.C., through Marr's mother, so they would bear a Santa Ana postmark and would not reveal where he was. Marr was instructed never to tell anyone where he or Harrington were going or what they were doing. In contrast to others in his field, Harrington was not the least bit eager to publicize his discoveries. Quite the opposite. Marr said Harrington once told him of a tribe in the Sierra that had discovered the skeleton of a Spanish conquistador in full armor in a cave. Fearful that the find would attract reporters and other anthropologists, Harrington told Marr he had the Indians bury the body and swore them to secrecy. Harrington's life was full of contradictions. He was sensitive to the nuances of native cultures but revealed himself in his private letters as a fervent anti-Semite. He was a workaholic who never quite finished a project. A social misfit who had no close friends but could charm suspicious strangers into divulging their most profound secrets. "He preached it to me over and over: If we didn't do this, nobody else will, and these languages will be lost forever," said Marr, who hauled a 35-pound recording machine powered by a car battery around the West during the late 1930s and early 1940s, sometimes through mountains on horseback. "We'd be gone for a month or two at a time, living off cases of dried beef and chili and crackers~E. It was quite an adventure for a 17-year-old guy." When Marr took trips on his own, Harrington wrote long, rambling letters exhorting him not to come back empty-handed. When one of his aged subjects took ill, Harrington exhibited sheer panic. "Tell him we'll give him five dollars an hour, it'll pay all his doctor bills and his funeral and will leave his widow with a handsome jackpot," he wrote Marr regarding a sickly Chinook Indian elder in Washington state. "DON'T TAKE NO. Hound the life out of him, go back again and again and again." When another subject, a Chinook man nearly 100 years old, suffered a stroke, Harrington was heartbroken ~W for himself. "Have just gotten over crying ~E this is the worst thing that ever happened to me," he wrote Marr. A few sentences later, though, Harrington encouraged him to remain optimistic. "You know, a paralysed person often GETS OVER the first stroke, it is the third stroke that carries them off. And between strokes they get well and sit up and talk." Harrington was married once, to a linguistics student. He immediately turned Carobeth Tucker into an assistant, dragging her from one dusty outpost to another, even late in pregnancy and with their newborn daughter in tow, she recalled in a 1975 memoir. She divorced him after seven years and went on to become an accomplished linguist and ethnographer. Harrington's bosses at the Smithsonian accommodated his eccentricities because of the quality of the reports he sent back. It was only after his death that the extent of his material became known. It took the better part of the 1960s to bring most of the stuff together. Managers of storage units shipped boxes of notes to the Smithsonian seeking unpaid rent. Forgotten stockpiles turned up in post offices that were about to be razed. The material eventually filled two warehouses. In the mid-1970s, Gerald R. Ford was president when work began to transfer the written collection to 500 reels of microfilm. When the job was completed, Ronald Reagan was leaving office. The size of the archive makes a mockery of time. Spend a month plowing through what took a lifetime to compile, and you haven't even scratched the surface. A Smithsonian editor who worked for years to commit the archive to microfilm wrote, in a 10-volume overview of the collection: "One can easily fall prey to the 'Harrington Curse': obsession." After six months of separating Harrington's papers from his dirty laundry, Catherine Callaghan had an epiphany. "I could see myself becoming more and more like Harrington. I had wanted to devote my life to pure research as he did," she said. "But I realized I could not survive as a human being that way." For a man who worked so desperately to save something, Harrington gave surprisingly little thought to how his stuff would be used ~W or whether it would, in its vastness, simply be admired. "He thought these languages were dying off so rapidly that he could not afford to take the time to publish any of his findings," said Macri of UC Davis. "I don't think he envisioned [his archive] being used by Indian people. I don't think he thought Indian people would be as resilient as they've been." Joyce Stanfield Perry, a Juaneño tribal leader in Orange County, discovered the depth of Harrington's legacy in 1994 as she and others searched the Smithsonian for documentation to support federal recognition for their tribe. On a dusty shelf, they found a box of recordings one of Harrington's assistants made in the 1930s. On them was the voice of Anastacia de Majel, a tribal elder then in her 70s and one of the last speakers of the Juaneño language. Her words were preserved as if in amber. "We wept," Perry said. "It truly was like our ancestors were talking directly to us." Perry, who also runs a nonprofit Indian education and cultural foundation, estimates that 10,000 pages of Harrington's notes refer to her tribe. As they are entered into the database, a dictionary of her native language is emerging. So far, it contains 1,200 words. Through Harrington, Perry has made discoveries about her ancestors' way of life that have affected her profoundly. "I didn't know that animals would talk to my ancestors and that my ancestors understood them. I didn't know that the stars communicated with my ancestors or that when a crow flies overhead that I'm supposed to say certain words to them," Perry said. "It was humbling to acknowledge how much our ancestors knew." Perry's backyard garden is full of rocks that represent people in her life, a tradition she learned from Harrington's archive. Every room in her house has something in it that her ancestors told Harrington it was important to have ~W sacred items that Perry won't reveal to outsiders. "Harrington is our hero," she said. "There's something magical about his work~E. It changed how I pray and how I see the world From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Jul 8 00:10:45 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 17:10:45 -0700 Subject: The EMELD Language Query Room (fwd) Message-ID: [fwd'd from the linganth at cc.rochester.edu listserv] The EMELD Language Query Room The Endangered Language Fund (http://www.ling.yale.edu/~elf), as part of the EMELD grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (http://www.emeld.org), is pleased to announce the availability of The Language Query Room at: http://www.emeld.org/queryroom Development of the site has been accomplished by the Rosetta Project (http://www.rosettaproject.org) under the direction of Jim Mason. Organization and launching has been done by Lameen Souag at Rosetta. Original design was due to Doug Whalen of the Endangered Language Fund. The Query Room is a part of the internet that is designed to: * Allow speakers of endangered languages a chance to post messages to each other * Allow learners of a language (especially heritage learners) to ask questions of native speakers of endangered languages * Allow linguists and other interested folk to ask questions as well The Query Room is divided into areas devoted to various endangered languages. Each area has a host, who is typically a native speaker of the language. Anyone interested in the Language Query Room can register for free; no outside use will be made of any information registered. Then, the user can sign up for as many languages as are of interest. Registering for a language means that the user can post a query and it will be seen by everyone signed up for that language. Further, any time a new posting is made, an email will be sent to everyone on that list. If a native speaker feels like answering, then the answer will be posted and an announcement sent out. All postings are archived and will be available to users indefinitely. Languages that have unusual orthographies will be able to make use of our pop-up keypad. This Unicode compliant keypad can adapt to many scripts, including Cyrillic, Arabic and Cherokee. Chinese and Japanese are not currently supported. The Query Room also supports audio files, allowing easy uploads and playback. The languages currently with rooms are: Ainu, Akha, Basque, Cherokee, Cree, Degema, Kumiái, Eastern Oromo, Hmar, Nafusi, Miami, Manx, Monguor, Navajo, Hiri Motu. Our hope is that this room will allow for greater communication among native speakers who might be separated by large distances, and for the easier learning of these languages by those who are interested in them. As open forums, these areas should be used with respect, and the expertise of the native speakers should not be overtaxed. Asking how to say half a dozen sentences is a query; asking how to say 200 connected sentences is a translation and should not be done in this forum. All you need is a browser such as Internet Explorer (version 6.0 or higher is best), and an interest in endangered languages. This is a new program, so there are probably going to be some features that need fixing, but we hope that you will find the facility of some use. Point your browser to http://www.emeld.org/queryroom and see if your favorite (or native!) language is there. If it's not, please consider becoming a host for a new room. We are quite happy to add new rooms as we find hosts for them. Contact queryroom at emeld.org. For those of you who work with endangered languages whose speakers have internet access but who will probably not see this message, we would appreciate your help in spreading the word. Your comments and reactions are also welcome. Please write us at queryroom at emeld.org . Doug Whalen (whalen at haskins.yale.edu) Haskins Laboratories 270 Crown St. New Haven, CT 06511 203-865-6163, ext. 234 FAX: 203-865-8963 From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Thu Jul 8 20:13:24 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 13:13:24 -0700 Subject: Website Message-ID: You might find the following website of interest: http://www.ssila.org/ Here is a sample of what the site contains: MANDAN [MHQ] 6 fluent speakers (1992 M. Krauss) out of 400 population (1986 SIL). Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota. Classification: Siouan, Siouan Proper, Central, Mandan. Nearly extinct. More information. MARICOPA [MRC] 181 speakers (1990 census), out of 400 population (1977 SIL). Associated with the Pima on the Gila River and Salt River reservations near Phoenix, Arizona. Alternate names: COCOMARICOPA. Classification: Hokan, Esselen-Yuman, Yuman, River Yuman. More information. MENOMINI [MEZ] 39 first language speakers, 26 second language speakers, 15 others ages 30 to 50, who have learned Menominee in order to teach it, and 50 ages 20 and above who have learned it to understand it (1997 Menominee Historic Preservation Office), out of 3,500 population (1977 SIL). Northeastern Wisconsin, on what was formerly the Menomini Reservation. Alternate names: MENOMINEE. Classification: Algic, Algonquian, Central. Nearly extinct. More information. MESQUAKIE [SAC] 800 speakers out of 2,500 population (1977 SIL). 673 Fox speakers, including 2 monolinguals (1990 census). Mesquakie at Tama, Iowa; Sac and Fox at Sac and Fox Reservation on eastern Kansas-Nebraska border and central Oklahoma. Alternate names: SAC AND FOX, SAUK-FOX. Dialects: FOX, SAC, MESQUAKIE. Classification: Algic, Algonquian, Central. More information. MICHIF [CRG] 390 speakers in USA (1990 census). Population total both countries 390 or more. Alternate names: FRENCH CREE, MITCHIF. Classification: Mixed Language, French-Cree. More information. MICMAC [MIC] 1,200 in the USA, including 200 in Maine, and 1,000 largely in Boston. Northern Maine near Fort Fairfield, Boston, Massachusetts, and small scattered places elsewhere in the USA. Alternate names: MI'GMAW, MIIGMAO, MI'KMAW, RESTIGOUCHE. Classification: Algic, Algonquian, Eastern. More information. MIKASUKI [MIK] 496 speakers including 33 monolinguals (1990 census), out of 1,200 population (1977 SIL). Southern Florida. Alternate names: HITCHITI, MIKASUKI SEMINOLE, MICCOSUKEE. Dialects: HITCHITI, MIKASUKI. Classification: Muskogean, Eastern -- André Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org is the Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs of American Indians To subscribe to a news letter of interest to Natives send an email to: IndigenousNewsNetwork-subscribe at topica.com or go to: http://www.topica.com/lists/IndigenousNewsNetwork/subscribe/?location=listinfo From coyotez at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU Thu Jul 8 21:06:36 2004 From: coyotez at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU (David Lewis) Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 14:06:36 -0700 Subject: SSIL In-Reply-To: <40EDAAE4.5080202@ncidc.org> Message-ID: Klahowya Tillicums, the SSIL site is very good but some of their info is severely outdated. Please be aware and critical of this in anything you read on their site. For example their information on Kalapuya is thus, KALAPUYA: a language of USA SIL code: KAL ISO 639-2: nai /Population/ 1 or 2 speakers (1962 Chafe). /Region/ Northwest Oregon. /Alternate names / SANTIAM, LUKAMIUTE, WAPATU /Classification/ Penutian, Oregon Penutian, Kalapuyan. /Comments/ Bilingualism in English. All over 50 years old (1962). Nearly extinct. The last speaker of Kalapuya died in the late 50s, he was probably John Hudson Jr., Santiam Kalapuya of Grand Ronde Reservation, my great great grandfather. I have not heard that any other speakers lived past him and everywhere else Kalapuya is considered extinct. So their info is 50 years out of date. Therefore, I would be suspicious of any of their content. Consult Scott DeLancy's linguistics webpage for the most current info., or call the Grand Ronde tribe. David Andre Cramblit wrote: > You might find the following website of interest: http://www.ssila.org/ > Here is a sample of what the site contains: > MANDAN > > [MHQ] 6 fluent speakers (1992 M. Krauss) out of 400 population (1986 > SIL). Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota. Classification: Siouan, > Siouan Proper, Central, Mandan. Nearly extinct. > > More information. > > MARICOPA > > [MRC] 181 speakers (1990 census), out of 400 population (1977 > SIL). Associated with the Pima on the Gila River and Salt River > reservations near Phoenix, Arizona. Alternate names: COCOMARICOPA. > Classification: Hokan, Esselen-Yuman, Yuman, River Yuman. > More information. > > MENOMINI > > [MEZ] 39 first language speakers, 26 second language speakers, 15 others > ages 30 to 50, who have learned Menominee in order to teach it, and 50 > ages 20 and above who have learned it to understand it (1997 Menominee > Historic Preservation Office), out of 3,500 population (1977 > SIL). Northeastern Wisconsin, on what was formerly the Menomini > Reservation. Alternate names: MENOMINEE. Classification: Algic, > Algonquian, Central. Nearly extinct. > > More information. > > MESQUAKIE > > [SAC] 800 speakers out of 2,500 population (1977 SIL). 673 Fox speakers, > including 2 monolinguals (1990 census). Mesquakie at Tama, Iowa; Sac > and Fox at Sac and Fox Reservation on eastern Kansas-Nebraska border and > central Oklahoma. Alternate names: SAC AND FOX, SAUK-FOX. Dialects: > FOX, SAC, MESQUAKIE. Classification: Algic, Algonquian, Central. > More information. > > MICHIF > > [CRG] 390 speakers in USA (1990 census). Population total both countries > 390 or more. Alternate names: FRENCH CREE, MITCHIF. Classification: > Mixed Language, French-Cree. > More information. > > MICMAC > > [MIC] 1,200 in the USA, including 200 in Maine, and 1,000 largely in > Boston. Northern Maine near Fort Fairfield, Boston, Massachusetts, and > small scattered places elsewhere in the USA. Alternate names: MI'GMAW, > MIIGMAO, MI'KMAW, RESTIGOUCHE. Classification: Algic, Algonquian, > Eastern. > More information. > > MIKASUKI > > [MIK] 496 speakers including 33 monolinguals (1990 census), out of 1,200 > population (1977 SIL). Southern Florida. Alternate names: HITCHITI, > MIKASUKI SEMINOLE, MICCOSUKEE. Dialects: HITCHITI, MIKASUKI. > Classification: Muskogean, Eastern > > -- > > > André Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org is the Operations > Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC > (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs > of American Indians > > To subscribe to a news letter of interest to Natives send an email to: > IndigenousNewsNetwork-subscribe at topica.com or go to: > http://www.topica.com/lists/IndigenousNewsNetwork/subscribe/?location=listinfo > > From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 12 15:37:53 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 08:37:53 -0700 Subject: Reviving California Native languages (fwd) Message-ID: Reviving California Native languages By Jack Chang Knight Ridder Newspapers http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001977242_languages12.html BERKELEY, Calif. — In front of hundreds of indigenous people and linguists from around the world, California Native American Bill Combs held a sheet of paper in front of him and nervously spoke the lost language of his ancestors. While his cousin Norma Yeager translated, he read the Wintun words for frog, deer and other animals, complete with the glottal stops, or deep-throated clicking sounds, that he had practiced all week. Combs, 34, finished his presentation by looking up at the audience gathered in Pauley Ballroom at University of California, Berkeley, and telling them in Wintun what he had recently learned to do after being denied the opportunity all his life: "I am speaking my language." Since mid-June, the university's linguistics department has been helping about 50 Native Californians learn to read, write and speak their languages, many of which have not been used for decades and are considered dead. For many "Breath of Life" conference participants, the experience has been emotional as they dig through the university's archive of language recordings to find traces of their lost tongues. [insert] Nomelaki language Transcribed by California Native American Norma Yeager and UC, Berkeley graduate student Jenny Lederer. Nomelaki was spoken among Northern Californian natives. Nomelaki words: Tree — mee Deer — nopoom Flowers — kalal Bear — waymahl Jaybird — chiek-chiek Rabbit — patkeelee Part of a Nomelaki prayer using the words: Hlesin mem mee nopoom kalal way Hlesin mem waymahl chiek-chiek patkeelee Water-spirit make the tree, deer and flowers grow. Water-spirit feed the plant life to the bear, jaybird and rabbit. Source: Transcribed by California Native American Norma Yeager and UC, Berkeley graduate student Jenny Lederer [insert end] In some cases, they have come across recordings of grandparents and other family members speaking their languages decades ago into the microphones of UC, Berkeley anthropologists. Some have become the first people to speak their ancestral languages since the early 20th century. Mike Lincoln, who lives on the Round Valley Indian Reservation in California, said he hopes to revive the language of his father's tribe, the Nomelaki. "I look at it as something missing," Lincoln said. "(The U.S. government) took it away from us. They didn't let us have it. It's part of our culture. Without it, you're lost." Throughout the 20th century, the federal government aggressively tried to stamp out the languages, sending Native children to boarding schools where only English was permitted and prohibiting the teaching of the languages in public schools. Mamie Elsie Powell, 72, a resident of the Grindstone Indian Rancheria in Glenn County, Calif., grew up without speaking her native tongue of Nomelaki, although she remembered hearing her father and other relatives speak it while growing up. As it turns out, her father, who died in 1987 at age 101, was aware of the importance of his language and made hours of recordings of himself speaking it. "I am one of the few people around who remember what my language sounds like," Powell said. "I have my father's tapes." Since the 1980s, the campaign to rescue dying or dead languages has become a movement among Native Americans, said Leanne Hinton, chairwoman of UC, Berkeley's linguistics department. Many California Indians are apathetic about their culture, and changing that is often an uphill battle, said Yeager, also from Grindstone. "If they show interest, we'll teach them," she said. On a Thursday in June, UC, Berkeley launched a companion conference — "Stabilizing Indigenous Languages" — drawing several hundred indigenous people and linguists from around the world to learn how to rescue their own fragile languages. The two conferences merged the next Friday morning, and Californians such as Combs and Yeager nervously climbed onto the Pauley Ballroom stage to show what they had learned to the international audience. Among the crowd were young people such as Michelle Martin, 26, an Aborigine from northwestern Australia who said she has been trying to preserve some of the 25 indigenous languages in her part of the world. Her motivations were the same as those of the Native Californians. "It's who we are," Martin said. "You can say you're an Aborigine, but what it really means is your culture and your language." Martin said many of her elders still speak the old languages, although few try to pass on their knowledge. That's why Martin is working to preserve the languages by recording them onto tape and creating dictionaries. In that way, what she has seen so far in California has been a warning to her. "If my people don't take an interest now, we'll be in the same situation as you." From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 12 15:41:08 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 08:41:08 -0700 Subject: Breaking down language barriers (fwd) Message-ID: Breaking down language barriers By Brier Dudley Seattle Times technology reporter http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001977256_swahiliword12.html There is less than one computer for every 100 people in East Africa, where the population worries more about getting water and electricity than an Internet connection. But that's where Microsoft is working on special versions of Windows XP and standard Office applications in Kiswahili, or Swahili, the language spoken by more than 50 million people in Kenya, Tanzania and other countries in the region. Kiswahili is among 40 languages Microsoft is taking on as part of a new approach to localizing its products for overseas markets. The Local Language Program, which began in March, is expected to broaden the company's reach, build new partnerships with governments in developing countries and confront the challenge of freely shared software. It's part of a broad company effort to expand its global presence, especially now that Western markets are saturated with technology. Microsoft wants to help developing countries break down language barriers that contribute to the "digital divide" that has left much of the world behind the technology revolution. MICROSOFT Indonesian "We wanted to bring our desktop to a broader set of people around the world, and the way you do that is by breaking down the barrier," said Lori Brownell, general manager of the Windows International group that produces non-English versions of the software. In some ways, Microsoft is playing catch-up. Governments, universities, other companies and nonprofit groups have worked for years on an array of projects to make computers more usable in developing countries. It's complicated work, and Microsoft's contributions should make a big difference, especially if they're combined with computer-training programs, said Martin Benjamin, a professor of Swahili and anthropology at Wesleyan University. Benjamin produced a Kiswahili interface for Google two years ago and edits an online dictionary for the language. "I think it will be substantial progress for the ability of people in East Africa to use computers — it's about 10 years too late, but better late than never," he said. The politics of language One of the challenges is figuring out which terms to use in the programs. This is complicated by the politics of language, including academic debates about whether native words should be used for non-native products such as software. "There's a lively debate among people about what words should be used," Benjamin said, relating how academics in Kenya even disagree on what to call computers. Some Kenyans believe the appropriate translation for "computer" is "tarakilishi," a word with Kiswahili roots that relate to math. But others, including Benjamin, favor the commonly used word "kompyuta," which is borrowed from English. Microsoft hopes to avoid these issues by leaving the translation to local experts. To develop the language kits, Microsoft is working in partnership with government, universities and language groups. These partners are hired to produce a glossary of 3,000 standard computer terms in their language. Microsoft's software tools use these glossaries to produce a local language "layer" over Windows and Office. Microsoft also makes the glossaries available online at no charge to software developers around the world. The glossaries are available at members.microsoft.com/wincg/ In places such as Nepal, the people working on the glossaries don't have Internet access. A company working on the project there went to a community radio station and broadcast 10 computer terms a day, asking listeners to phone in translations, said Andy Abbar, group program manager for Microsoft's Information Worker International business. Elsewhere, it's a multinational effort. The Kiswahili version is being developed by professors in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and coordinated by the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. On the other side of Africa, Microsoft is simultaneously working with Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia on an Amharic version. "What you don't want is to push a solution, so it's important it comes from within the country, within the community," Abbar said. Abbar said it's gratifying work, especially after seeing the lengths users go to use software in a language they don't understand. While in an office in Vietnam, he noticed a receptionist had ringed her computer monitor with yellow sticky notes. He asked a Vietnamese co-worker what the notes said, and it turned out they had translations of desktop commands such as "Start" and file menu names. Which markets picked Microsoft began localizing its software in different languages about 15 years ago. "We started out by saying, 'Well these are big markets, we should localize.' That gets you the top seven, maybe," said Brownell, the general manager. Now Microsft chooses new languages after analyzing information from its overseas subsidiaries. Criteria include PC sales, growth rates and market potential. Among the high priorities are languages in countries with fast-growing technology industries such as India, where the company plans to introduce versions in nine regional dialects over the next year. One of them is Telugu, the language spoken in Hyderabad, where Microsoft has had a software-development center since 1998. The company also has worked on languages that were suggested by users or governments, including the Irish and Welsh versions. Currently, it has about 40 languages done, and it plans to complete another 40 by the end of June 2005. Outsourcing linguists The language program also reflects the company's new way of doing business. In years past, the company hired hundreds of language experts to build "localized" versions of its programs for promising markets. Now it's focused on software tools that simplify the localization process, and it's outsourcing language work to partners in countries where the languages are spoken. Instead of hundreds of linguists, the Windows international group now has just 75 people doing software-tool development, Brownell said. The new approach coalesced about a year and a half ago, when the company realized it didn't have to translate 100 percent of the program commands to make Windows and Office usable by non-English speakers. It developed tools for adding a foreign-language layer over Windows and Office, based on what Brownell calls the "80-20 rule": By translating just 20 percent of the commands — including key terms such as "start" and "click" — the software is 80 percent usable to non-English speakers. The layers are built using tools the company originally developed to help multinational corporations set up PCs for users in different countries. This leaner approach helps the company produce more foreign-language versions of its products for less money, Brownell said. "The team is building more layers now than in the past, when there were more people, because of the tools," she said. (Currently available layers — from Afrikaans to Zulu — may be downloaded at www.microsoft.com/resources/government/locallanguage.aspx) Competitors localizing The new language program was announced in March by Maggie Wilderotter, a senior vice president charged with building relationships with governments and schools around the world. She's also a point person in the company's competition with freely shared software such as the Linux operating system and OpenOffice suite, which also have ambitious localization programs. OpenOffice is being translated into about 60 languages, said OpenOffice "community manager" Louis Suarez-Potts, who also works as senior community-development manager of CollabNet in Brisbane, Calif. Suarez-Potts said Microsoft is trying to catch up to OpenOffice, which is being embraced by developing countries. He contends that countries can create software industries by creating local versions of freely shared software such as OpenOffice. "They've seen what we've been doing and how we've been trying to work with the various national governments and regional governments to create local economies," he said. Either way, the localized software products are unlikely to find their way into many homes in countries such as Tanzania, where people live on a dollar a day, Wesleyan's Benjamin said. "They're not going to be buying a computer anytime soon no matter what happens with an interface available in Swahili," he said. "They don't have electricity; they have more pressing concerns." But if the language barrier were lowered, people would be able to use computers in Internet cafes, and computers could be brought into schools for students to use. "People I know who don't have access to computers because in large part they read Swahili but not English, they would love to be able to learn computers," Benjamin said. "They know what's available with computers — they'd love to be able to send e-mails, instant message chat, but they can't." Not for a while, at least. Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or bdudley at seattletimes.com From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 12 15:59:47 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 08:59:47 -0700 Subject: misc news articles...(links) Message-ID: [ilat note: these news articles have a brief mention of language learning by aboriginal or native children.] Aboriginal children less healthy than average Canadian Press http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1089485551839_267/?hub=Health Native youngsters gain culture, learning skills Programs geared to aboriginals give city children a taste of their heritage http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040710/KIDS10/TPEducation/ From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 12 16:01:32 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 09:01:32 -0700 Subject: Phoenix Indian Center to start =?iso-8859-1?b?RGlu6Q==?= language classes for children (fwd) Message-ID: Phoenix Indian Center to start Diné language classes for children By LaNell Shirley Special to the Times http://www.thenavajotimes.com/20040807/News/phoenix_indcenter.html PHOENIX - The city of Phoenix is not a place you would expect to find Navajo language classes, but the Indian Center is planning to expand its classes to include children in August. The Phoenix Indian Center has seen a rise in popularity among the urban Navajo community. In 2000, the center expanded its services to include Navajo language and culture classes that are offered throughout the year. With recent funding from the Navajo Nation and several grants, the center's education department has employed four permanent staff - cultural specialist Freddie Johnson, language instructor Rachel Antonio, elder assistant Richard Beyal, and education specialist David Frazier. The staffers were hired to develop a curriculum for beginning and intermediate Navajo language classes as well as Navajo literacy classes. "While we have programs that are structured from traditional curriculum to non-traditional curriculum, we strive to provide families with a connection to their mother, the Navajo Nation," said Roberta Howard, program director. "Her children may live in different areas, but they still need to maintain that connection with her." Language instructor Rachel Antonio is a graduate of the Diné College and Arizona State University Diné Teacher Education Program. She instructs beginning, intermediate, and advanced adult Navajo language classes. Though the classes are not officially accredited, they are formally structured with regular class work, homework assignments and tests. "Teaching the classes is challenging because they are constantly being revitalized," Antonio said. "But, I enjoy it. It is something I desire to do." Cultural specialist Freddie Johnson instructs intergenerational family classes where family members learn the Navajo language and culture through real-life situations and environments. Johnson favors an informal approach when working with families. Family members sometimes play "Navajo Jeopardy" and "Navajo Pictionary" and are encouraged to interact with one another as they would at home. "I teach the parents and the children, the component of a family", Johnson said. "It is a good way of reaching the children and reminding the parents that they are the first teachers." Although staffers are busy with classes, they often host cultural events and activities for families. This past winter, the center hosted the Navajo shoe game and often invited guests from the reservation. "On several occasions, I've had a few elders come visit the classes," Johnson said. "I once had an 83-year-old grandma from Lukachukai come in with her grandchildren and tell me that the Navajo language program was a good thing to do down here." Program director Howard promises that the establishment of the classes is just the beginning. Among its many goals, the program hopes to establish a distance-learning program using modern technology and build partnerships with Phoenix school districts that have high concentrations of Native American students. However, the program's biggest goal is to become an extension of Diné College. "There is a need for such an extension among the community here both educationally and career-wise," said Howard. "It would be a wonderful source of revenue for the college and would serve as an educational exchange between urban and reservation areas." This fall, the program will welcome some big changes. Currently, staff members are hard at work to expand the center's focus to include young children and are eagerly developing a curriculum that includes games, songs and hands-on activities. The center will begin hosting Navajo language and culture classes for children this upcoming August. "We're excited about the children's classes, it will be something new," said Antonio. "We want to start focusing on the children because they are going to be our leaders one day and it is important that they know their native language." "Culture and language keeps us happy and whole", said Howard. "Without it, we lose our self-identity. The language is the spirit of the people and our program hopes to help keep the spirit alive." The city of Phoenix is home to nearly 80,000 Native American from across the United States. Although Phoenix is attractive for families and those seeking a college education or a change of lifestyle, many within the urban Native community need language and cultural ties, job training, educational resources, and opportunities to socialize with fellow Native Americans. The Phoenix Indian Center was established to serve urban Indians in need of such services. Founded in 1947, the center provided vendors with a location to sell and buy arts and crafts and served as a place where the Native community could receive messages, shower, and connect with other Natives. Today, the center has become a fully functioning, multi-faceted organization that seeks to "promote the social and economic self-sufficiency of the American Indians living of Maricopa County." The center offers child-care services, family counseling, case management and learning circles. Native Workforce Services, one of the center's most utilized resources, provides employment and job-training assistance through its on-site Adult Learning Center. Free GED classes and seminars are available through the program. In addition to employment assistance, Native Workforce Services features a "resource room" where Internet access, printer access, and fax machines are available for use for those that qualify for the program. For more information on the Phoenix Indian Center and its services, please call 602-264-6768 or visit their offices at 2601 North Third Street Suite 100, Phoenix, Arizona 85004. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Jul 13 01:18:10 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 18:18:10 -0700 Subject: Digitizing the voices of the past (fwd) Message-ID: Digitizing the voices of the past Science perfects sound of century-old recordings Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer Monday, July 12, 2004 A new technology under development in Berkeley could help thousands of long-dead Americans to "speak" again. Almost 130 years ago, Thomas Edison and other entrepreneur-inventors popularized sound recording via phonographs. For decades afterward, innumerable Americans -- from politicians to Native Americans, from opera singers to barbershop quartets -- recorded their voices on tin or wax cylinders. Now, tens of thousands of those cylinders, stored in sites as diverse as temperature-controlled archives and dusty suburban attics, have deteriorated so badly that they're unplayable. These recorded voices of Americans from a legendary era -- Americans who were old enough to recall slavery, the Civil War, the conquest of the American West and earlier national sagas -- have been silenced not only by death but by the insatiable appetites of fungal mold and insects. But perhaps not forever. Using a tool normally used for particle physics research, two scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Carl Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyev, are investigating how to extract clear, audible voices from broken, mold-eaten and otherwise unplayable early recordings. In their most impressive feat so far, they have extracted high-quality sound from a well-worn wax cylinder recording from 1912. On the cylinder, what sounds like a barbershop quartet sings a sentimental tune called "Just Before the Battle, Mother." The great thing about the scientists' technique is that it's noninvasive. They don't have to risk damaging a cylinder or wearing down its grooves by playing it on the original phonograph. Rather, they use special microscopes to scan the grooves. Then, with special software, they convert the varying groove shapes to sound. Haber cautions that he doesn't want to overpromise what the technique might eventually achieve. Further work is needed to determine whether they can extract audible sounds from most damaged cylinders or early disc recordings. "It's possible," he acknowledged. "But as a scientist I'm always shy to state more than has been measured, or to be too speculative." Still, history buffs can't help daydreaming about the possibility of hearing the voices of Americans who witnessed a mythic era when the nation was young, a time when native tribes clashed with cowboys and cavalry in barren lands unmarked by superhighways, fast-food joints or casinos. The voices still exist, encoded on wax cylinders, if scientists could only perfect ways to recover them. So far, "we've lost as many cylinders to mold damage as to breakage. The mold literally eats the wax," said Sam Brylawski, head of the recorded film section of the U.S. Library of Congress, which is supporting the Berkeley research. Tin- or wax-cylinder recordings still exist of some of the most famous figures of the 19th or early 20th centuries. Among them: the poet Alfred Tennyson, actress Sarah Bernhardt, nurse Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria of England and Germany's leader in World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm. There are also purported recordings of poet Walt Whitman and populist politician William Jennings Bryan, but some experts have questioned their authenticity. The oldest known surviving recording is of a talking clock. It was recorded in 1878 on a tin cylinder, and can now be heard online at http: //tinfoil.com, a phonograph history enthusiasts' site. At the same site, which has no connection with the Berkeley researchers, one can also hear a 1910 tune sung by Sophie Tucker and a 1908 speech by future president William Howard Taft, who sounds less like one of those stentorian, larger-than-life presidents portrayed in movies than like an ordinary political hack at a rubber-chicken dinner. The Berkeley scientists' site is www-cdf.lbl.gov/~av. The Berkeley scientists' work is a spin-off of a particle physics project. That project, still ongoing, aims to detect a hypothetical subatomic particle, the Higgs boson; in theory, the particle, named after physicist Peter Higgs, gives objects mass. Physicists at CERN, the giant international particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, hope to find Higgs boson in the debris of particles smashed together within a new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As part of Berkeley's contribution to an LHC experiment dubbed Atlas, Haber and Fadeyev have used a kind of super-microscope to inspect flat, dark wafers of silicon. The microscope is called the OGP SmartScope. OGP stands for the manufacturer, Optical Gauging Products of Rochester, N.Y. Unlike an ordinary optical microscope, into which one might look with a naked eye, "the SmartScope captures magnified images with a digital camera and then uses a computer to analyze and measure the shapes and locations of objects under view," Haber said. The device can automatically measure distances between points on the screen in microns, or millionths of a meter. (A meter is equivalent to 39 inches.) Now, Fadeyev and Haber are using the SmartScope to map grooves in old recordings. In initial experiments, they extracted sound from flat, disc- shaped records dating from the early 20th century -- the precursors to the albums of the rock 'n' roll period. Rather than risk damaging a record by playing it in an original phonograph, they used the microscope to image the grooves on the record and to measure their precise horizontal dimensions in microns. Wriggles in the groove encode fluctuations in sound frequency and intensity. Also, "the computer can be programmed to recognize dirt, scratches and debris and delete them from the image, similar to retouching a photograph," Haber said. Next, they transfer the groove measurements to a computer. Its software serves as what Haber calls a virtual stylus: It reads the groove data -- just as a stylus reads the grooves on a phonograph -- and converts it to sound. In fact, the computer technique creates higher-quality sound than the original phonograph. Edison's early recordings worked by etching vertical, not horizontal, undulations into a wax cylinder. The Berkeley scientists make three- dimensional maps of these vertical grooves with a different instrument, a confocal microscope. If their technique is perfected, then how many recorded voices, now lost, might speak again? Despite Haber's cautionary remarks, the imagination reels at the possible prospects. One of the world's leading historians of phonography, Allen Koenigsberg, who is also a classics professor at Brooklyn College in New York, has investigated the rumor that President Abraham Lincoln made a sound recording. Koenigsberg, who isn't connected with the Berkeley research, said he has looked for the supposed Lincoln recording "in various archives all over the world," so far without luck. Undaunted, Koenigsberg hopes to locate a supposedly lost recording that, if it still exists, would be just as fantastic. It's the voice of an elderly American man who, at the time he recorded his speech in 1890, was 100 years old -- a man who was a child in the late 18th century, not long after the American Revolution. The man was Horatio Perry of Wellington, Ohio, and the recording was made in honor of his great age by someone from a startup firm, the Ohio Phonograph Co. According to a document uncovered by Koenigsberg, the recording was placed inside a safe at the firm. A few years later, as a severe depression swept the U.S. economy, the Ohio Phonograph Co. -- a dot-com of its day -- went bankrupt. "What happened to the safe? We don't know," Koenigsberg laments, but then adds, "It may turn up." If it does, then 21st century humans will be able to hear a remarkable thing: the voice of a man who lived and breathed when George Washington was the first president of the United States, when French guillotines beheaded aristocrats, and Mozart played across Europe to crowned heads and commoners. For years, a rumor has titillated enthusiasts of phonograph history -- the rumor that Abraham Lincoln himself made a sound recording. Indeed, it is known that in 1857, a French scientist named Leon Scott invented a proto-phonograph that recorded, but could not play back, sounds. According to the Lincoln rumor, the 16th president spoke into a similar device in 1863. However, Lincoln fans shouldn't get too excited: For now, there's absolutely no proof that Lincoln actually took time off during the Civil War to speak into anyone's recording device, experts say. E-mail the author at kdavidson at sfchronicle.com. Page A - 1 URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/07/12/MNGJP7JRC21.DTL From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Jul 13 15:47:10 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:47:10 -0700 Subject: Native Americans Strive to Retain Vanishing Heritage (fwd) Message-ID: Native Americans Strive to Retain Vanishing Heritage Deborah Block Browning, Montana 12 Jul 2004 http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=C03EAA9D-8CB0-49BB-88095305F37D3F85# Watch video on the Blackfeet Native American school (RealVideo)   For the indigenous peoples of America, the Lewis and Clark expedition brought publicity that led to a massive influx of people into their native lands. The Blackfeet Indian nation of Montana is one of those native American tribes trying to teach its children about their language and culture, before the old ways completely disappear. Ernie Heavyrunner Ernie Heavyrunner teaches three to five-year-olds some words in the Blackfeet language. He shows them the colors of traffic signals and what they mean. He says since so many Blackfeet no longer speak the language, efforts are being made to reach the children, even at a young age. "It's important for their identity," says the teacher. "It's important for them to know who they are, where they came from, and their language helps them to know this." The children sing in the Blackfeet language at a private elementary school on the Blackfeet reservation in Browning, Montana. The school, which is part of a non-profit organization known as the Piegan Institute, hopes to revitalize the language. Darrell Kipp The small school opened almost 10 years ago, and teaches about 30 students each year. They not only learn Blackfeet, but also take part in a full elementary school curriculum. Darrell Kipp, founder of the Institute, says he thinks the students do well in both Blackfeet and English. "The fact is that our students come here and speak our language exclusively each day - English isn't allowed in the classrooms during the day. So all instruction is in our language," says Mr. Kipp. "Yet, our students are more articulate and better English speakers than their public school peers." The Blackfeet is the largest tribe in Montana and probably got its name from the blackened moccasins the people used to wear. The reservation borders Glacier National Park. The Blackfeet owned the land that became the park until 1895, when they sold it to the U.S. government. The Blackfeet children at the Piegan Institute are being taught a language that most of their parents and grandparents did not have the opportunity to learn. In the past, to discourage Indians from speaking their native tongues, the U.S. government sent Native American children to boarding and missionary schools far from their family and friends. Cynthia Kipp Among them was Piegan Institute volunteer Cynthia Kipp [not related to Darrell Kipp], who went to a school outside Montana. "I always wanted to learn and I yearned to speak Blackfeet," says Ms. Kipp. "I always felt there was something missing in my life and that it wasn't complete." Some of her other family members are also involved with the school. Her daughter, Joycelyn Des Rosier, a teacher, says she first had to learn the Blackfeet language before she could help the students. She says the school encourages the children to think creatively. For example, at a staff meeting, she shows a picture a young student drew about the story of a wolf. "This wolf is looking for something that is already dead. He's going to take it home to cook," she explained. "Another kid told the student, 'But wolves don't know how to cook.' I told her, 'It's OK, your wolf can cook.'" Joycelyn says Blackfeet is also spoken at her home, including by her son Michael, who attends the Piegan Institute school. "We practice quite a bit. And a lot of his friends who come from this school, we make them also speak [Blackfeet]," she says. "We pray everyday in our language. And we give all the commands and everything, so that I can remember, and I wake them all up in Blackfoot." Michael Michael, whose Native American name is Eagle Bear, says he enjoys learning about his cultural heritage. "I like learning Blackfeet. And I like art, and drawing, and reading and writing, but I don't like math," he laughs. Darrell Kipp says the students learn about their ancestors. They are also taught about the Lewis and Clark expedition, including from the Native American point of view. He says many Indians are commemorating rather than celebrating the 200th anniversary of the journey. One reason, he says, is because Native Americans went through tremendous hardship after publicity from the expedition brought an influx of people out West. "Tribes lost enormous land, lost enormous amounts of their homeland," he explains. "They suffered a lot of the influx of diseases that decimated their populations. They were subject to a dominant government. They were ultimately placed on reservations." Mr. Kipp says despite the hardships of the past, and problems that continue today, the Piegan Institute is looking toward the future. He says while many indigenous languages around the world are disappearing, he hopes the Blackfeet language will continue and endure. "Well, it is our dream, and our hope, and our vision many years from now, when we've all left this wonderful place, that those children that are in our schools will be parents and grandparents," he says "and that our language will continue to be used by them and that we'll be probably one of the few tribal languages on this earth that continue to exist." From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Jul 13 15:59:34 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:59:34 -0700 Subject: Dakota language teacher Franklin Firesteel dead at 51 (fwd) Message-ID: Dakota language teacher Franklin Firesteel dead at 51 The Associated Press - Tuesday, July 13, 2004 MINNEAPOLIS http://www.in-forum.com/ap/index.cfm?page=view&id=D83Q06HG1 Franklin Firesteel, who taught the Dakota language and tried to pass on his cultural traditions, has died of liver failure. He was 51. Firesteel, who also went by the name Isna Hoksina, which means Lone Boy, worked to pass along the culture of his people. He taught the Dakota language, culture, history and art at the University of Minnesota and in tribal settings. "He was a natural teacher, an empowering teacher who made learning fun. He made the students want to learn," said Neil McKay, one of Firesteel's former students and teaching assistants and a University of Minnesota language instructor in the Department of American Indian Studies. A member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota tribe in South Dakota, Firesteel worked for the university during the 1990s in the American Indian Studies department and at the Bell Museum. Besides Dakota culture and history, he also taught Dakota art to groups in the Twin Cities and served as a consultant and teacher to the Mendota tribe of the Dakota Nation. Ellen Neale of Shakopee, Firesteel's ex-wife, said she knew at least a half-dozen students who became fluent in Dakota thanks to Firesteel. "He has planted many seeds from the culture and language," she said. Firesteel died of liver failure at the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center on June 30. Services have been held. ___ Information from: Star Tribune, http:// WWW.STARTRIBUNE.COM From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Jul 21 02:21:46 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 19:21:46 -0700 Subject: Lawrence Nicodemus, 94, tribal-language expert (fwd) Message-ID: Tuesday, July 20, 2004, 12:00 A.M. Pacific Lawrence Nicodemus, 94, tribal-language expert By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS The Associated Press SPOKANE — Lawrence G. Nicodemus, a Coeur d'Alene Indian tribal elder who made preservation of the tribal language his life's work, has died at age 94. Mr. Nicodemus, who died Saturday, was considered a hero within the Northern Idaho tribe for his efforts to preserve Snchitsu'umshtsn, as the language is called. "We will be closing tribal offices on the day of his funeral to remember our past and to pay our respects for this tribal elder," Chief J. Allan, tribal vice chairman, said in a news release. Mr. Nicodemus will be buried today. He wrote a self-study course on the language that was published in 1975. It included a primer, two-volume dictionary and audio cassette tape delivered to every tribal family on the reservation. The course remains in use today, the tribe said. Mr. Nicodemus also wrote an account of tribal family and historical names in the old language and compiled a list of place names in the original territory of the tribe. Mr. Nicodemus was part of a long family legacy of preserving the language, an effort that started in the 1870s when Jesuit missionaries required all Indian children to learn English. Cyprian Kwaruutus Nicodemus, his paternal grandfather, was a principal consultant to ethnologist James Teit in the production of Teit's important 19th-century account of the tribe, which included much information on the language. When Columbia University professor Gladys Reichard began working with tribal elders in the 1920s to help save the Coeur d'Alene language, she developed a working relationship with Dorothy Nicodemus, widow of Cyprian. Lawrence Nicodemus was born on July 21, 1909, to a family that farmed on the reservation near the Washington-Idaho border. He entered boarding school at age 9, a time when he spoke only the Coeur d'Alene language. In 1935, he went to Columbia University with Reichard and spent 13 months working there. The result was a grammar of the tribal language, published in 1938. During World War II, he wrote a newsletter for members of the tribe both at home and serving in the armed forces. "Letters home to Lawrence became, essentially, dispatches from the European and Pacific theaters," said Raymond Brinkman, a student of Mr. Nicodemus who is now director of the tribe's Language Department. After World War II, Mr. Nicodemus was appointed a judge of the Coeur d'Alene Tribal Court and was a member of the tribal council in the 1950s. By the 1990s, the tribe was making enough money from gambling revenues to begin new efforts to preserve its language. Although in his 80s, Mr. Nicodemus helped the tribe create both a high-school and college course in the language. He continued teaching language classes until his 94th birthday last year. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Jul 21 20:05:47 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 13:05:47 -0700 Subject: Tribal elder co-writes book to help save language (fwd) Message-ID: Wed July 21, 2004 Tribal elder co-writes book to help save language By Karen Klinka The Oklahoman http://www.newsok.com/article/1281735/?template=news/main NORMAN - At an age when many people are content to rest on past accomplishments, Creek/Seminole elder Linda Alexander, 87, still is working to preserve the language and culture of her ancestors. Alexander, along with two co-authors, has written "Beginning Creek," a college-level textbook on the language and culture of the Mvskoke-speaking peoples, the Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole Indians. The book was published earlier this year by the University of Oklahoma Press. Alexander's co-authors are her daughter, Bertha Tilkens, a consultant who helps translate and administer health questionnaires to Muscogee and Seminole people for OU's College of Nursing, and Pamela Innes, assistant professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Wyoming at Laramie, who works with American Indian communities on issues of language revitalization and maintenance. Until her retirement several years ago, Alexander taught Mvskoke language classes at OU and at Oklahoma State University campuses in Stillwater and Tulsa. During a recent interview from her home in Norman, Alexander said she helped write the book in order to keep the Mvskoke language alive. "I did not want my language to fade away," Alexander said. "It's getting to the point where a lot of full-blooded Creek and Seminole Indians are getting educated in so many other things, but they aren't learning their own language. "And there are very few elderly Indian people left who know the language and are still able to explain things," she said. The walls of Alexander's living room display some prime examples of fine Oklahoma Indian art. On a tall shelf behind her favorite chair, dozens of photographs offer silent proof that Alexander, the mother of six, is the matriarch of a family that includes 31 grandchildren, 31 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren. Alexander said she hopes Creek, Seminole and other Indian students attending college can use her book to study the Mvskoke language as a way of fulfilling their "foreign" language requirement for graduation. The 256-page volume begins with a basic overview of Creek history and language, then each chapter introduces readers to a new grammatical feature, vocabulary set and series of conversational sentences. Accompanying the book are two compact discs that provide translation exercises from English to Mvskoke and from Mvskoke to English, and help to reinforce new words and concepts. The two audio CDs also present examples of ceremonial speech, songs and storytelling, and include pronunciations of Mvskoke language keyed to exercises and vocabulary lists in the book. Alexander and Tilkens, both fluent Mvskoke speakers, also contributed brief essays on Creek culture and history, with suggestions for further reading. In addition to writing a book, Alexander also serves as a resource for OU music professor Paula Conlon, who teaches world music, Indian music and ethnomusicology classes at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Conlon, who is not Indian, is doing research on contemporary stomp dancing in Oklahoma. Alexander has served as a tour guide for many of the OU professor's visits to some of the state's 17 sacred stomp grounds. "I know Linda has learned things from me," Conlon said, "but she's taught me so many things about the Indian way. She's a treasure." Alexander also has taught Conlon how to strap turtle-shell rattles to her legs and "shake shells" at stomp and corn dances. "Linda and I go to stomp dances together, and stomp dances often can last all night or until 2 a.m.," Conlon said. "On the way back from them, Linda will tell me Creek stories to keep me awake while we're driving. "Fortunately, she has lots of stories." A favorite is Alexander's Creek story of how the turtle got the cracks in its shell, Conlon said. Whenever she can, Conlon tries to write down Alexander's stories or to record them. Alexander approves of that. "I'm not the type of person who says, 'That's a secret,'" Alexander said. "If you die and nothing gets out, then there's no record of the things you do know. "How can people learn if you don't tell them?" From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 23 16:39:37 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 09:39:37 -0700 Subject: Which comes first, language or thought? (fwd) Message-ID: Which comes first, language or thought? Babies think first http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html By William J. Cromie Harvard News Office It's like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first. "Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects," says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. "These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later." Speakers of different languages notice different things and so make different distinctions. For example, when Koreans say that one object joins another, they specify whether the objects touch tightly or loosely. English speakers, in contrast, say whether one object is in or on another. Saying "I put the spoon cup" is not correct in either language. The spoon has to be "in" or "on" the cup in English, and has to be held tightly or loosely by the cup in Korean. These differences affect how adults view the world. When Koreans and Americans see the same everyday events (an apple in a bowl, a cap on a pen), they categorize them in accord with the distinctions of their languages. Because languages differ this way, many scientists suspected that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their language. That's wrong, Spelke insists. Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go unspoken when they get older. Spelke and Susan Hespos, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., did some clever experiments to show that the idea of tight/loose fitting comes before the words that are used/not used to describe it. When babies see something new, they will look at it until they get bored. Hespos and Spelke used this well-known fact to show different groups of five-month-olds a series of cylinders being placed in and on tight- or loose-fitting containers. The babies watched until they were bored and quit looking. After that happened, the researchers showed them other objects that fit tightly or loosely together. The change got and held their attention for a while, contrary to American college students who failed to notice it. This showed that babies raised in English-speaking communities were sensitive to separate categories of meaning used by Korean, but not by English, adult speakers. By the time the children grow up, their sensitivity to this distinction is lost. Other experiments show that infants use the distinction between tight and loose fits to predict how a container will behave when you move the object inside it. This capacity, then, "seems to be linked to mechanisms for representing objects and their motions," Hespos and Spelke report. Their findings suggest that language reduces sensitivity to thought distinctions not considered by the native language. "Because chimps and monkeys show similar expectations about objects, languages are probably built on concepts that evolved before humans did," Spelke suggests. The researchers describe their experiments and conclusions in the July 22 issue of the scientific journal Nature. The sounds of meaning Their findings parallel experiments done by others, which show that, before babies learn to talk for themselves, they are receptive to the sounds of all languages. But sensitivity to nonnative language sounds drops after the first year of life. "It's not that children become increasingly sensitive to distinctions made in the language they are exposed to," comments Paul Bloom of Yale University. Instead, they start off sensitive to every distinction that languages make, then they become insensitive to those that are irrelevant. They learn what to ignore, Bloom notes in an article accompanying the Hespos/Spelke report. As with words, if a child doesn't hear sound distinctions that it is capable of knowing, the youngster loses his or her ability to use them. It's a good example of use it or lose it. This is one reason why it is so difficult for adults to learn a second language, Bloom observes. "Adults' recognition of nonnative speech sounds may improve with training but rarely attains native facility," Spelke adds. Speech is for communicating so once a language is learned nothing is lost by ignoring sounds irrelevant to it. However, contrasts such as loose-versus-tight fit help us make sense of the world. Although mature English speakers don't spontaneously notice these categories, they have little difficulty distinguishing them when they are pointed out. Therefore, the effect of language experience may be more dramatic at the crossroad of hearing and sound than at the interface of thinking and word meaning, Hespos and Spelke say. Even if babies come equipped with all concepts that languages require, children may learn optional word meanings differently. Consider "fragile" or "delicately," which, unlike "in," you can leave out when you say "she delicately placed the spoon in the fragile cup." One view, Bloom points out, "is that there exists a universal core of meaningful distinctions that all humans share, but other distinctions that people make are shaped by the forces of language. On the other hand, language learning might really be the act of learning to express ideas that already exist," as in the case of the situation studied by Hespos and Spelke. There are lots of situations involving the relation between ideas and language that Hespos and Spelke did not address, so the debate is still open. Do people think before they speak or do words shape their thoughts? From mward at LUNA.CC.NM.US Fri Jul 23 20:45:37 2004 From: mward at LUNA.CC.NM.US (Matthew Ward) Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:45:37 -0600 Subject: Which comes first, language or thought? (fwd) Message-ID: Obviously, language is the primary way that human beings express thought, and obviously, language expresses the different ways of thinking practiced by different cultures, but there can be little debate that thought precedes language and is largely independent of it. After all, there are highly intelligent adults who can express complex thought in various ways but who happen to lack language. Clearly, complex thought is not dependent on complex speech. Even for the majority of us who are able to use language, we are all familiar with the experience of having a thought and being unable to express it. And then there are animals�~@~Tthe higher animals are unable to use language, but does that mean they do not have thoughts? Many studies on this subject, like the one below, show that people are somewhat more likely to remember categories or notice distinctions that are explicitly stated in their native languages, and this is interesting evidence of how language interacts with thought. However, the idea (once popular with linguistic determinists and still widely held by educated laypeople) that language is thought or that language is an insidious shaper of thought does not hold up to scrutiny. Many language preservationalists are attracted to the "language is thought" belief, because it seems to be a compelling reason for the preservation of language. Ironically, the same belief is frequently used against language preservation: "Navajo {or Tibetan, Basque, etc.} cannot possibly be used in the modern world because it allows only a way of thinking that somehow precludes understanding nuclear physics, stock markets, and electric nose-hair pullers." While the bigots refuse to acknowledge the enormous flexibility that all human language possesses, the preservationists sometimes miss the real reason for language preservation: how individual languages preserve and reflect the collective thinking of entire cultures: thousands of years of human interaction, idea-sharing and creativity. After all, it is much easier to transfer the simple expression of a world-view from one language to another than it is to transfer the myriad forms of cultural genius contained in each language that the world-view is based on. If the original language is lost, the culture loses this enormous wealth of collective genius, and that is the chief reason why language loss represents intellectual disaster. Cultures have stories, oral or written histories, songs, chants, poems, idioms, folk-sayings, and prayers, to name a few, and although many of these things can be translated with their literal meaning more or less preserved, they essentially become different works of art when they pass into another language. Even simple lexical items, with each word having a unique range of meanings and cultural and historical implications, hold a great key to thousands of years of human interaction. All of this is far more profound and important than mundane things like remembering colors based on the categories that ones native language possesses, or whether one notices that cylinders fit tightly or loosely into containers. I�~@~Ym not dismissing the importance of these studies, but I do not think that they will ever make compelling arguments for language diversity. phil cash cash wrote: >Which comes first, language or thought? >Babies think first >http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html > >By William J. Cromie >Harvard News Office > >It's like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we >speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with >five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first. > >"Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about >objects," says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. >"These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later." > >Speakers of different languages notice different things and so make >different distinctions. For example, when Koreans say that one object >joins another, they specify whether the objects touch tightly or >loosely. English speakers, in contrast, say whether one object is in or >on another. Saying "I put the spoon cup" is not correct in either >language. The spoon has to be "in" or "on" the cup in English, and has >to be held tightly or loosely by the cup in Korean. > >These differences affect how adults view the world. When Koreans and >Americans see the same everyday events (an apple in a bowl, a cap on a >pen), they categorize them in accord with the distinctions of their >languages. Because languages differ this way, many scientists suspected >that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their >language. That's wrong, Spelke insists. > >Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction >between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In >other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe >what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. >But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go >unspoken when they get older. > >Spelke and Susan Hespos, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in >Nashville, Tenn., did some clever experiments to show that the idea of >tight/loose fitting comes before the words that are used/not used to >describe it. > >When babies see something new, they will look at it until they get >bored. Hespos and Spelke used this well-known fact to show different >groups of five-month-olds a series of cylinders being placed in and on >tight- or loose-fitting containers. The babies watched until they were >bored and quit looking. After that happened, the researchers showed >them other objects that fit tightly or loosely together. The change got >and held their attention for a while, contrary to American college >students who failed to notice it. This showed that babies raised in >English-speaking communities were sensitive to separate categories of >meaning used by Korean, but not by English, adult speakers. By the time >the children grow up, their sensitivity to this distinction is lost. > >Other experiments show that infants use the distinction between tight >and loose fits to predict how a container will behave when you move the >object inside it. This capacity, then, "seems to be linked to >mechanisms for representing objects and their motions," Hespos and >Spelke report. > >Their findings suggest that language reduces sensitivity to thought >distinctions not considered by the native language. "Because chimps and >monkeys show similar expectations about objects, languages are probably >built on concepts that evolved before humans did," Spelke suggests. > >The researchers describe their experiments and conclusions in the July >22 issue of the scientific journal Nature. > >The sounds of meaning > >Their findings parallel experiments done by others, which show that, >before babies learn to talk for themselves, they are receptive to the >sounds of all languages. But sensitivity to nonnative language sounds >drops after the first year of life. "It's not that children become >increasingly sensitive to distinctions made in the language they are >exposed to," comments Paul Bloom of Yale University. Instead, they >start off sensitive to every distinction that languages make, then they >become insensitive to those that are irrelevant. They learn what to >ignore, Bloom notes in an article accompanying the Hespos/Spelke >report. > >As with words, if a child doesn't hear sound distinctions that it is >capable of knowing, the youngster loses his or her ability to use them. >It's a good example of use it or lose it. This is one reason why it is >so difficult for adults to learn a second language, Bloom observes. >"Adults' recognition of nonnative speech sounds may improve with >training but rarely attains native facility," Spelke adds. > >Speech is for communicating so once a language is learned nothing is >lost by ignoring sounds irrelevant to it. However, contrasts such as >loose-versus-tight fit help us make sense of the world. Although mature >English speakers don't spontaneously notice these categories, they have >little difficulty distinguishing them when they are pointed out. >Therefore, the effect of language experience may be more dramatic at >the crossroad of hearing and sound than at the interface of thinking >and word meaning, Hespos and Spelke say. > >Even if babies come equipped with all concepts that languages require, >children may learn optional word meanings differently. Consider >"fragile" or "delicately," which, unlike "in," you can leave out when >you say "she delicately placed the spoon in the fragile cup." > >One view, Bloom points out, "is that there exists a universal core of >meaningful distinctions that all humans share, but other distinctions >that people make are shaped by the forces of language. On the other >hand, language learning might really be the act of learning to express >ideas that already exist," as in the case of the situation studied by >Hespos and Spelke. > >There are lots of situations involving the relation between ideas and >language that Hespos and Spelke did not address, so the debate is still >open. Do people think before they speak or do words shape their >thoughts? > > > From miakalish at REDPONY.US Fri Jul 23 20:57:37 2004 From: miakalish at REDPONY.US (Mia - Main Red Pony) Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:57:37 -0600 Subject: Which comes first, language or thought? (fwd) Message-ID: I can recommend Vygotsky, Thought and Language, translated by Hanfmann and Vakar. Although old, it contains a precise and developmentally detailed discussion of the issue using analysis of the writings of Piaget, who for a long time dominated developmental psychology, and other theories of language development. Current research in biology has uncovered dynamical systems that require language as representation. Additional research has shown that bats have more than 40 meaning-laden "calls". Certain wasps create and care for up to 15 nests, with differently-aged larvae in each, where each requires a different type of food. Such systems are complex, and require representational systems, which in human sytems are called 'language'. I believe that the assumption that only humans have language is false and is based both on unexamined assumptions and independent biases, some fueled by religious beliefs and others by discussions of Chomsky's proposed and vehemently defended "language module". What is most true about language and thought is that most people don't understand either one, nor the relationship between the two. Patricia Kuhl has done extensive research on how human infants form models of understanding. What is clear from her research is that the children, even the infant-sized ones, have cognitive models to which they are matching movements. Some of these movements include word formation and speechifying. Children first mold themselves to the models in their heads, and then move the modeled understandings to their extremities. "Language" is a multi-component object. When one understands and can physically represent each and every component, and each component's function in different processes, plus each component's diachronic variation over time and by process, then one sees the quetion of chickens, eggs, thought, and language as an exercise in sophistry. Mia Kalish Tularosa ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matthew Ward" To: Sent: Friday, July 23, 2004 2:45 PM Subject: Re: Which comes first, language or thought? (fwd) Obviously, language is the primary way that human beings express thought, and obviously, language expresses the different ways of thinking practiced by different cultures, but there can be little debate that thought precedes language and is largely independent of it. After all, there are highly intelligent adults who can express complex thought in various ways but who happen to lack language. Clearly, complex thought is not dependent on complex speech. Even for the majority of us who are able to use language, we are all familiar with the experience of having a thought and being unable to express it. And then there are animals�~@~Tthe higher animals are unable to use language, but does that mean they do not have thoughts? Many studies on this subject, like the one below, show that people are somewhat more likely to remember categories or notice distinctions that are explicitly stated in their native languages, and this is interesting evidence of how language interacts with thought. However, the idea (once popular with linguistic determinists and still widely held by educated laypeople) that language is thought or that language is an insidious shaper of thought does not hold up to scrutiny. Many language preservationalists are attracted to the "language is thought" belief, because it seems to be a compelling reason for the preservation of language. Ironically, the same belief is frequently used against language preservation: "Navajo {or Tibetan, Basque, etc.} cannot possibly be used in the modern world because it allows only a way of thinking that somehow precludes understanding nuclear physics, stock markets, and electric nose-hair pullers." While the bigots refuse to acknowledge the enormous flexibility that all human language possesses, the preservationists sometimes miss the real reason for language preservation: how individual languages preserve and reflect the collective thinking of entire cultures: thousands of years of human interaction, idea-sharing and creativity. After all, it is much easier to transfer the simple expression of a world-view from one language to another than it is to transfer the myriad forms of cultural genius contained in each language that the world-view is based on. If the original language is lost, the culture loses this enormous wealth of collective genius, and that is the chief reason why language loss represents intellectual disaster. Cultures have stories, oral or written histories, songs, chants, poems, idioms, folk-sayings, and prayers, to name a few, and although many of these things can be translated with their literal meaning more or less preserved, they essentially become different works of art when they pass into another language. Even simple lexical items, with each word having a unique range of meanings and cultural and historical implications, hold a great key to thousands of years of human interaction. All of this is far more profound and important than mundane things like remembering colors based on the categories that ones native language possesses, or whether one notices that cylinders fit tightly or loosely into containers. I�~@~Ym not dismissing the importance of these studies, but I do not think that they will ever make compelling arguments for language diversity. phil cash cash wrote: >Which comes first, language or thought? >Babies think first >http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html > >By William J. Cromie >Harvard News Office > >It's like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we >speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with >five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first. > >"Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about >objects," says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. >"These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later." > >Speakers of different languages notice different things and so make >different distinctions. For example, when Koreans say that one object >joins another, they specify whether the objects touch tightly or >loosely. English speakers, in contrast, say whether one object is in or >on another. Saying "I put the spoon cup" is not correct in either >language. The spoon has to be "in" or "on" the cup in English, and has >to be held tightly or loosely by the cup in Korean. > >These differences affect how adults view the world. When Koreans and >Americans see the same everyday events (an apple in a bowl, a cap on a >pen), they categorize them in accord with the distinctions of their >languages. Because languages differ this way, many scientists suspected >that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their >language. That's wrong, Spelke insists. > >Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction >between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In >other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe >what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. >But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go >unspoken when they get older. > >Spelke and Susan Hespos, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in >Nashville, Tenn., did some clever experiments to show that the idea of >tight/loose fitting comes before the words that are used/not used to >describe it. > >When babies see something new, they will look at it until they get >bored. Hespos and Spelke used this well-known fact to show different >groups of five-month-olds a series of cylinders being placed in and on >tight- or loose-fitting containers. The babies watched until they were >bored and quit looking. After that happened, the researchers showed >them other objects that fit tightly or loosely together. The change got >and held their attention for a while, contrary to American college >students who failed to notice it. This showed that babies raised in >English-speaking communities were sensitive to separate categories of >meaning used by Korean, but not by English, adult speakers. By the time >the children grow up, their sensitivity to this distinction is lost. > >Other experiments show that infants use the distinction between tight >and loose fits to predict how a container will behave when you move the >object inside it. This capacity, then, "seems to be linked to >mechanisms for representing objects and their motions," Hespos and >Spelke report. > >Their findings suggest that language reduces sensitivity to thought >distinctions not considered by the native language. "Because chimps and >monkeys show similar expectations about objects, languages are probably >built on concepts that evolved before humans did," Spelke suggests. > >The researchers describe their experiments and conclusions in the July >22 issue of the scientific journal Nature. > >The sounds of meaning > >Their findings parallel experiments done by others, which show that, >before babies learn to talk for themselves, they are receptive to the >sounds of all languages. But sensitivity to nonnative language sounds >drops after the first year of life. "It's not that children become >increasingly sensitive to distinctions made in the language they are >exposed to," comments Paul Bloom of Yale University. Instead, they >start off sensitive to every distinction that languages make, then they >become insensitive to those that are irrelevant. They learn what to >ignore, Bloom notes in an article accompanying the Hespos/Spelke >report. > >As with words, if a child doesn't hear sound distinctions that it is >capable of knowing, the youngster loses his or her ability to use them. >It's a good example of use it or lose it. This is one reason why it is >so difficult for adults to learn a second language, Bloom observes. >"Adults' recognition of nonnative speech sounds may improve with >training but rarely attains native facility," Spelke adds. > >Speech is for communicating so once a language is learned nothing is >lost by ignoring sounds irrelevant to it. However, contrasts such as >loose-versus-tight fit help us make sense of the world. Although mature >English speakers don't spontaneously notice these categories, they have >little difficulty distinguishing them when they are pointed out. >Therefore, the effect of language experience may be more dramatic at >the crossroad of hearing and sound than at the interface of thinking >and word meaning, Hespos and Spelke say. > >Even if babies come equipped with all concepts that languages require, >children may learn optional word meanings differently. Consider >"fragile" or "delicately," which, unlike "in," you can leave out when >you say "she delicately placed the spoon in the fragile cup." > >One view, Bloom points out, "is that there exists a universal core of >meaningful distinctions that all humans share, but other distinctions >that people make are shaped by the forces of language. On the other >hand, language learning might really be the act of learning to express >ideas that already exist," as in the case of the situation studied by >Hespos and Spelke. > >There are lots of situations involving the relation between ideas and >language that Hespos and Spelke did not address, so the debate is still >open. Do people think before they speak or do words shape their >thoughts? > > > From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 26 17:02:39 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:02:39 -0700 Subject: Senate speech printed in Lakota (fwd) Message-ID: Senate speech printed in Lakota http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2004/07/24/news/state/state04.txt WASHINGTON — Tunkasila Mila Hanska Oyate ki lel un gluwitapi. No, that wasn't a typographical error covering two-thirds of page S8579 of the Congressional Record published Friday. It was a speech Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., had delivered in English in the Senate on Thursday and had printed in the record in both English and Lakota, an American Indian language. It is unusual for a foreign language to appear in the record, the official chronicle of remarks made in the House and Senate since 1876. It is rarer still for the comments to be in an American Indian language. "I'm certainly not aware of anything like this happening earlier in the Congressional Record," Senate Historian Richard Baker said of an Indian language being printed in the daily publication. The Lakota words at the beginning of Daschle's speech mean, "President, Americans are united." Senators usually open their floor comments by addressing the senator who is presiding over the chamber, technically the Senate's president pro tempore or acting president. In his comments, Daschle did not mention that he is in a tight re-election race this fall in a state whose population is 8 percent American Indian. The Lakota are a branch of the Great Sioux nation. Daschle used his speech to hail the "code talkers" of World War II. Those were troops from the Navajo, Lakota and about 15 other American Indian nations who sent messages in their own languages during World War I and World War II that the enemy could not understand. Daschle said one way to honor the code talkers would be try preserving Indian languages, which are rapidly fading away. Only half the 300 Indian languages once used in what is now the United States are still spoken, and the rest are expected to vanish in decades, he said. It costs $611 per page to publish the record each day, distribute it and place it on the Internet, said Government Printing Office spokeswoman Veronica Meter. About 7,000 copies are printed daily. Meter said she did not know if the record has been printed before in a Native American language. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 26 17:11:32 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:11:32 -0700 Subject: Study of ancient local languages seeing revival in North County (fwd) Message-ID: Study of ancient local languages seeing revival in North County By: BRUCE KAUFFMAN - Staff Writer http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/07/25/special_reports/science_technology/19_48_107_24_04.txt SAN MARCOS ---- Palomar College teacher Linda Locklear became a student again this summer, enrolling in a class in Luiseno, a language indigenous to San Diego County and believed to be the first spoken here. It's the second summer she's studied the language in a formal Palomar course, a course the 30-year veteran American Indian studies professor lobbied for years to get in the regular curriculum for credit. A unanimous vote of the Palomar board of trustees in December 2001 put Luiseno, a language spoken in North County for centuries before Europeans arrived, into the catalogue. Now the movement is building to develop an entire new generation of people who speak this ancient language of several North County and Southwest Riverside County tribes, including the Rincon, La Jolla, Pechanga, Pauma and Pala. Luiseno, educators said in interviews this week, is spoken now by a sparse few and needs to be nurtured. And along with offerings this academic year that will advance the skills of those who took introductory Luiseno, the college for the first time this August begins a formal, for-credit course in Cupeno. It is among 90 to 100 pre-European languages native to Southern California, and the language spoken by a tribe known as the Cupeno who were forced in 1903 to leave its land in Warner Hot Springs and resettle at the Pala Reservation. Both Luiseno and Cupeno are now to count toward meeting the requirement in both the California State University and the University of California systems that students learn a foreign language in order to graduate, said Steven Crouthamel, the chair of the American Indian studies department at Palomar. At Cal State San Marcos, senior Shalene Molina is getting university credit for her study of Luiseno. She will have taken three ever-more advanced classes at Palomar by the time her undergraduate course work is done at the end of the fall 2004 semester. A human development major who lives on the La Jolla Indian Reservation, Molina, who describes herself as Luiseno, Cupeno and Diegueno, said Luiseno should survive to serve as a living expression of American Indian culture. "I just don't want the language to be lost," she said by phone from the reservation Friday. "It's important to carry it on." Molina is one of 425 students who have studied Luiseno and Cupeno in 16 non-credit and for-credit classes at Palomar since 2002, college officials said. Trial runs of the courses go back to the mid-1970s. By 2005, said professor Locklear, a plan to add Kumeyaay, the language of Los Coyotes, may be realized. Said Locklear, who took the course with her 6-year-old grandson, Narsall, "I can count to five (in Luiseno), I know my colors, and I can tell a story." The story is one that linguist Eric Elliott, the sole Luiseno teacher at Palomar, aims to have his students passing on in the original from generation to generation. In English, it would be called "Mr. and Mrs. Tiger and the Frog." The story, as Elliott related it in an interview Thursday, involves a boastful frog who is caught alone with Mrs. Tiger by her husband. The male tiger examines the frog's every tale and finds them to be full of falsehoods, including the frog's claim to have been a decorated soldier who can beat anybody up. "Do anything to me," the frog pleads with Mr. Tiger after being thoroughly unmasked, "but don't kick me into the pond." And that's exactly what Mr. Tiger does, as the frog swims off and survives because of the wiliness of his plea. It's about the eternal battle between truth and falsehood, said Elliott, and a worthy vessel to carry the intricate Luiseno language and instill its sounds and words in children. Elliott, 43, a part-time professor at the college and a married father of three who says he's very aware that he's a white man, taught the course for the first time in 2002 "live" at the Palomar Education Center on the Pauma Reservation. But after he was named to a full-time teaching post at the Pechanga Reservation, the Chula Vista resident turned to the World Wide Web and online classes as a way to solve the grueling problem of his commute. In 2003 and earlier this year, students heard Elliott teach the language spoken via audio stream after they linked to their electronic classroom from the college Web site at www.palomar.edu. For the fall semester, online video of Elliott holding forth will be added. "This is pretty revolutionary," Elliott said. "I don't know any place except Palomar that's trying to get these courses out there, especially in Southern California." Elliot studied with the late Villiana Hyde, a native speaker of the Rincon dialect of Luiseno who in "Yumayk, Yumayk" (translated as 'long, long ago') wrote down the fairy tales and various histories that were spoken and passed down through the generations. Her first book, "Introduction to the Luiseno Language," was published in 1971. Elliott expects to be working with a 19-year-old Palomar graduate and UC Riverside Native American studies major named Paul Miranda this fall semester as Palomar offers Cupeno online for the first time. Miranda, who grew up on the Pala Reservation and calls it home, said he would be the first Cupeno person to teach college-level Cupeno in the region. Miranda says he will draw from a English-Cupeno dictionary, complete with Cupeno legends, that has been in his family "a long time," a work by the late Rocinda Nolasquez called "Mulu'wetam." It's all the more important that the language be revived, Miranda said, because, along with the other indigenous languages, it was suppressed. "There was a story about one girl who spoke Cupeno in class and the nun took her tongue and put it on a frozen pole and a piece of it chipped off," Miranda said. Palomar's Locklear, a sociologist and a Lumbee Indian from the southeast part of North Carolina, said preserving languages such as Luiseno and Cupeno is vital because the words reflect the special views of the world held by those peoples. "You can't pray the same way in English," she said. "The songs are not the same, the world view is not the same. The language is really kind of the heart of the culture and, without the language, your culture is really deprived." Contact staff writer Bruce Kauffman at (760) 761-4410 or bkauffman at nctimes.com. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 26 17:32:06 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:32:06 -0700 Subject: Dompok: Big leap in preserving mother tongues (fwd) Message-ID: Dompok: Big leap in preserving mother tongues 25 July, 2004 http://www.dailyexpress.com.my/news.cfm?NewsID=28287 THE first Timugon Murut-Malay dictionary was launched Saturday after two decades of meticulous research headed by linguists, Richard Brewis and wife Kielo Brewis. The project for the dictionary, containing 3,700 word roots, began in 1983 when the Brewises, who are attached with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) Malaysia branch, started collecting data for the language as well as information on the culture and customs of the Timugon people. Timugon is one of the Murut tribes. Murut, in turn, is among the major native ethnic groups in Sabah. Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Tan Sri Bernard Dompok, who launched the dictionary, said its successful completion signified a major achievement in the effort to preserve the mother tongues of the people in Sabah. “It will be in danger of dying out along with other minority languages if we do nothing to preserve it,” he said. The dictionary was also another step forward towards providing teaching materials in the event that the language be taught in schools in the future, he said. “There’s still a lot more to be done...the Murut language has been proposed to be accepted as a subject in the Malaysian schools curriculum but I think the problem lies with insufficient teaching materials. “The Government is sympathetic with the proposal but perhaps we are not quite ready in terms of teaching materials and also the staffing,” he said. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 26 17:36:31 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:36:31 -0700 Subject: Maori language week kicks off (fwd) Message-ID: Maori language week kicks off http://tvnz.co.nz/view/news_national_story_skin/438183%3fformat=html Jul 26, 2004 Maori language week starts on Monday as part of a continuing campaign to encourage more people to embrace New Zealand's indigenous language. It's 30 years since a movement began aimed at recognising the importance of Te Reo Maori. A petition in support of the language was presented at the steps of parliament.  Te Reo Maori was the most frequently spoken and written language in New Zealand in the 1840s. Since then the struggle to maintain Te Reo Maori as an official language has been an uphill battle. See related video for more information From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Tue Jul 27 19:00:56 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 12:00:56 -0700 Subject: Better Late Message-ID: DAY OF ACTION TO SAVE KLAMATH SALMON Let Scottish Power hear from you! http://capwiz.com/friendsoftheriver/mail/compose/?alertid=6090101&target=CU&customid=6089531&type=CU WEDNESDAY, JULY 21 is a day of action for Klamath River supporters. Members of the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, and Klamath Tribes and staffers from Friends of the River and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen~Rs Associations need your help to make an impression on Scottish Power! You can help by sending an email to the Scottish Power Board of Directors on July 21, just days before their annual shareholders~R meeting. In your message let the Board of Directors know that: -Their American subsidiary, PacifiCorp, is not living up to their ~Sgreen~T standards -The Klamath fishery is the basis for unique and important Native American cultures. These cultures cannot exist without salmon. -The dams block access to over 350 miles of historic spawning habitat -Share your personal experiences and feelings The leaders of the Karuk, Hoopa, Yurok, and Klamath Tribes request that your letters be kind. The goal is to let the companies leaders in Scotland know more about the situation and the people of the Klamath Basin. WHO IS SCOTTISH POWER? Scottish Power is a large multinational energy company that owns PacifiCorp who in turn own and operate the Klamath dams. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH KLAMATH DAMS? The Klamath dams are in the process of being relicensed by the federal government. Since the new license will last from 30 to 50 years, now is the time to make changes. We hope to convince the federal government and Scottish Power, to work Tribes, environmentalists, and fishermen to provide for fish passage. This means some dams, like the towering Iron Gate, will need to be removed and other smaller dams fitted with functional ladders. From miakalish at REDPONY.US Wed Jul 28 13:09:47 2004 From: miakalish at REDPONY.US (Mia - Main Red Pony) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 07:09:47 -0600 Subject: Better Late Message-ID: Is this still current? Today is the 27th, and this just ended up in my box. ????? Mia ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andre Cramblit" To: Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2004 1:00 PM Subject: Better Late DAY OF ACTION TO SAVE KLAMATH SALMON Let Scottish Power hear from you! http://capwiz.com/friendsoftheriver/mail/compose/?alertid=6090101&target=CU& customid=6089531&type=CU WEDNESDAY, JULY 21 is a day of action for Klamath River supporters. Members of the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, and Klamath Tribes and staffers from Friends of the River and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen~Rs Associations need your help to make an impression on Scottish Power! You can help by sending an email to the Scottish Power Board of Directors on July 21, just days before their annual shareholders~R meeting. In your message let the Board of Directors know that: -Their American subsidiary, PacifiCorp, is not living up to their ~Sgreen~T standards -The Klamath fishery is the basis for unique and important Native American cultures. These cultures cannot exist without salmon. -The dams block access to over 350 miles of historic spawning habitat -Share your personal experiences and feelings The leaders of the Karuk, Hoopa, Yurok, and Klamath Tribes request that your letters be kind. The goal is to let the companies leaders in Scotland know more about the situation and the people of the Klamath Basin. WHO IS SCOTTISH POWER? Scottish Power is a large multinational energy company that owns PacifiCorp who in turn own and operate the Klamath dams. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH KLAMATH DAMS? The Klamath dams are in the process of being relicensed by the federal government. Since the new license will last from 30 to 50 years, now is the time to make changes. We hope to convince the federal government and Scottish Power, to work Tribes, environmentalists, and fishermen to provide for fish passage. This means some dams, like the towering Iron Gate, will need to be removed and other smaller dams fitted with functional ladders. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Jul 28 12:55:35 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 05:55:35 -0700 Subject: Native American Languages Pull Disappearing Act (fwd) Message-ID: Wednesday  July 28, 2004        KGUN 9 NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGES PULL DISAPPEARING ACT By Dave Hecht (7/16/04) http://www.kgun9.com/story.asp?TitleID=3835&ProgramOption=News In their small office at the University of Arizona, Dr. Susan Penfield and graduate student Phillip Cash Cash are working against the clock to save a cultural treasure before it's too late. "Language is really the backbone of our culture," said Cash Cash.   "And even if you don't speak the language, we're at a loss when you lose that kind of diversity," added Penfield. Today, fewer and fewer Native Americans are able to speak their tribal language.  Of those languages, many dialects are on the verge of extinction.  For example, only 30 people are able to speak Mohave.  And to make matters worse, the majority of those people are 70-years old. Here in the United States, there are 150 native languages still being spoken today.  And as the number of native speakers continues to dwindle, "by the year 2050, only 30 of those languages will survive," said Cash Cash. It's a problem not limited to the United States.  Nearly 90-percent of the world's six thousand spoken languages will also disappear by 2050. To save the spoken word, Penfield and Cash Cash are counting on technology.  Thanks to a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they are teaching tribal members how to use 21st century technology to preserve their native languages.  So far they have helped tribes all across the country including Tohote Otum, Hopi, Apache and the Navajo. With computers, voice recorders, video tape recorders and any other electronics the tribes can lay their hands on, "they produce a language lesson in their native language and target that lesson to everyone from grade school students on up to adult learners," Their goal is simple, to increase the number of native speakers so that these cultural treasures don't become the Latin of tomorrow. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Jul 28 13:27:28 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 06:27:28 -0700 Subject: Academic says Maori immersion classes divisive (fwd) Message-ID: Academic says Maori immersion classes divisive 27 July 2004 http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2984005a8153,00.html An Auckland academic has been accused of putting a damper on Maori Language Week by describing Maori immersion teaching as a major cause of ethnic division. Elizabeth Rata, a lecturer at the Auckland College of Education, has been criticised by Maori language leaders for a 19-page report she released this month. In her report, Ethnic Ideologies in New Zealand Education: What's Wrong with Kaupapa Maori, she described Maori initiatives such as total Maori immersion language schools, or kura kaupapa Maori, as being flawed. "Kaupapa Maori contributes to creating ethnic division, is anti-democratic and fundamentalist," Dr Rata said. "Nothing is sacred, everything must be scrutinised and I am simply calling on New Zealanders to do that." Dr Rata, a principal lecturer in the faculty of postgraduate studies and research, also claims that kaupapa Maori: # Is not scrutinised enough. # Has become too influential in government education policy. # Reinforces the victimhood mentality. # Is intellectually flawed. # Is scientifically flawed. The chief executive of the Maori Language Commission, Haami Piripi, said he welcomed scrutiny, but he described Dr Rata as being the "female equivalent of Don Brash". "She's an ignorant academic who has had her head in the books for too long. I had never heard of her until three weeks ago when I attended a conference she spoke at. "A lot of people walked out of the room when she spoke and even the Pakeha academics there were questioning her. Apparently she has got personal hang-ups with some Maori people." Mr Piripi said Maori Language Week would go ahead full steam. "This is going to be our biggest Maori Language Week ever, and if she thinks she can get rid of kaupapa Maori then she needs to wake up." Wiremu Doherty, the tumuaki (principal) at New Zealand's first total immersion Maori language school, Te Kura o Hoani Waititi in Waitakere City, said kaupapa Maori was about being inclusive, not exclusive. "Kaupapa Maori has nothing to do with anything that she is talking about. It's about empowering Maori, not defying other groups. "Kaupapa Maori is about being independent and self-sufficient, knowing who you are as a Maori, where you come from and where you are going." Dr Rata, who is also an honorary research fellow in the department of political studies at the University of Auckland, said she had been researching kaupapa Maori for the past 10 years. But when asked if she spoke Maori or had ever visited a Maori language school or traditional marae, she refused to answer. "That is personal information," Dr Rata said. "It has nothing to do with what I'm researching." The Education Review Office regularly issues reports evaluating kura kaupapa Maori, as it does with mainstream schools. In a 2002 report it said this about the effectiveness of kura kaupapa Maori: "While ERO has concerns about the delivery of education at many kura kaupapa Maori, some kura are providing excellent educations for their students. "Many of the factors which make for good performance in kura kaupapa are the same as those which would be found in high-performing mainstream schools." From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Jul 28 13:30:38 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 06:30:38 -0700 Subject: Maori And Indigenous Education (Iri) Statement (fwd) Message-ID: Maori And Indigenous Education (Iri) Statement Wednesday, 28 July 2004, 8:54 am Press Release: International Research Institute http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/ED0407/S00077.htm International Research Institute For Maori And Indigenous Education (Iri) And Te Aratiatia (Maori Education, The University Of Auckland. The recent attack by Elizabeth Rata on Kaupapa Maori developments highlights a disturbing trend of racism being disguised as public debate. Director of the International Research Institue for Maori and Indigenous Education, Dr Leonie Pihama, states that the comments by Elizabeth Rata where couched within an "almost unintelligible academic language" do in fact merely reflect the Don Brash position that Maori language and culture have little significance in this country. Dr Pihama states "Elizabeth Rata has used her academic position to promote a totally uninformed view of Kaupapa Maori and Maori Education. The 'research' she purports to have undertaken is seriously devoid of any input by Maori in the sector and rehashes a range of articles and reports that have already been challenged". Claims by Rata that Kaupapa Maori is 'anti-democratic and fundamentalist' have no substance in that all Kaupapa Maori initiatives have been open for others, including Elizabeth Rata, to be involved. Furthermore, Dr Pihama highlights that the claim that Kaupapa Maori is 'intellectually and scientifically flawed' is one that Rata fails to verify. Dr Pihama notes that "Kaupapa Maori initiatives are grounded within a strong Maori intellectual, cultural, spiritual and scientific base. Just because Maori knowledge is not viewed in the same way as western knowledge by people like Elizabeth Rata, does not make it any less robust." As Director of IRI, Dr Pihama advocates a Kaupapa Maori approach to research and in fact Maori authors, Dr Graham Smith, Dr Linda Smith and Dr Fiona Cram, referred to by Rata in her paper are closely involved with the Institute. A Kaupapa Maori approach acknowledges clearly that matauranga Maori is a valid and highly complex knowledge system that offers a unique way of analyzing issues for Maori both historically and in contemporary times. The underlying assumptions are clearly stated, it is about validating a cultural knowledge base and approach to research and education. Dr Pihama contends that where Kaupapa Maori clearly states up front its intentions, Elizabeth Rata does not afford the public with the same , rather she operates under a guise of academic scrutiny when there is in fact much more going on. Dr Pihama states; "Elizabeth Rata is a Pakeha woman who has had major personal differences with Maori people working in Kaupapa Maori initiatives and as such I seriously question her intentions. Hiding her own intentions under a claim that she is seeking subjective scrutiny is quite unacceptable, as it denies her own self-interest." Maori Academic, Jenny Lee, also questions Rata's criticism of Kaupapa Maori as promoting primordial ethnic divisions. Lee, who teaches in the area of race, ethnicity and Education, notes that such statements show an ignorance of Kaupapa Maori and a limited understanding of ethnicity. Lee states "definitions of ethnicity are widely debated, complex and range from primordial to political explanations of ethnic formation. Most theorists, however, acknowledge that ethnicity is usually influenced by both primordial and political elements, that is, culture (and knowledge) is protected and passed down to the next generation while simultaneously responding to challenges in the contemporary context." Ms Lee contends that the promotion of ethnic cultural traditions does not mean that there is a non-acceptance of ethnic fluidity, to the contrary Kaupapa Maori acknowledges that as a result of colonisation Maori are as diverse as any other group. Furthermore Lee states "Strengthening Maori ethnicity, whether it be primordial or political, is about asserting and exploring our indigeneity, our position as tangata whenua, that is not creating divisions. There is no reason for Elizabeth Rata or any other person to be threatened by that". ENDS From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Wed Jul 28 16:20:31 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 09:20:31 -0700 Subject: Contacting Scottish Power Message-ID: If You want to write the man, feel free: gordon.mcgregor at scottishpower.com If you have any queries on their commitment to communities please contact the ScottishPower Corporate Communications, 1 Atlantic Quay, Glasgow G2 8SP or email at communityreport at scottishpower.com From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Wed Jul 28 16:50:56 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 09:50:56 -0700 Subject: Better Late In-Reply-To: <000d01c474a4$2b140f50$6400a8c0@computer> Message-ID: A letter will still help Mia - Main Red Pony wrote: >Is this still current? Today is the 27th, and this just ended up in my box. > >????? > >Mia > >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Andre Cramblit" >To: >Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2004 1:00 PM >Subject: Better Late > > >DAY OF ACTION TO SAVE KLAMATH SALMON >Let Scottish Power hear from you! >http://capwiz.com/friendsoftheriver/mail/compose/?alertid=6090101&target=CU& >customid=6089531&type=CU > >WEDNESDAY, JULY 21 is a day of action for Klamath River supporters. >Members of the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, and Klamath Tribes and staffers from >Friends of the River and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen~Rs >Associations need your help to make an impression on Scottish Power! > >You can help by sending an email to the Scottish Power Board of >Directors on July 21, just days before their annual shareholders~R >meeting. In your message let the Board of Directors know that: > >-Their American subsidiary, PacifiCorp, is not living up to their >~Sgreen~T standards > >-The Klamath fishery is the basis for unique and important Native >American cultures. These cultures cannot exist without salmon. > >-The dams block access to over 350 miles of historic spawning habitat > >-Share your personal experiences and feelings > >The leaders of the Karuk, Hoopa, Yurok, and Klamath Tribes request that >your letters be kind. The goal is to let the companies leaders in >Scotland know more about the situation and the people of the Klamath Basin. > >WHO IS SCOTTISH POWER? >Scottish Power is a large multinational energy company that owns >PacifiCorp who in turn own and operate the Klamath dams. > >WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH KLAMATH DAMS? >The Klamath dams are in the process of being relicensed by the federal >government. Since the new license will last from 30 to 50 years, now is >the time to make changes. We hope to convince the federal government and >Scottish Power, to work Tribes, environmentalists, and fishermen to >provide for fish passage. This means some dams, like the towering Iron >Gate, will need to be removed and other smaller dams fitted with >functional ladders. > > > -- André Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org is the Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs of American Indians To subscribe to a news letter of interest to Natives send an email to: IndigenousNewsNetwork-subscribe at topica.com or go to: http://www.topica.com/lists/IndigenousNewsNetwork/subscribe/?location=listinfo From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Jul 29 15:46:09 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 08:46:09 -0700 Subject: Aboriginal languages for curriculum (fwd) Message-ID: Aboriginal languages for curriculum 30jul04 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10289061%255E421,00.html ABORIGINAL language studies will become a major part of the school curriculum in an Australian first that takes indigenous education to a new level across New South Wales. The formal lessons in Aboriginal languages will be driven by demand from local communities, but it is hoped thousands of non-indigenous students will support the program. NSW Education Minister Andrew Refshauge today will launch a new syllabus for mandatory and elective courses in Aboriginal languages for students from Kindergarten to Year 10. Students in Government and independent schools will be able to study an Aboriginal language subject in primary school, for their School Certificate and for the HSC. Initiatives to teach and revive the state's 70 indigenous languages will be spearheaded by specialists who will help teachers in the classroom. Under the new policy: * A KINDERGARTEN to Year 10 syllabus will be introduced from 2005, enabling any student in the state to study an Aboriginal language; * MORE than $1 million already has been spent establishing an Aboriginal Languages Research and Resource Centre providing technical support to indigenous communities; * AN Aboriginal languages database will become available to schools and communities from 2005; and * NEW guidelines will help Aboriginal communities trying to revive or teach their local language Education sources indicated yesterday that primary schools could spend at least half an hour a week on Aboriginal language lessons. At Darlington Public School, children already are learning how to count, sing and identify body parts in the Wiradjuri language. Teachers said reaction had been positive, but they were careful not to "tread on the toes" of community members who were not supportive. Primary principal Cheryl McBride said the syllabus would give Aboriginal pupils a sense of pride and recognition. Opposition spokeswoman Jillian Skinner also supported the plan, as long as core subjects were not neglected. It is understood about 80 schools have applied for resources to run the programs; about 25 are being funded. Dr Refshauge said learning a language helped improve comprehension and literacy. © The Australian From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Jul 29 15:50:06 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 08:50:06 -0700 Subject: Minding the language: students give voice to endangered words (fwd) Message-ID: Minding the language: students give voice to endangered words By Kelly Burke, Education Reporter July 30, 2004 http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/29/1091080381836.html?oneclick=true# [photo insert - Hear us out ... students at Darlington Public School with a banner created by them and used in the teaching of the endangered Wiradjuri language. Photo: Tamara Dean] It's little lunch at Darlington Public School, and between mouthfuls of bread and peanut butter Mikaela Welsh is trying out her newly acquired skills in the Wiradjuri language. "Nyan," she says, pointing to her shy, sticky grin. "Nyan - that's mouth." Although her Dhan-gadi family hail from the opposite end of the state to where the Wiradjuri language is spoken, Mikaela - as much as any seven-year-old is capable of seeing the bigger picture - knows she is contributing to the revitalisation a crucial part of Aboriginal culture under threat of extinction. Her classmate, Ji Duncan-Weatherby, whose mother comes from the Kamilaroi language group in central NSW, shares the passion, along with fellow year 1 and 2 students Jonathon Sandstrom, Mali Sinclair and Nericia Brown, whose family origins lie in Lebanon, Fiji and China respectively. It is two years since the NSW office of the Board of Studies admitted there was not a single child in the state who could competently speak one of more than 60 indigenous languages. Now, Darlington Public, in the inner Sydney suburb of Chippendale, where a quarter of the students are Aboriginal, is part of a changing tide, precipitated by this country's first indigenous languages policy. Advertisement Advertisement Today, the NSW Education Minister, Andrew Refshauge, will launch the cornerstone of that policy - a new Aboriginal language syllabus for kindergarten to year 10, expected to be adopted by about 80 schools across the state from the beginning of next year. Dr Refshauge said the new syllabus would establish NSW as Australia's leader in Aboriginal languages education. It would help to revitalise existing languages and provide a blueprint for recreating lost languages such as Sydney's local Eora, which has fewer than 200 surviving words. "We know that language is at the heart of Aboriginal culture and identity - revitalising languages is therefore critical to ensuring Aboriginal cultural identity is strong," he said. The Department of Education will also be looking to the new syllabus to help lift the state's indigenous school participation rate. Nationally, only 38 per cent of Aboriginal students finish year 12, half the national rate of 77 per cent. A review of NSW's Aboriginal education policy and practice is expected to be handed to the minister next month. Today's launch of the syllabus coincides with a meeting between the University of Sydney and the Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages, to work out a proposal for an institute of Aboriginal languages. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 30 03:46:06 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 20:46:06 -0700 Subject: Language Barrier in Info Society (fwd) Message-ID: Language Barrier in Info Society Daily Champion (Lagos) OPINION Posted to the web July 29, 2004 By Remmy Nweke South Down to Northern Hemisphere http://allafrica.com/stories/200407290494.html Despite the burgeoning progress made by individuals, corporate organisations, government, and stakeholders in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) all over the world, the language limitation has continued to constitute major hurdle for Information Society (IS). A language is a way of communication either by writing or spoken words, which is used by the people of a given society, area or country. Information Society is one without borders which describes the 'global village' whereby every one is not only invited but included in the scheme of things, in all ramifications without emphasise on race, gender, colour, societal status among others. This sort of society is possible today with the acceptance of Internet, which little or no restriction offers people the right to communicate more freely than ever before without much hindrance. Except in the cases of dealing with Internet fraudulent practices, such as the 'spam', hackers and online scams, there seems to be in 'existence' because Internet has empowered humanity tremendously and opened doors, which ordinarily were impossible. But these achievements still have hindrance in language barriers, which if not well managed could form the toughest amongst the obstacles facing digital divide, mostly in developing countries as prevalent in Africa. In Nigeria, for instance, there are over 500 recognized languages, according to linguists. Out of this number, there are three major languages, namely the Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa, while English was adopted as the official lingua franca. The three local languages are used for local radio and television broadcasts. A West African indigenous version of English called "Pidgin English" also exist and is very popular among Nigerians. Experts said that about 65 per cent of the nation's population speak one of these languages, that is, Hausa is widely spoken in the north, Igbo in the southeast and Yoruba in the west. In the world today, especially on the Internet, several languages are also emerging as individuals and corporate organizations as well as governments try to promote their languages through encouraging the citizens to use local or native languages in their websites daily, running with options of other languages like French, Spanish, Arabic, English and so on. Apparently a major reason for this is what some analysts saw as a way of averting neo-colonialism, at this 21st century. Although multiplicity of language application on the Internet could avert neo-colonialism, this on its own has the negative multiplier effect, in which every community endeavours to be represented electronically, or in the global village; thus language seems to be a thorn in the flesh of Information Society. This plurality as much as it could be encouraged, should also be envisaged in the futuristic acceptance, because the number of languages would increase with few people understanding just a handful, except those who depend on it for livelihood. In the light of the aforementioned, the major languages chosen as nation's lingua franca, would still have upper hands, while few of them must have been subsumed overtime. An instance of recognizing language as a barrier was witnessed recently where a discussant could not respond to questions raised by another participant in an online discussion, simply because one speaks English and the other French. It took weeks for the French speaker to realize this and had to re-send the questions and contributions raised thereof in English to get a response from fellow discussant. Confirming this, Zambian female journalists, Mrs. Brenda Zulu noted that language is a core barrier in development of ICT, mostly in the African continent, which has remained among Least Developed Countries (LDCs). For her, the media has a lot to do in promoting the use of African local languages in application of ICT. She said that Zambia with 73 local languages, for example, the media uses only seven main local languages to broadcast and disseminate information. Zulu also said that she learnt Microsoft had designed a Swahili software, describing it as a plus for Africa, because, "if you look at the use of Internet we only have foreign languages". She said, language barrier remains a great challenge to Africa, which has many languages. "In broadcast we have tried to meet the challenge by providing our listeners with the programmes in local languages". Noting that in several online discussions, "it's clear that the Arab and Portuguese speaking people based in Africa are being left out on so many things" and called on African professionals and media to be precise, to develop an appropriate translating mechanism, which would benefit all in the heels of being part of Info Society. Already, a campaign to teach people Igbo language on the Internet for $38 is another business opportunity for south-easterners. In western Nigeria for instance, dominated by Yorubas, the use of local languages seems to be on the rise, especially in number of local community newspapers in existence currently. Dr. Uwe Seibert, Department of Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts University of Jos, while discussing "Documenting Nigerian languages" said that taking this as a scale, "only a small proportion of about 500 languages of Nigeria could be classified as "well documented". He attributed this to what he called "sad fact" which includes lack of interest, trained linguists, funds and research equipment. All these could be listed as possible reasons if not excuses and apart from that, there are political reasons, he said, wondering if developing all these minority languages would not create disunity, and if nations should not strive for one national language only? Certainly every government has to settle the issue which languages should be developed to which stage in a wise and fair national language policy. But in order to make wise decisions, languages first need to be surveyed: Where are they spoken? By how many speakers? How many speakers are bilingual in another language and in which? What is the attitude of the speakers towards their own and other, major languages? The younger members of the language community in the country, the linguist said, no longer actively speak many languages. Although, they may still be able to understand the language, but they prefer to speak English, Hausa or some other language of wider communication among themselves and to their children. The consequence is that these languages will become extinct in the next generation, citing some Nigerian languages that are nearly extinct, such as Holma, a Chadic language spoken in Adamawa State or have already ceased to exist such as Auyokawa and Teshenanci, two Chadic languages formerly spoken in Jigawa State. Stressing that for many Nigerian languages, there are already a certain amount of published materials available. Mostly religious literature - Bible portions, the New Testament, portions of the Bible, Catechisms and so on. But not all the languages of Nigeria have been well described and developed to an extent that would allow them to be used for educational purposes. Nigeria is presently in the verge of upgrading its three main local languages, namely Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba, by translating the 1999 Constitution into these languages. This was disclosed by the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Chief Chukwuemeka Chikelu, last April. The idea, according to him, was to deepen citizens' knowledge of democratic principles and values, even as translations in smaller languages would also follow. The country is place in one of the world's highest language diversity area; given this diversity, Nigeria has strictly followed the principle of only having one official language; that of the former colonial master - English. The official beginning of the translation process commenced with the leaders of the team of language experts' visit to Chief Chikelu in Abuja recently. They included Prof. Saidu Mohammed Gusau of the Bayero University, leading the Hausa team, Prof. Kola Owolabi of the University of Lagos, leading the Yoruba team and Prof. Sam Ugochukwu, also of University of Lagos, leading the Igbo team. Speaking on behalf of the team leaders, Prof. Owolabi had stated that though the federal government move to translate the Constitution into local languages, "is belated, it is a big and historic venture that would encourage people to be proud to speak their local languages. It is the first time in Nigeria's history". As Nigerians await the team to submit their draft of the translated version of the Constitution, after a three-month duration, before another set of experts would also review it, prior for its official adoption. It is worthwhile also to incorporate African language advocacy in the agenda for developing the continent's Millennium Development Goal (MDG), as much as poverty, and health via the dreadful HIV/AIDS. African government through the New Partnership for Africa Development (NEPAD), therefore, should evolve systems that encourages the citizens to learn an official languages, by emulating the French government. This could be done by first trying to adopt few African languages as official continental languages. And followed up with setting up of language learning sections among African nations as well as making it almost free-of-charge, just as obtained at the Alliance Francise, globally. Copyright © 2004 Daily Champion. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 30 16:21:03 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 09:21:03 -0700 Subject: NSW REVIVES INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES AT SCHOOL (fwd) Message-ID: NSW REVIVES INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES AT SCHOOL 30.7.2004. 17:35:37 http://www9.sbs.com.au/theworldnews/region.php?id=90523®ion=7 Students across New South Wales will be able to study an Aboriginal language under changes to the state education curriculum. The Minister for Education and Aboriginal Affairs, Andrew Refshauge, launched the policy today at Darlington Primary School in Sydney, where many students are studying Wiradjuri. Mr Refshauge says students from kindergarten to year 10 will be affected by the changes, which are an attempt to preserve and revitalise the state's 70 Aboriginal languages. The curriculum was piloted earlier this year in six schools statewide, and Mr Refshauge says it has already had a number of un-looked for benefits. "And that is Aboriginal children themselves who've studied it find school more relevant and therefore their attendance rate is better. "It also means, following the increased attendance rate, their own school achievement is improving as well, so it's having a direct benefit - for Aboriginal students who take these language courses - on their other subjects as well." A youth worker in Sydney's indigenous centre of Redfern, Richard Green, says the program is an exciting step towards reviving the indigenous cultures of Australia's eastern coast. "Sydney Wiradjuri dialect; Badjalang; Gidabal; Gumbainggirr; Gamilaraay. "If we could be speaking all these lingos, we could be speaking all along the east coast. "Let's walk into the future and make a difference. "We've got a tongue, let's start speaking it." Under the program, a new syllabus will be introduced from next year, with Aboriginal communities working closely with schools in the development and delivery of the new curriculum. SOURCE: Radio News From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 30 16:17:35 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 09:17:35 -0700 Subject: Sealaska Heritage offers immersion retreats (fwd) Message-ID: Sealaska Heritage offers immersion retreats http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/073004/sta_nwdigest.shtml JUNEAU - Sealaska Heritage Institute is offering Tlingit immersion retreats in Hoonah and near Sitka this summer in an effort to revitalize the endangered language. Tlingit speakers and serious students of the language will live in a Tlingit-speaking world 24 hours a day from Aug. 9-19 during an immersion retreat at Icy Strait Lodge in Hoonah. A second retreat is scheduled for Aug. 11-21 near Sitka at Dog Point Fish Camp, called in Tlingit Waashdaanx'. "The program gives both speakers and learners a habitat where Tlingit can flourish," said SHI President Rosita Worl. "The immersion approach appears to accelerate the rate at which learners acquire the Tlingit language." Daily activities will include gathering and processing Native foods while fluent speakers give directions in Tlingit. Participants also will sing, drum, dance and tell stories in Tlingit. A grant from the Administration for Native Americans is funding two language immersion retreats per year in 2003, 2004 and 2005 in Sitka and the Glacier Bay-Hoonah area. About 74 percent of the project, or $148,000, will be funded through federal dollars, and 26 percent will be funded through non-government sources this year. Call 463-4844 for more information. From coyotez at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU Fri Jul 30 20:37:42 2004 From: coyotez at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU (David Lewis) Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 13:37:42 -0700 Subject: [Fwd: development advertisement1] Message-ID: Development Director The American Indian Graduate Center, a national scholarship administrator located in Alb., NM seeks an experienced fundraising professional to create and implement a $1 million annual campaign. The candidate will demonstrate past success at independently creating a fundraising plan, cultivating donors, developing program proposals, generating revenue from private and public sources and managing a department budget.The Development Director also serves as the organizations Information Officer and will oversee the design and development of marketing strategies and public information. A bachelors or advanced degree is required; history of progressive fundraising results, exceptional writing skills, and history of outstanding leadership will be strongly evaluated. AIGC is an Equal opportunity employer that practices Indian preference.To Apply: Send a letter of interest, resume, salary history and three professional references to the American Indian Graduate Center, Inc., 4520 Montgomery Blvd. N.E., Suite 1-B, Albuquerque, NM 87109. Fax to (505) 884-0427 or email to susan at aigc.com . Resumes will be accepted until September 1, 2004. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Sat Jul 31 16:38:32 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 09:38:32 -0700 Subject: Alutiiq language program gets federal grant (fwd) Message-ID: Alutiiq language program gets federal grant The Associated Press http://www.adn.com/alaska_ap/story/5358961p-5297521c.html KODIAK (July 30, 10:54 am ADT) - A $171,000 federal grant will help expand a master-apprentice language program aimed at preserving the Alutiiq language. The money is part of $3.5 million in grants to Alaska programs announced this week by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson during a swing through Alaska. The agency's Administration for Native Americans is administering the grants, including the language preservation grant to the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak. The grant to the museum will help fund a three-year Alutiiq language revitalization project, which has a total budget of $652,380. Alutiiq, also called Alutiitstun or Sugt'stun, is the indigenous language of Kodiak Island and parts of the Alaska Peninsula, and belongs to the Eskimo-Aleut family of languages. Only about 50 people still speak the language fluently, but their average age is over 70 years. Leanne Hinton, a University of California Berkeley linguist, developed the master-apprentice model for a language-preservation effort involving 10 Native languages in California facing extinction. The model - used in the Alutiiq program - matches participants with fluent elders for daily lessons and practice. The museum is accepting applications. Organizers plan to select the participants in September and begin activities early in October. The program requires a three-year commitment, the minimum time for an adult to achieve fluency, said April Laktonen Counceller, the museum's education coordinator. After as little as one year, apprentices may be available for outreach activity to Kodiak schools, to start bringing the language to younger children and "grow new speakers," Counceller told the Kodiak Daily Mirror. For the past year, the program has survived mostly on local funding and donations, with two apprentices, Counceller and Shauna Hegna, who recently moved to Anchorage. It is one of several methods the museum is pursuing to preserve the language. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 2 15:18:34 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 08:18:34 -0700 Subject: Using Technology to Preserve Endangered Tribal Languages, Culture (fwd) Message-ID: Using Technology to Preserve Endangered Tribal Languages, Culture http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/505883/ Newswise ? Efforts to help preserve native languages through the use of technology can be considered a "matter of life and death." Thanks to the work of Native Americans from the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT), the University of Arizona and funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, two more languages are closer to preservation. Susan Penfield, of the UA department of English has devoted more than 30 years of her professional life to working with endangered languages. More recently, she has been the principle investigator in a project funded since January 2003 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to train tribal members in the use of selected technologies that support language revitalization. This grant has provided funds for the collaboration between the CRIT and the UA. The CRIT Reservation is located on the Colorado River, just south of Lake Havasu on the Arizona/California border. CRIT is home to four culturally and linguistically different tribes: Mohave, Chemehuevi, Hopi and Navajo. Goals include the training of CRIT speakers of Mohave and Chemehuevi in the use of software and Internet tools which will support preservation and instruction related to these languages. Mohave, a Yuman language, is spoken by 33 fully fluent speakers at CRIT. Most of these speakers are at least age 70 or older. Chemehuevi is spoken by only about 10 fluent speakers who are 60 years or older. "The need to take action on these two most critically endangered languages of the four CRIT cultures was apparent," says Penfield. While the preservation of native languages ultimately rests with the members of the tribes themselves, Penfield and a group of specialists from the UA have initiated a project to train tribal members from the CRIT communities in the use of computer software and other technologies to help tribal members in this task. As part of the project, six fluent speakers of Mohave and Chemehuevi learned how to record, preserve and digitally manipulate samples of their language with the help of special software installed on the laptops purchased with the grant money. Participants were already involved with language work either as teachers, librarians or consultants who were available to train on the UA campus. One of the first sessions was on the use PowerPoint? and Audacity? to create language lessons. Pictures from coloring books of Mohave and Chemehuevi were scanned and transformed into electronic images which were later combined with sound files created by the participants with the help of Audacity?. These skills and language lessons encouraged the native speakers to learn additional computer skills and to use more complex software such as MaxAuthor, used for rarely taught languages and the MOO developed at the UA for multi-user conference space accessed through the Internet. While the grant money is running out and funds are needed to continue the work, Penfield says that the project "has met its goals of training members from CRIT to develop a model for the use of technology-enhanced language revitalization. I'm very grateful to the participants from CRIT who interrupted their lives and work to train with us and who continue to fight for their languages. We learned a lot from them and the experience of working together was enriching for everyone." Penfield would like to establish a one-week computer camp on the UA campus which would provide three units of credit in indigenous languages and technology. Also, more assistance is needed for additional hardware and software development. She says that "it's vital to recognize that the field of indigenous languages and technology is new and largely untapped." "Computers, video cameras and recorders can't save languages; only people can do that," says Penfield, "but technology can support revitalization efforts." Compiled from various sources and edited by Julieta Gonzalez, News Services. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 2 15:25:03 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 08:25:03 -0700 Subject: A Packrat's Path to Indian Past (fwd) Message-ID: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-harrington2jul02,1,979787.story?coll=la-home-headlines COLUMN ONE A Packrat's Path to Indian Past A California linguist's mountain of scribbled notes is the key to nearly forgotten Native American languages. By Mike Anton Times Staff Writer July 2, 2004 Few understood the true significance of John Peabody Harrington's work when he died at age 77. For some 50 years, the linguist and anthropologist had crisscrossed California and the West, cheating the grave by finding the last speakers of ancient Native American tongues and writing down their words and customs. Secretive and paranoid, Harrington was a packrat who stuffed much of his work into boxes, crates and steamer trunks. After his death in 1961, the papers turned up in warehouses, attics, basements, even chicken coops throughout the West and eventually made their way to his former employer, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "Six tons of material ? much of it worthless," recalled Catherine A. Callaghan, now 72, a linguist who sorted through the Harrington papers when they arrived at the Smithsonian. "There was blank paper, dirty old shirts, half-eaten sandwiches. The low point came when I found a box of birds stored for 30 years without the benefit of taxidermy . But mixed in with all of that were these treasures." Forty-three years later, Harrington's massive legacy is regarded as a Rosetta stone that unlocks dozens of all-but-forgotten California Indian languages. But the work of deciphering it is far from over. Researchers at UC Davis, backed by a National Science Foundation grant, are transcribing Harrington's notes ? a million pages of scribbled writing, much of it in code, Spanish or phonetic script ? into electronic documents that can be searched word by word. The job is expected to take 20 years. "I very much doubt I will see the end of it," said project co-director Victor Golla, a 65-year-old professor of linguistics at Humboldt State. "Like Harrington's original project, you do this for the future benefit of other people." Harrington's work has been used by California's Indians trying to establish federal tribal recognition, settle territorial claims and protect sacred sites from development. It has also played a crucial role in reviving languages. The Muwekma Ohlone tribe in the Bay Area, for instance, is using a dictionary compiled from Harrington's research to teach its members the Chochenyo language, which had been dead for more than 60 years. "They've gone from knowing nothing to being able to carry on a short conversation, sing songs and play games. Now they're starting to do some creative writing," said UC Berkeley linguistics professor Juliette Blevins, who works with the tribe. "We are reconstructing a whole language using his material." Scholars of Indian anthropology are drawn to Harrington's archive as the definitive work of its kind. There's only one problem: His handwritten notes are as comprehensible as Aramaic. "It's impenetrable," said Martha Macri, director of the UC Davis Native American Language Center and co-director of the effort to computerize Harrington's papers. "It's too hard to read his handwriting. Few people can tolerate looking at it for long periods of time." The significance of Harrington's work lies not in individual great discoveries, but in the preservation of millions of words and customs. His archive is a detailed inventory of the everyday. He pumped his subjects ? often the last speakers of their languages ? for everything they knew on topics ranging from astronomy to zoology. His papers describe centuries-old ceremonies. Medicinal cures. Songs, dances and games. Family histories. Even gossip. "You've got a RICH lot of information there. Just record them all DRY . Get all that each one knows," Harrington wrote to one of the many assistants he hired, often with his own money, to record Indian elders. "Get all the old people, get ones I never heard of and all who are about to die." Consider the thousands of pages Harrington devoted to the Luise?o Indians of Southern California. Some of the material, gathered in the 1930s, is straightforward. "Hu-ka-pish," reads one entry, "a pipe made of clay, and has no stem, it is necessary for a person to lie on his back to smoke it." More typical are the rambling, hard-to-read descriptions of games, stories and sacred rites. One of Harrington's "informants," Maria Omish, told him about two smallpox epidemics that ravaged the tribe. "When the smallpox came 1st time," Harrington wrote, "the Inds. were having a big fiesta at Sjc. [San Juan Capistrano], and a man came who had smallpox, & the people were talking of making him go away, but he threw a cloth that had small pox matter on it into the fire, & then all of them got it, pretty near all of them died." There's the description of a religious ceremony involving two men who slowly dance while quickly playing flutes made from the shin bones of a deer. The legend of a dying man who asks not to be buried and who returns to life as an elk. The behavior of a particular black beetle that crawls away quickly when placed in the hand of a generous man ? and plays dead in the hand of one who is stingy. "For Harrington, it was all about getting the information down on paper, and he lived in fear that he couldn't get it done in his lifetime," Macri said. "He wasn't heavy on analysis. His gift was to record what he heard." When Gloria Morgan, a member of the Tejon tribe in Kern County, read that UC Davis was seeking Native Americans to help computerize Harrington's work, she jumped at the chance. Morgan discovered that Harrington had recorded her great-great-grandmother Angelita singing songs in the Kitanemuk language, of which there are no fluent speakers today. "I didn't grow up exposed to my own culture, so this is such a huge thing," said Morgan, 30, a 911 dispatcher. "I had never even heard of Harrington before this." Typing Harrington's notes into a spreadsheet is tedious work. But with each page, Morgan has learned something. A description of a death ceremony. How paint was made using deer marrow. That her ancestors had words for 40 different native grasses but didn't know what a shark was. "A hundred little things that wouldn't mean anything to anyone," Morgan said. "Except if you're a Tejon." Harrington, born in 1884 and raised in Santa Barbara, studied classical languages and anthropology at Stanford University and graduated at the top of his class in three years. He turned down a Rhodes scholarship and studied anthropology and linguistics at universities in Europe. Professors marveled at his flawless ear. He also had the ability to write down every word said to him. "He was able to take phonetic dictation at conversation speed, like a court reporter," Golla said. He returned to California to teach languages at Santa Ana High School. But Harrington had a wanderlust. He wanted to follow the ethos of anthropologist Franz Boas, who promoted the then-radical idea that "primitive" societies were as complex as those in Europe. As modernity overtook the West, advocates of Boas saw the preservation of Indian cultures as nothing short of a rescue mission. In 1915, Harrington landed a job as a field linguist for the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology. Over the next 40 years his travels took him from California and the Southwest to Canada and Alaska as he immersed himself in a world that was evaporating before his eyes. "I thought he was a little nuts at times. But I never met anybody who was so devoted to his work," said Jack Marr, an 83-year-old retired Fullerton engineer who worked for Harrington as an assistant, beginning as a teenager. "He'd travel into a remote area by bus and get off and walk miles by himself to a trading post and ask, 'Where can I find the Indians?' " Harrington was a recluse who didn't care about money, dressed in tattered clothing and slept on the dirt floors of his interview subjects' homes. He rented Marr's grandmother's home in Santa Ana and used it as a base for several decades, turning it into a warren of papers and boxes that left little room to walk. He had no phone and would routinely not answer the door. While in the field, Harrington routed letters to his bosses in Washington, D.C., through Marr's mother, so they would bear a Santa Ana postmark and would not reveal where he was. Marr was instructed never to tell anyone where he or Harrington were going or what they were doing. In contrast to others in his field, Harrington was not the least bit eager to publicize his discoveries. Quite the opposite. Marr said Harrington once told him of a tribe in the Sierra that had discovered the skeleton of a Spanish conquistador in full armor in a cave. Fearful that the find would attract reporters and other anthropologists, Harrington told Marr he had the Indians bury the body and swore them to secrecy. Harrington's life was full of contradictions. He was sensitive to the nuances of native cultures but revealed himself in his private letters as a fervent anti-Semite. He was a workaholic who never quite finished a project. A social misfit who had no close friends but could charm suspicious strangers into divulging their most profound secrets. "He preached it to me over and over: If we didn't do this, nobody else will, and these languages will be lost forever," said Marr, who hauled a 35-pound recording machine powered by a car battery around the West during the late 1930s and early 1940s, sometimes through mountains on horseback. "We'd be gone for a month or two at a time, living off cases of dried beef and chili and crackers . It was quite an adventure for a 17-year-old guy." When Marr took trips on his own, Harrington wrote long, rambling letters exhorting him not to come back empty-handed. When one of his aged subjects took ill, Harrington exhibited sheer panic. "Tell him we'll give him five dollars an hour, it'll pay all his doctor bills and his funeral and will leave his widow with a handsome jackpot," he wrote Marr regarding a sickly Chinook Indian elder in Washington state. "DON'T TAKE NO. Hound the life out of him, go back again and again and again." When another subject, a Chinook man nearly 100 years old, suffered a stroke, Harrington was heartbroken ? for himself. "Have just gotten over crying this is the worst thing that ever happened to me," he wrote Marr. A few sentences later, though, Harrington encouraged him to remain optimistic. "You know, a paralysed person often GETS OVER the first stroke, it is the third stroke that carries them off. And between strokes they get well and sit up and talk." Harrington was married once, to a linguistics student. He immediately turned Carobeth Tucker into an assistant, dragging her from one dusty outpost to another, even late in pregnancy and with their newborn daughter in tow, she recalled in a 1975 memoir. She divorced him after seven years and went on to become an accomplished linguist and ethnographer. Harrington's bosses at the Smithsonian accommodated his eccentricities because of the quality of the reports he sent back. It was only after his death that the extent of his material became known. It took the better part of the 1960s to bring most of the stuff together. Managers of storage units shipped boxes of notes to the Smithsonian seeking unpaid rent. Forgotten stockpiles turned up in post offices that were about to be razed. The material eventually filled two warehouses. In the mid-1970s, Gerald R. Ford was president when work began to transfer the written collection to 500 reels of microfilm. When the job was completed, Ronald Reagan was leaving office. The size of the archive makes a mockery of time. Spend a month plowing through what took a lifetime to compile, and you haven't even scratched the surface. A Smithsonian editor who worked for years to commit the archive to microfilm wrote, in a 10-volume overview of the collection: "One can easily fall prey to the 'Harrington Curse': obsession." After six months of separating Harrington's papers from his dirty laundry, Catherine Callaghan had an epiphany. "I could see myself becoming more and more like Harrington. I had wanted to devote my life to pure research as he did," she said. "But I realized I could not survive as a human being that way." For a man who worked so desperately to save something, Harrington gave surprisingly little thought to how his stuff would be used ? or whether it would, in its vastness, simply be admired. "He thought these languages were dying off so rapidly that he could not afford to take the time to publish any of his findings," said Macri of UC Davis. "I don't think he envisioned [his archive] being used by Indian people. I don't think he thought Indian people would be as resilient as they've been." Joyce Stanfield Perry, a Juane?o tribal leader in Orange County, discovered the depth of Harrington's legacy in 1994 as she and others searched the Smithsonian for documentation to support federal recognition for their tribe. On a dusty shelf, they found a box of recordings one of Harrington's assistants made in the 1930s. On them was the voice of Anastacia de Majel, a tribal elder then in her 70s and one of the last speakers of the Juane?o language. Her words were preserved as if in amber. "We wept," Perry said. "It truly was like our ancestors were talking directly to us." Perry, who also runs a nonprofit Indian education and cultural foundation, estimates that 10,000 pages of Harrington's notes refer to her tribe. As they are entered into the database, a dictionary of her native language is emerging. So far, it contains 1,200 words. Through Harrington, Perry has made discoveries about her ancestors' way of life that have affected her profoundly. "I didn't know that animals would talk to my ancestors and that my ancestors understood them. I didn't know that the stars communicated with my ancestors or that when a crow flies overhead that I'm supposed to say certain words to them," Perry said. "It was humbling to acknowledge how much our ancestors knew." Perry's backyard garden is full of rocks that represent people in her life, a tradition she learned from Harrington's archive. Every room in her house has something in it that her ancestors told Harrington it was important to have ? sacred items that Perry won't reveal to outsiders. "Harrington is our hero," she said. "There's something magical about his work . It changed how I pray and how I see the world." From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Fri Jul 2 16:51:50 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 09:51:50 -0700 Subject: Mobilizing For Justice (event) Message-ID: The Pitt River Tribe and the International Indian Treaty Council NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT. On July 7-11, 2004, the Pitt River Tribe is hosting the International Indian Treaty Council~Rs 30th Anniversary Conference, ~SIndigenous Nations Mobilizing For Justice, Sovereignty and Protection of Sacred Homelands~T, near Fall River Mills, CA., in furthering our efforts to protect Saht-Tit-Lah (known to Pitt River people as Obsidian Knife Lake. aka as Medicine Lake). The primary goal of the Conference is to build support for Pitt River and other Indigenous Nations~R current struggle to protect our sacred Medicine Lake, used since the beginning of time when the creator bathed and left great powers there. It is currently targeted for geothermal energy development by the Calpine Energy Corporation, backed by $50 million in California Energy Commission state subsidies. A proposed Calpine industrial complex in our pristine Medicine Lake Highlands would produce 18 tons of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas each year, and other heavy metals such as arsenic and mercury. The Pitt River Nation and others have filed lawsuits against Calpine Energy Corporation to halt the proposed mining plans. A boycott of all consumer items linked to Calpine is underway, as well as a shareholder divestment strategy. Other panels and presentations will focus on: defending cultural rights; treaties and land rights, environmental protection; right to food and food sovereignty; subsistence rights and impacts of environmental contamination; youth organizing; international work for the rights of Indigenous Peoples; and struggles for recognition and restoration of land rights by California Indian Nations which have been terminated by the United States government. Participants will include Indigenous leaders from throughout the United States and Canada, as well as Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, Guatemala, New Zealand, Panama, India, Africa and Peru. In will also include Indigenous members of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Organization of American States. The Conference site is outside and lots of camping area available. We will provide all meals during the conference time. Also, we will be running to Saht-Tit-Lah on Wednesday (July 7) morning to let the lake know we are having this gathering. WE NEED PEOPLE AND WE NEED MORE HELP in volunteering for security, daycare, assisting elders, translation, sweats, watching fire, making water runs, kitchen, etc. Due to the shortness of this request, you can get more information by logging on to IITC~Rs web page at: www.treatycouncil.org or call the Pitt River Tribal Office at (530) 335-5421. I will attach the latest agenda for your review. With Respect, Radley Davis, Illmawi Councilman Pitt River Nation (FYI: The Pitt River Tribal Nation is opposed to the current Rainbow Gathering being held in our country and we have a Resolution to that effort directed at the Federal Agencies who issued permits for such a gathering in the Hammawi Territory) From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Wed Jul 7 00:04:54 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 17:04:54 -0700 Subject: Harrington (language) Message-ID: >7/2/04 Dear fellow Harrington aficionados-- Mike Anton's article on Harrington finally appeared today in the LA Times. You can read it online at: http://www.latimes.com/la-me-harrington2jul02,1,711575.story but you'll have to register to get access. The full text is appended below if you don't want to go through that rigamarole. --Victor ======================================================================= COLUMN ONE * A California linguist's mountain of scribbled notes is the key to nearly forgotten Native American languages. By Mike Anton, Times Staff Writer Few understood the true significance of John Peabody Harrington's work when he died at age 77. For some 50 years, the linguist and anthropologist had crisscrossed California and the West, cheating the grave by finding the last speakers of ancient Native American tongues and writing down their words and customs. Secretive and paranoid, Harrington was a packrat who stuffed much of his work into boxes, crates and steamer trunks. After his death in 1961, the papers turned up in warehouses, attics, basements, even chicken coops throughout the West and eventually made their way to his former employer, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "Six tons of material ~W much of it worthless," recalled Catherine A. Callaghan, now 72, a linguist who sorted through the Harrington papers when they arrived at the Smithsonian. "There was blank paper, dirty old shirts, half-eaten sandwiches. The low point came when I found a box of birds stored for 30 years without the benefit of taxidermy ~E. But mixed in with all of that were these treasures." Forty-three years later, Harrington's massive legacy is regarded as a Rosetta stone that unlocks dozens of all-but-forgotten California Indian languages. But the work of deciphering it is far from over. Researchers at UC Davis, backed by a National Science Foundation grant, are transcribing Harrington's notes ~W a million pages of scribbled writing, much of it in code, Spanish or phonetic script ~W into electronic documents that can be searched word by word. The job is expected to take 20 years. "I very much doubt I will see the end of it," said project co-director Victor Golla, a 65-year-old professor of linguistics at Humboldt State. "Like Harrington's original project, you do this for the future benefit of other people." Harrington's work has been used by California's Indians trying to establish federal tribal recognition, settle territorial claims and protect sacred sites from development. It has also played a crucial role in reviving languages. The Muwekma Ohlone tribe in the Bay Area, for instance, is using a dictionary compiled from Harrington's research to teach its members the Chochenyo language, which had been dead for more than 60 years. "They've gone from knowing nothing to being able to carry on a short conversation, sing songs and play games. Now they're starting to do some creative writing," said UC Berkeley linguistics professor Juliette Blevins, who works with the tribe. "We are reconstructing a whole language using his material." Scholars of Indian anthropology are drawn to Harrington's archive as the definitive work of its kind. There's only one problem: His handwritten notes are as comprehensible as Aramaic. "It's impenetrable," said Martha Macri, director of the UC Davis Native American Language Center and co-director of the effort to computerize Harrington's papers. "It's too hard to read his handwriting. Few people can tolerate looking at it for long periods of time." The significance of Harrington's work lies not in individual great discoveries, but in the preservation of millions of words and customs. His archive is a detailed inventory of the everyday. He pumped his subjects ~W often the last speakers of their languages ~W for everything they knew on topics ranging from astronomy to zoology. His papers describe centuries-old ceremonies. Medicinal cures. Songs, dances and games. Family histories. Even gossip. "You've got a RICH lot of information there. Just record them all DRY~E. Get all that each one knows," Harrington wrote to one of the many assistants he hired, often with his own money, to record Indian elders. "Get all the old people, get ones I never heard of and all who are about to die." Consider the thousands of pages Harrington devoted to the Luise?o Indians of Southern California. Some of the material, gathered in the 1930s, is straightforward. "Hu-ka-pish," reads one entry, "a pipe ~E made of clay, and has no stem, it is necessary for a person to lie on his back to smoke it." More typical are the rambling, hard-to-read descriptions of games, stories and sacred rites. One of Harrington's "informants," Maria Omish, told him about two smallpox epidemics that ravaged the tribe. "When the smallpox came 1st time," Harrington wrote, "the Inds. were having a big fiesta at Sjc. [San Juan Capistrano], and a man came who had smallpox, & the people were talking of making him go away, but he threw a cloth that had small pox matter on it into the fire, & then all of them got it, pretty near all of them died." There's the description of a religious ceremony involving two men who slowly dance while quickly playing flutes made from the shin bones of a deer. The legend of a dying man who asks not to be buried and who returns to life as an elk. The behavior of a particular black beetle that crawls away quickly when placed in the hand of a generous man ~W and plays dead in the hand of one who is stingy. "For Harrington, it was all about getting the information down on paper, and he lived in fear that he couldn't get it done in his lifetime," Macri said. "He wasn't heavy on analysis. His gift was to record what he heard." When Gloria Morgan, a member of the Tejon tribe in Kern County, read that UC Davis was seeking Native Americans to help computerize Harrington's work, she jumped at the chance. Morgan discovered that Harrington had recorded her great-great-grandmother Angelita singing songs in the Kitanemuk language, of which there are no fluent speakers today. "I didn't grow up exposed to my own culture, so this is such a huge thing," said Morgan, 30, a 911 dispatcher. "I had never even heard of Harrington before this." Typing Harrington's notes into a spreadsheet is tedious work. But with each page, Morgan has learned something. A description of a death ceremony. How paint was made using deer marrow. That her ancestors had words for 40 different native grasses but didn't know what a shark was. "A hundred little things that wouldn't mean anything to anyone," Morgan said. "Except if you're a Tejon." Harrington, born in 1884 and raised in Santa Barbara, studied classical languages and anthropology at Stanford University and graduated at the top of his class in three years. He turned down a Rhodes scholarship and studied anthropology and linguistics at universities in Europe. Professors marveled at his flawless ear. He also had the ability to write down every word said to him. "He was able to take phonetic dictation at conversation speed, like a court reporter," Golla said. He returned to California to teach languages at Santa Ana High School. But Harrington had a wanderlust. He wanted to follow the ethos of anthropologist Franz Boas, who promoted the then-radical idea that "primitive" societies were as complex as those in Europe. As modernity overtook the West, advocates of Boas saw the preservation of Indian cultures as nothing short of a rescue mission. In 1915, Harrington landed a job as a field linguist for the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology. Over the next 40 years his travels took him from California and the Southwest to Canada and Alaska as he immersed himself in a world that was evaporating before his eyes. "I thought he was a little nuts at times. But I never met anybody who was so devoted to his work," said Jack Marr, an 83-year-old retired Fullerton engineer who worked for Harrington as an assistant, beginning as a teenager. "He'd travel into a remote area by bus and get off and walk miles by himself to a trading post and ask, 'Where can I find the Indians?' " Harrington was a recluse who didn't care about money, dressed in tattered clothing and slept on the dirt floors of his interview subjects' homes. He rented Marr's grandmother's home in Santa Ana and used it as a base for several decades, turning it into a warren of papers and boxes that left little room to walk. He had no phone and would routinely not answer the door. While in the field, Harrington routed letters to his bosses in Washington, D.C., through Marr's mother, so they would bear a Santa Ana postmark and would not reveal where he was. Marr was instructed never to tell anyone where he or Harrington were going or what they were doing. In contrast to others in his field, Harrington was not the least bit eager to publicize his discoveries. Quite the opposite. Marr said Harrington once told him of a tribe in the Sierra that had discovered the skeleton of a Spanish conquistador in full armor in a cave. Fearful that the find would attract reporters and other anthropologists, Harrington told Marr he had the Indians bury the body and swore them to secrecy. Harrington's life was full of contradictions. He was sensitive to the nuances of native cultures but revealed himself in his private letters as a fervent anti-Semite. He was a workaholic who never quite finished a project. A social misfit who had no close friends but could charm suspicious strangers into divulging their most profound secrets. "He preached it to me over and over: If we didn't do this, nobody else will, and these languages will be lost forever," said Marr, who hauled a 35-pound recording machine powered by a car battery around the West during the late 1930s and early 1940s, sometimes through mountains on horseback. "We'd be gone for a month or two at a time, living off cases of dried beef and chili and crackers~E. It was quite an adventure for a 17-year-old guy." When Marr took trips on his own, Harrington wrote long, rambling letters exhorting him not to come back empty-handed. When one of his aged subjects took ill, Harrington exhibited sheer panic. "Tell him we'll give him five dollars an hour, it'll pay all his doctor bills and his funeral and will leave his widow with a handsome jackpot," he wrote Marr regarding a sickly Chinook Indian elder in Washington state. "DON'T TAKE NO. Hound the life out of him, go back again and again and again." When another subject, a Chinook man nearly 100 years old, suffered a stroke, Harrington was heartbroken ~W for himself. "Have just gotten over crying ~E this is the worst thing that ever happened to me," he wrote Marr. A few sentences later, though, Harrington encouraged him to remain optimistic. "You know, a paralysed person often GETS OVER the first stroke, it is the third stroke that carries them off. And between strokes they get well and sit up and talk." Harrington was married once, to a linguistics student. He immediately turned Carobeth Tucker into an assistant, dragging her from one dusty outpost to another, even late in pregnancy and with their newborn daughter in tow, she recalled in a 1975 memoir. She divorced him after seven years and went on to become an accomplished linguist and ethnographer. Harrington's bosses at the Smithsonian accommodated his eccentricities because of the quality of the reports he sent back. It was only after his death that the extent of his material became known. It took the better part of the 1960s to bring most of the stuff together. Managers of storage units shipped boxes of notes to the Smithsonian seeking unpaid rent. Forgotten stockpiles turned up in post offices that were about to be razed. The material eventually filled two warehouses. In the mid-1970s, Gerald R. Ford was president when work began to transfer the written collection to 500 reels of microfilm. When the job was completed, Ronald Reagan was leaving office. The size of the archive makes a mockery of time. Spend a month plowing through what took a lifetime to compile, and you haven't even scratched the surface. A Smithsonian editor who worked for years to commit the archive to microfilm wrote, in a 10-volume overview of the collection: "One can easily fall prey to the 'Harrington Curse': obsession." After six months of separating Harrington's papers from his dirty laundry, Catherine Callaghan had an epiphany. "I could see myself becoming more and more like Harrington. I had wanted to devote my life to pure research as he did," she said. "But I realized I could not survive as a human being that way." For a man who worked so desperately to save something, Harrington gave surprisingly little thought to how his stuff would be used ~W or whether it would, in its vastness, simply be admired. "He thought these languages were dying off so rapidly that he could not afford to take the time to publish any of his findings," said Macri of UC Davis. "I don't think he envisioned [his archive] being used by Indian people. I don't think he thought Indian people would be as resilient as they've been." Joyce Stanfield Perry, a Juane?o tribal leader in Orange County, discovered the depth of Harrington's legacy in 1994 as she and others searched the Smithsonian for documentation to support federal recognition for their tribe. On a dusty shelf, they found a box of recordings one of Harrington's assistants made in the 1930s. On them was the voice of Anastacia de Majel, a tribal elder then in her 70s and one of the last speakers of the Juane?o language. Her words were preserved as if in amber. "We wept," Perry said. "It truly was like our ancestors were talking directly to us." Perry, who also runs a nonprofit Indian education and cultural foundation, estimates that 10,000 pages of Harrington's notes refer to her tribe. As they are entered into the database, a dictionary of her native language is emerging. So far, it contains 1,200 words. Through Harrington, Perry has made discoveries about her ancestors' way of life that have affected her profoundly. "I didn't know that animals would talk to my ancestors and that my ancestors understood them. I didn't know that the stars communicated with my ancestors or that when a crow flies overhead that I'm supposed to say certain words to them," Perry said. "It was humbling to acknowledge how much our ancestors knew." Perry's backyard garden is full of rocks that represent people in her life, a tradition she learned from Harrington's archive. Every room in her house has something in it that her ancestors told Harrington it was important to have ~W sacred items that Perry won't reveal to outsiders. "Harrington is our hero," she said. "There's something magical about his work~E. It changed how I pray and how I see the world From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Jul 8 00:10:45 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 17:10:45 -0700 Subject: The EMELD Language Query Room (fwd) Message-ID: [fwd'd from the linganth at cc.rochester.edu listserv] The EMELD Language Query Room The Endangered Language Fund (http://www.ling.yale.edu/~elf), as part of the EMELD grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (http://www.emeld.org), is pleased to announce the availability of The Language Query Room at: http://www.emeld.org/queryroom Development of the site has been accomplished by the Rosetta Project (http://www.rosettaproject.org) under the direction of Jim Mason. Organization and launching has been done by Lameen Souag at Rosetta. Original design was due to Doug Whalen of the Endangered Language Fund. The Query Room is a part of the internet that is designed to: * Allow speakers of endangered languages a chance to post messages to each other * Allow learners of a language (especially heritage learners) to ask questions of native speakers of endangered languages * Allow linguists and other interested folk to ask questions as well The Query Room is divided into areas devoted to various endangered languages. Each area has a host, who is typically a native speaker of the language. Anyone interested in the Language Query Room can register for free; no outside use will be made of any information registered. Then, the user can sign up for as many languages as are of interest. Registering for a language means that the user can post a query and it will be seen by everyone signed up for that language. Further, any time a new posting is made, an email will be sent to everyone on that list. If a native speaker feels like answering, then the answer will be posted and an announcement sent out. All postings are archived and will be available to users indefinitely. Languages that have unusual orthographies will be able to make use of our pop-up keypad. This Unicode compliant keypad can adapt to many scripts, including Cyrillic, Arabic and Cherokee. Chinese and Japanese are not currently supported. The Query Room also supports audio files, allowing easy uploads and playback. The languages currently with rooms are: Ainu, Akha, Basque, Cherokee, Cree, Degema, Kumi?i, Eastern Oromo, Hmar, Nafusi, Miami, Manx, Monguor, Navajo, Hiri Motu. Our hope is that this room will allow for greater communication among native speakers who might be separated by large distances, and for the easier learning of these languages by those who are interested in them. As open forums, these areas should be used with respect, and the expertise of the native speakers should not be overtaxed. Asking how to say half a dozen sentences is a query; asking how to say 200 connected sentences is a translation and should not be done in this forum. All you need is a browser such as Internet Explorer (version 6.0 or higher is best), and an interest in endangered languages. This is a new program, so there are probably going to be some features that need fixing, but we hope that you will find the facility of some use. Point your browser to http://www.emeld.org/queryroom and see if your favorite (or native!) language is there. If it's not, please consider becoming a host for a new room. We are quite happy to add new rooms as we find hosts for them. Contact queryroom at emeld.org. For those of you who work with endangered languages whose speakers have internet access but who will probably not see this message, we would appreciate your help in spreading the word. Your comments and reactions are also welcome. Please write us at queryroom at emeld.org . Doug Whalen (whalen at haskins.yale.edu) Haskins Laboratories 270 Crown St. New Haven, CT 06511 203-865-6163, ext. 234 FAX: 203-865-8963 From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Thu Jul 8 20:13:24 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 13:13:24 -0700 Subject: Website Message-ID: You might find the following website of interest: http://www.ssila.org/ Here is a sample of what the site contains: MANDAN [MHQ] 6 fluent speakers (1992 M. Krauss) out of 400 population (1986 SIL). Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota. Classification: Siouan, Siouan Proper, Central, Mandan. Nearly extinct. More information. MARICOPA [MRC] 181 speakers (1990 census), out of 400 population (1977 SIL). Associated with the Pima on the Gila River and Salt River reservations near Phoenix, Arizona. Alternate names: COCOMARICOPA. Classification: Hokan, Esselen-Yuman, Yuman, River Yuman. More information. MENOMINI [MEZ] 39 first language speakers, 26 second language speakers, 15 others ages 30 to 50, who have learned Menominee in order to teach it, and 50 ages 20 and above who have learned it to understand it (1997 Menominee Historic Preservation Office), out of 3,500 population (1977 SIL). Northeastern Wisconsin, on what was formerly the Menomini Reservation. Alternate names: MENOMINEE. Classification: Algic, Algonquian, Central. Nearly extinct. More information. MESQUAKIE [SAC] 800 speakers out of 2,500 population (1977 SIL). 673 Fox speakers, including 2 monolinguals (1990 census). Mesquakie at Tama, Iowa; Sac and Fox at Sac and Fox Reservation on eastern Kansas-Nebraska border and central Oklahoma. Alternate names: SAC AND FOX, SAUK-FOX. Dialects: FOX, SAC, MESQUAKIE. Classification: Algic, Algonquian, Central. More information. MICHIF [CRG] 390 speakers in USA (1990 census). Population total both countries 390 or more. Alternate names: FRENCH CREE, MITCHIF. Classification: Mixed Language, French-Cree. More information. MICMAC [MIC] 1,200 in the USA, including 200 in Maine, and 1,000 largely in Boston. Northern Maine near Fort Fairfield, Boston, Massachusetts, and small scattered places elsewhere in the USA. Alternate names: MI'GMAW, MIIGMAO, MI'KMAW, RESTIGOUCHE. Classification: Algic, Algonquian, Eastern. More information. MIKASUKI [MIK] 496 speakers including 33 monolinguals (1990 census), out of 1,200 population (1977 SIL). Southern Florida. Alternate names: HITCHITI, MIKASUKI SEMINOLE, MICCOSUKEE. Dialects: HITCHITI, MIKASUKI. Classification: Muskogean, Eastern -- Andr? Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org is the Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs of American Indians To subscribe to a news letter of interest to Natives send an email to: IndigenousNewsNetwork-subscribe at topica.com or go to: http://www.topica.com/lists/IndigenousNewsNetwork/subscribe/?location=listinfo From coyotez at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU Thu Jul 8 21:06:36 2004 From: coyotez at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU (David Lewis) Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 14:06:36 -0700 Subject: SSIL In-Reply-To: <40EDAAE4.5080202@ncidc.org> Message-ID: Klahowya Tillicums, the SSIL site is very good but some of their info is severely outdated. Please be aware and critical of this in anything you read on their site. For example their information on Kalapuya is thus, KALAPUYA: a language of USA SIL code: KAL ISO 639-2: nai /Population/ 1 or 2 speakers (1962 Chafe). /Region/ Northwest Oregon. /Alternate names / SANTIAM, LUKAMIUTE, WAPATU /Classification/ Penutian, Oregon Penutian, Kalapuyan. /Comments/ Bilingualism in English. All over 50 years old (1962). Nearly extinct. The last speaker of Kalapuya died in the late 50s, he was probably John Hudson Jr., Santiam Kalapuya of Grand Ronde Reservation, my great great grandfather. I have not heard that any other speakers lived past him and everywhere else Kalapuya is considered extinct. So their info is 50 years out of date. Therefore, I would be suspicious of any of their content. Consult Scott DeLancy's linguistics webpage for the most current info., or call the Grand Ronde tribe. David Andre Cramblit wrote: > You might find the following website of interest: http://www.ssila.org/ > Here is a sample of what the site contains: > MANDAN > > [MHQ] 6 fluent speakers (1992 M. Krauss) out of 400 population (1986 > SIL). Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota. Classification: Siouan, > Siouan Proper, Central, Mandan. Nearly extinct. > > More information. > > MARICOPA > > [MRC] 181 speakers (1990 census), out of 400 population (1977 > SIL). Associated with the Pima on the Gila River and Salt River > reservations near Phoenix, Arizona. Alternate names: COCOMARICOPA. > Classification: Hokan, Esselen-Yuman, Yuman, River Yuman. > More information. > > MENOMINI > > [MEZ] 39 first language speakers, 26 second language speakers, 15 others > ages 30 to 50, who have learned Menominee in order to teach it, and 50 > ages 20 and above who have learned it to understand it (1997 Menominee > Historic Preservation Office), out of 3,500 population (1977 > SIL). Northeastern Wisconsin, on what was formerly the Menomini > Reservation. Alternate names: MENOMINEE. Classification: Algic, > Algonquian, Central. Nearly extinct. > > More information. > > MESQUAKIE > > [SAC] 800 speakers out of 2,500 population (1977 SIL). 673 Fox speakers, > including 2 monolinguals (1990 census). Mesquakie at Tama, Iowa; Sac > and Fox at Sac and Fox Reservation on eastern Kansas-Nebraska border and > central Oklahoma. Alternate names: SAC AND FOX, SAUK-FOX. Dialects: > FOX, SAC, MESQUAKIE. Classification: Algic, Algonquian, Central. > More information. > > MICHIF > > [CRG] 390 speakers in USA (1990 census). Population total both countries > 390 or more. Alternate names: FRENCH CREE, MITCHIF. Classification: > Mixed Language, French-Cree. > More information. > > MICMAC > > [MIC] 1,200 in the USA, including 200 in Maine, and 1,000 largely in > Boston. Northern Maine near Fort Fairfield, Boston, Massachusetts, and > small scattered places elsewhere in the USA. Alternate names: MI'GMAW, > MIIGMAO, MI'KMAW, RESTIGOUCHE. Classification: Algic, Algonquian, > Eastern. > More information. > > MIKASUKI > > [MIK] 496 speakers including 33 monolinguals (1990 census), out of 1,200 > population (1977 SIL). Southern Florida. Alternate names: HITCHITI, > MIKASUKI SEMINOLE, MICCOSUKEE. Dialects: HITCHITI, MIKASUKI. > Classification: Muskogean, Eastern > > -- > > > Andr? Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org is the Operations > Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC > (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs > of American Indians > > To subscribe to a news letter of interest to Natives send an email to: > IndigenousNewsNetwork-subscribe at topica.com or go to: > http://www.topica.com/lists/IndigenousNewsNetwork/subscribe/?location=listinfo > > From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 12 15:37:53 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 08:37:53 -0700 Subject: Reviving California Native languages (fwd) Message-ID: Reviving California Native languages By Jack Chang Knight Ridder Newspapers http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001977242_languages12.html BERKELEY, Calif. ? In front of hundreds of indigenous people and linguists from around the world, California Native American Bill Combs held a sheet of paper in front of him and nervously spoke the lost language of his ancestors. While his cousin Norma Yeager translated, he read the Wintun words for frog, deer and other animals, complete with the glottal stops, or deep-throated clicking sounds, that he had practiced all week. Combs, 34, finished his presentation by looking up at the audience gathered in Pauley Ballroom at University of California, Berkeley, and telling them in Wintun what he had recently learned to do after being denied the opportunity all his life: "I am speaking my language." Since mid-June, the university's linguistics department has been helping about 50 Native Californians learn to read, write and speak their languages, many of which have not been used for decades and are considered dead. For many "Breath of Life" conference participants, the experience has been emotional as they dig through the university's archive of language recordings to find traces of their lost tongues. [insert] Nomelaki language Transcribed by California Native American Norma Yeager and UC, Berkeley graduate student Jenny Lederer. Nomelaki was spoken among Northern Californian natives. Nomelaki words: Tree ? mee Deer ? nopoom Flowers ? kalal Bear ? waymahl Jaybird ? chiek-chiek Rabbit ? patkeelee Part of a Nomelaki prayer using the words: Hlesin mem mee nopoom kalal way Hlesin mem waymahl chiek-chiek patkeelee Water-spirit make the tree, deer and flowers grow. Water-spirit feed the plant life to the bear, jaybird and rabbit. Source: Transcribed by California Native American Norma Yeager and UC, Berkeley graduate student Jenny Lederer [insert end] In some cases, they have come across recordings of grandparents and other family members speaking their languages decades ago into the microphones of UC, Berkeley anthropologists. Some have become the first people to speak their ancestral languages since the early 20th century. Mike Lincoln, who lives on the Round Valley Indian Reservation in California, said he hopes to revive the language of his father's tribe, the Nomelaki. "I look at it as something missing," Lincoln said. "(The U.S. government) took it away from us. They didn't let us have it. It's part of our culture. Without it, you're lost." Throughout the 20th century, the federal government aggressively tried to stamp out the languages, sending Native children to boarding schools where only English was permitted and prohibiting the teaching of the languages in public schools. Mamie Elsie Powell, 72, a resident of the Grindstone Indian Rancheria in Glenn County, Calif., grew up without speaking her native tongue of Nomelaki, although she remembered hearing her father and other relatives speak it while growing up. As it turns out, her father, who died in 1987 at age 101, was aware of the importance of his language and made hours of recordings of himself speaking it. "I am one of the few people around who remember what my language sounds like," Powell said. "I have my father's tapes." Since the 1980s, the campaign to rescue dying or dead languages has become a movement among Native Americans, said Leanne Hinton, chairwoman of UC, Berkeley's linguistics department. Many California Indians are apathetic about their culture, and changing that is often an uphill battle, said Yeager, also from Grindstone. "If they show interest, we'll teach them," she said. On a Thursday in June, UC, Berkeley launched a companion conference ? "Stabilizing Indigenous Languages" ? drawing several hundred indigenous people and linguists from around the world to learn how to rescue their own fragile languages. The two conferences merged the next Friday morning, and Californians such as Combs and Yeager nervously climbed onto the Pauley Ballroom stage to show what they had learned to the international audience. Among the crowd were young people such as Michelle Martin, 26, an Aborigine from northwestern Australia who said she has been trying to preserve some of the 25 indigenous languages in her part of the world. Her motivations were the same as those of the Native Californians. "It's who we are," Martin said. "You can say you're an Aborigine, but what it really means is your culture and your language." Martin said many of her elders still speak the old languages, although few try to pass on their knowledge. That's why Martin is working to preserve the languages by recording them onto tape and creating dictionaries. In that way, what she has seen so far in California has been a warning to her. "If my people don't take an interest now, we'll be in the same situation as you." From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 12 15:41:08 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 08:41:08 -0700 Subject: Breaking down language barriers (fwd) Message-ID: Breaking down language barriers By Brier Dudley Seattle Times technology reporter http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001977256_swahiliword12.html There is less than one computer for every 100 people in East Africa, where the population worries more about getting water and electricity than an Internet connection. But that's where Microsoft is working on special versions of Windows XP and standard Office applications in Kiswahili, or Swahili, the language spoken by more than 50 million people in Kenya, Tanzania and other countries in the region. Kiswahili is among 40 languages Microsoft is taking on as part of a new approach to localizing its products for overseas markets. The Local Language Program, which began in March, is expected to broaden the company's reach, build new partnerships with governments in developing countries and confront the challenge of freely shared software. It's part of a broad company effort to expand its global presence, especially now that Western markets are saturated with technology. Microsoft wants to help developing countries break down language barriers that contribute to the "digital divide" that has left much of the world behind the technology revolution. MICROSOFT Indonesian "We wanted to bring our desktop to a broader set of people around the world, and the way you do that is by breaking down the barrier," said Lori Brownell, general manager of the Windows International group that produces non-English versions of the software. In some ways, Microsoft is playing catch-up. Governments, universities, other companies and nonprofit groups have worked for years on an array of projects to make computers more usable in developing countries. It's complicated work, and Microsoft's contributions should make a big difference, especially if they're combined with computer-training programs, said Martin Benjamin, a professor of Swahili and anthropology at Wesleyan University. Benjamin produced a Kiswahili interface for Google two years ago and edits an online dictionary for the language. "I think it will be substantial progress for the ability of people in East Africa to use computers ? it's about 10 years too late, but better late than never," he said. The politics of language One of the challenges is figuring out which terms to use in the programs. This is complicated by the politics of language, including academic debates about whether native words should be used for non-native products such as software. "There's a lively debate among people about what words should be used," Benjamin said, relating how academics in Kenya even disagree on what to call computers. Some Kenyans believe the appropriate translation for "computer" is "tarakilishi," a word with Kiswahili roots that relate to math. But others, including Benjamin, favor the commonly used word "kompyuta," which is borrowed from English. Microsoft hopes to avoid these issues by leaving the translation to local experts. To develop the language kits, Microsoft is working in partnership with government, universities and language groups. These partners are hired to produce a glossary of 3,000 standard computer terms in their language. Microsoft's software tools use these glossaries to produce a local language "layer" over Windows and Office. Microsoft also makes the glossaries available online at no charge to software developers around the world. The glossaries are available at members.microsoft.com/wincg/ In places such as Nepal, the people working on the glossaries don't have Internet access. A company working on the project there went to a community radio station and broadcast 10 computer terms a day, asking listeners to phone in translations, said Andy Abbar, group program manager for Microsoft's Information Worker International business. Elsewhere, it's a multinational effort. The Kiswahili version is being developed by professors in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and coordinated by the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. On the other side of Africa, Microsoft is simultaneously working with Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia on an Amharic version. "What you don't want is to push a solution, so it's important it comes from within the country, within the community," Abbar said. Abbar said it's gratifying work, especially after seeing the lengths users go to use software in a language they don't understand. While in an office in Vietnam, he noticed a receptionist had ringed her computer monitor with yellow sticky notes. He asked a Vietnamese co-worker what the notes said, and it turned out they had translations of desktop commands such as "Start" and file menu names. Which markets picked Microsoft began localizing its software in different languages about 15 years ago. "We started out by saying, 'Well these are big markets, we should localize.' That gets you the top seven, maybe," said Brownell, the general manager. Now Microsft chooses new languages after analyzing information from its overseas subsidiaries. Criteria include PC sales, growth rates and market potential. Among the high priorities are languages in countries with fast-growing technology industries such as India, where the company plans to introduce versions in nine regional dialects over the next year. One of them is Telugu, the language spoken in Hyderabad, where Microsoft has had a software-development center since 1998. The company also has worked on languages that were suggested by users or governments, including the Irish and Welsh versions. Currently, it has about 40 languages done, and it plans to complete another 40 by the end of June 2005. Outsourcing linguists The language program also reflects the company's new way of doing business. In years past, the company hired hundreds of language experts to build "localized" versions of its programs for promising markets. Now it's focused on software tools that simplify the localization process, and it's outsourcing language work to partners in countries where the languages are spoken. Instead of hundreds of linguists, the Windows international group now has just 75 people doing software-tool development, Brownell said. The new approach coalesced about a year and a half ago, when the company realized it didn't have to translate 100 percent of the program commands to make Windows and Office usable by non-English speakers. It developed tools for adding a foreign-language layer over Windows and Office, based on what Brownell calls the "80-20 rule": By translating just 20 percent of the commands ? including key terms such as "start" and "click" ? the software is 80 percent usable to non-English speakers. The layers are built using tools the company originally developed to help multinational corporations set up PCs for users in different countries. This leaner approach helps the company produce more foreign-language versions of its products for less money, Brownell said. "The team is building more layers now than in the past, when there were more people, because of the tools," she said. (Currently available layers ? from Afrikaans to Zulu ? may be downloaded at www.microsoft.com/resources/government/locallanguage.aspx) Competitors localizing The new language program was announced in March by Maggie Wilderotter, a senior vice president charged with building relationships with governments and schools around the world. She's also a point person in the company's competition with freely shared software such as the Linux operating system and OpenOffice suite, which also have ambitious localization programs. OpenOffice is being translated into about 60 languages, said OpenOffice "community manager" Louis Suarez-Potts, who also works as senior community-development manager of CollabNet in Brisbane, Calif. Suarez-Potts said Microsoft is trying to catch up to OpenOffice, which is being embraced by developing countries. He contends that countries can create software industries by creating local versions of freely shared software such as OpenOffice. "They've seen what we've been doing and how we've been trying to work with the various national governments and regional governments to create local economies," he said. Either way, the localized software products are unlikely to find their way into many homes in countries such as Tanzania, where people live on a dollar a day, Wesleyan's Benjamin said. "They're not going to be buying a computer anytime soon no matter what happens with an interface available in Swahili," he said. "They don't have electricity; they have more pressing concerns." But if the language barrier were lowered, people would be able to use computers in Internet cafes, and computers could be brought into schools for students to use. "People I know who don't have access to computers because in large part they read Swahili but not English, they would love to be able to learn computers," Benjamin said. "They know what's available with computers ? they'd love to be able to send e-mails, instant message chat, but they can't." Not for a while, at least. Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or bdudley at seattletimes.com From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 12 15:59:47 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 08:59:47 -0700 Subject: misc news articles...(links) Message-ID: [ilat note: these news articles have a brief mention of language learning by aboriginal or native children.] Aboriginal children less healthy than average Canadian Press http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1089485551839_267/?hub=Health Native youngsters gain culture, learning skills Programs geared to aboriginals give city children a taste of their heritage http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040710/KIDS10/TPEducation/ From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 12 16:01:32 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 09:01:32 -0700 Subject: Phoenix Indian Center to start =?iso-8859-1?b?RGlu6Q==?= language classes for children (fwd) Message-ID: Phoenix Indian Center to start Din? language classes for children By LaNell Shirley Special to the Times http://www.thenavajotimes.com/20040807/News/phoenix_indcenter.html PHOENIX - The city of Phoenix is not a place you would expect to find Navajo language classes, but the Indian Center is planning to expand its classes to include children in August. The Phoenix Indian Center has seen a rise in popularity among the urban Navajo community. In 2000, the center expanded its services to include Navajo language and culture classes that are offered throughout the year. With recent funding from the Navajo Nation and several grants, the center's education department has employed four permanent staff - cultural specialist Freddie Johnson, language instructor Rachel Antonio, elder assistant Richard Beyal, and education specialist David Frazier. The staffers were hired to develop a curriculum for beginning and intermediate Navajo language classes as well as Navajo literacy classes. "While we have programs that are structured from traditional curriculum to non-traditional curriculum, we strive to provide families with a connection to their mother, the Navajo Nation," said Roberta Howard, program director. "Her children may live in different areas, but they still need to maintain that connection with her." Language instructor Rachel Antonio is a graduate of the Din? College and Arizona State University Din? Teacher Education Program. She instructs beginning, intermediate, and advanced adult Navajo language classes. Though the classes are not officially accredited, they are formally structured with regular class work, homework assignments and tests. "Teaching the classes is challenging because they are constantly being revitalized," Antonio said. "But, I enjoy it. It is something I desire to do." Cultural specialist Freddie Johnson instructs intergenerational family classes where family members learn the Navajo language and culture through real-life situations and environments. Johnson favors an informal approach when working with families. Family members sometimes play "Navajo Jeopardy" and "Navajo Pictionary" and are encouraged to interact with one another as they would at home. "I teach the parents and the children, the component of a family", Johnson said. "It is a good way of reaching the children and reminding the parents that they are the first teachers." Although staffers are busy with classes, they often host cultural events and activities for families. This past winter, the center hosted the Navajo shoe game and often invited guests from the reservation. "On several occasions, I've had a few elders come visit the classes," Johnson said. "I once had an 83-year-old grandma from Lukachukai come in with her grandchildren and tell me that the Navajo language program was a good thing to do down here." Program director Howard promises that the establishment of the classes is just the beginning. Among its many goals, the program hopes to establish a distance-learning program using modern technology and build partnerships with Phoenix school districts that have high concentrations of Native American students. However, the program's biggest goal is to become an extension of Din? College. "There is a need for such an extension among the community here both educationally and career-wise," said Howard. "It would be a wonderful source of revenue for the college and would serve as an educational exchange between urban and reservation areas." This fall, the program will welcome some big changes. Currently, staff members are hard at work to expand the center's focus to include young children and are eagerly developing a curriculum that includes games, songs and hands-on activities. The center will begin hosting Navajo language and culture classes for children this upcoming August. "We're excited about the children's classes, it will be something new," said Antonio. "We want to start focusing on the children because they are going to be our leaders one day and it is important that they know their native language." "Culture and language keeps us happy and whole", said Howard. "Without it, we lose our self-identity. The language is the spirit of the people and our program hopes to help keep the spirit alive." The city of Phoenix is home to nearly 80,000 Native American from across the United States. Although Phoenix is attractive for families and those seeking a college education or a change of lifestyle, many within the urban Native community need language and cultural ties, job training, educational resources, and opportunities to socialize with fellow Native Americans. The Phoenix Indian Center was established to serve urban Indians in need of such services. Founded in 1947, the center provided vendors with a location to sell and buy arts and crafts and served as a place where the Native community could receive messages, shower, and connect with other Natives. Today, the center has become a fully functioning, multi-faceted organization that seeks to "promote the social and economic self-sufficiency of the American Indians living of Maricopa County." The center offers child-care services, family counseling, case management and learning circles. Native Workforce Services, one of the center's most utilized resources, provides employment and job-training assistance through its on-site Adult Learning Center. Free GED classes and seminars are available through the program. In addition to employment assistance, Native Workforce Services features a "resource room" where Internet access, printer access, and fax machines are available for use for those that qualify for the program. For more information on the Phoenix Indian Center and its services, please call 602-264-6768 or visit their offices at 2601 North Third Street Suite 100, Phoenix, Arizona 85004. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Jul 13 01:18:10 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 18:18:10 -0700 Subject: Digitizing the voices of the past (fwd) Message-ID: Digitizing the voices of the past Science perfects sound of century-old recordings Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer Monday, July 12, 2004 A new technology under development in Berkeley could help thousands of long-dead Americans to "speak" again. Almost 130 years ago, Thomas Edison and other entrepreneur-inventors popularized sound recording via phonographs. For decades afterward, innumerable Americans -- from politicians to Native Americans, from opera singers to barbershop quartets -- recorded their voices on tin or wax cylinders. Now, tens of thousands of those cylinders, stored in sites as diverse as temperature-controlled archives and dusty suburban attics, have deteriorated so badly that they're unplayable. These recorded voices of Americans from a legendary era -- Americans who were old enough to recall slavery, the Civil War, the conquest of the American West and earlier national sagas -- have been silenced not only by death but by the insatiable appetites of fungal mold and insects. But perhaps not forever. Using a tool normally used for particle physics research, two scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Carl Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyev, are investigating how to extract clear, audible voices from broken, mold-eaten and otherwise unplayable early recordings. In their most impressive feat so far, they have extracted high-quality sound from a well-worn wax cylinder recording from 1912. On the cylinder, what sounds like a barbershop quartet sings a sentimental tune called "Just Before the Battle, Mother." The great thing about the scientists' technique is that it's noninvasive. They don't have to risk damaging a cylinder or wearing down its grooves by playing it on the original phonograph. Rather, they use special microscopes to scan the grooves. Then, with special software, they convert the varying groove shapes to sound. Haber cautions that he doesn't want to overpromise what the technique might eventually achieve. Further work is needed to determine whether they can extract audible sounds from most damaged cylinders or early disc recordings. "It's possible," he acknowledged. "But as a scientist I'm always shy to state more than has been measured, or to be too speculative." Still, history buffs can't help daydreaming about the possibility of hearing the voices of Americans who witnessed a mythic era when the nation was young, a time when native tribes clashed with cowboys and cavalry in barren lands unmarked by superhighways, fast-food joints or casinos. The voices still exist, encoded on wax cylinders, if scientists could only perfect ways to recover them. So far, "we've lost as many cylinders to mold damage as to breakage. The mold literally eats the wax," said Sam Brylawski, head of the recorded film section of the U.S. Library of Congress, which is supporting the Berkeley research. Tin- or wax-cylinder recordings still exist of some of the most famous figures of the 19th or early 20th centuries. Among them: the poet Alfred Tennyson, actress Sarah Bernhardt, nurse Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria of England and Germany's leader in World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm. There are also purported recordings of poet Walt Whitman and populist politician William Jennings Bryan, but some experts have questioned their authenticity. The oldest known surviving recording is of a talking clock. It was recorded in 1878 on a tin cylinder, and can now be heard online at http: //tinfoil.com, a phonograph history enthusiasts' site. At the same site, which has no connection with the Berkeley researchers, one can also hear a 1910 tune sung by Sophie Tucker and a 1908 speech by future president William Howard Taft, who sounds less like one of those stentorian, larger-than-life presidents portrayed in movies than like an ordinary political hack at a rubber-chicken dinner. The Berkeley scientists' site is www-cdf.lbl.gov/~av. The Berkeley scientists' work is a spin-off of a particle physics project. That project, still ongoing, aims to detect a hypothetical subatomic particle, the Higgs boson; in theory, the particle, named after physicist Peter Higgs, gives objects mass. Physicists at CERN, the giant international particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, hope to find Higgs boson in the debris of particles smashed together within a new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As part of Berkeley's contribution to an LHC experiment dubbed Atlas, Haber and Fadeyev have used a kind of super-microscope to inspect flat, dark wafers of silicon. The microscope is called the OGP SmartScope. OGP stands for the manufacturer, Optical Gauging Products of Rochester, N.Y. Unlike an ordinary optical microscope, into which one might look with a naked eye, "the SmartScope captures magnified images with a digital camera and then uses a computer to analyze and measure the shapes and locations of objects under view," Haber said. The device can automatically measure distances between points on the screen in microns, or millionths of a meter. (A meter is equivalent to 39 inches.) Now, Fadeyev and Haber are using the SmartScope to map grooves in old recordings. In initial experiments, they extracted sound from flat, disc- shaped records dating from the early 20th century -- the precursors to the albums of the rock 'n' roll period. Rather than risk damaging a record by playing it in an original phonograph, they used the microscope to image the grooves on the record and to measure their precise horizontal dimensions in microns. Wriggles in the groove encode fluctuations in sound frequency and intensity. Also, "the computer can be programmed to recognize dirt, scratches and debris and delete them from the image, similar to retouching a photograph," Haber said. Next, they transfer the groove measurements to a computer. Its software serves as what Haber calls a virtual stylus: It reads the groove data -- just as a stylus reads the grooves on a phonograph -- and converts it to sound. In fact, the computer technique creates higher-quality sound than the original phonograph. Edison's early recordings worked by etching vertical, not horizontal, undulations into a wax cylinder. The Berkeley scientists make three- dimensional maps of these vertical grooves with a different instrument, a confocal microscope. If their technique is perfected, then how many recorded voices, now lost, might speak again? Despite Haber's cautionary remarks, the imagination reels at the possible prospects. One of the world's leading historians of phonography, Allen Koenigsberg, who is also a classics professor at Brooklyn College in New York, has investigated the rumor that President Abraham Lincoln made a sound recording. Koenigsberg, who isn't connected with the Berkeley research, said he has looked for the supposed Lincoln recording "in various archives all over the world," so far without luck. Undaunted, Koenigsberg hopes to locate a supposedly lost recording that, if it still exists, would be just as fantastic. It's the voice of an elderly American man who, at the time he recorded his speech in 1890, was 100 years old -- a man who was a child in the late 18th century, not long after the American Revolution. The man was Horatio Perry of Wellington, Ohio, and the recording was made in honor of his great age by someone from a startup firm, the Ohio Phonograph Co. According to a document uncovered by Koenigsberg, the recording was placed inside a safe at the firm. A few years later, as a severe depression swept the U.S. economy, the Ohio Phonograph Co. -- a dot-com of its day -- went bankrupt. "What happened to the safe? We don't know," Koenigsberg laments, but then adds, "It may turn up." If it does, then 21st century humans will be able to hear a remarkable thing: the voice of a man who lived and breathed when George Washington was the first president of the United States, when French guillotines beheaded aristocrats, and Mozart played across Europe to crowned heads and commoners. For years, a rumor has titillated enthusiasts of phonograph history -- the rumor that Abraham Lincoln himself made a sound recording. Indeed, it is known that in 1857, a French scientist named Leon Scott invented a proto-phonograph that recorded, but could not play back, sounds. According to the Lincoln rumor, the 16th president spoke into a similar device in 1863. However, Lincoln fans shouldn't get too excited: For now, there's absolutely no proof that Lincoln actually took time off during the Civil War to speak into anyone's recording device, experts say. E-mail the author at kdavidson at sfchronicle.com. Page?A - 1 URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/07/12/MNGJP7JRC21.DTL From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Jul 13 15:47:10 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:47:10 -0700 Subject: Native Americans Strive to Retain Vanishing Heritage (fwd) Message-ID: Native Americans Strive to Retain Vanishing Heritage Deborah Block Browning, Montana 12 Jul 2004 http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=C03EAA9D-8CB0-49BB-88095305F37D3F85# Watch video on the Blackfeet Native American school (RealVideo) ? For the indigenous peoples of America, the Lewis and Clark expedition brought publicity that led to a massive influx of people into their native lands. The Blackfeet Indian nation of Montana is one of those native American tribes trying to teach its children about their language and culture, before the old ways completely disappear. Ernie Heavyrunner Ernie Heavyrunner teaches three to five-year-olds some words in the Blackfeet language. He shows them the colors of traffic signals and what they mean. He says since so many Blackfeet no longer speak the language, efforts are being made to reach the children, even at a young age. "It's important for their identity," says the teacher. "It's important for them to know who they are, where they came from, and their language helps them to know this." The children sing in the Blackfeet language at a private elementary school on the Blackfeet reservation in Browning, Montana. The school, which is part of a non-profit organization known as the Piegan Institute, hopes to revitalize the language. Darrell Kipp The small school opened almost 10 years ago, and teaches about 30 students each year. They not only learn Blackfeet, but also take part in a full elementary school curriculum. Darrell Kipp, founder of the Institute, says he thinks the students do well in both Blackfeet and English. "The fact is that our students come here and speak our language exclusively each day - English isn't allowed in the classrooms during the day. So all instruction is in our language," says Mr. Kipp. "Yet, our students are more articulate and better English speakers than their public school peers." The Blackfeet is the largest tribe in Montana and probably got its name from the blackened moccasins the people used to wear. The reservation borders Glacier National Park. The Blackfeet owned the land that became the park until 1895, when they sold it to the U.S. government. The Blackfeet children at the Piegan Institute are being taught a language that most of their parents and grandparents did not have the opportunity to learn. In the past, to discourage Indians from speaking their native tongues, the U.S. government sent Native American children to boarding and missionary schools far from their family and friends. Cynthia Kipp Among them was Piegan Institute volunteer Cynthia Kipp [not related to Darrell Kipp], who went to a school outside Montana. "I always wanted to learn and I yearned to speak Blackfeet," says Ms. Kipp. "I always felt there was something missing in my life and that it wasn't complete." Some of her other family members are also involved with the school. Her daughter, Joycelyn Des Rosier, a teacher, says she first had to learn the Blackfeet language before she could help the students. She says the school encourages the children to think creatively. For example, at a staff meeting, she shows a picture a young student drew about the story of a wolf. "This wolf is looking for something that is already dead. He's going to take it home to cook," she explained. "Another kid told the student, 'But wolves don't know how to cook.' I told her, 'It's OK, your wolf can cook.'" Joycelyn says Blackfeet is also spoken at her home, including by her son Michael, who attends the Piegan Institute school. "We practice quite a bit. And a lot of his friends who come from this school, we make them also speak [Blackfeet]," she says. "We pray everyday in our language. And we give all the commands and everything, so that I can remember, and I wake them all up in Blackfoot." Michael Michael, whose Native American name is Eagle Bear, says he enjoys learning about his cultural heritage. "I like learning Blackfeet. And I like art, and drawing, and reading and writing, but I don't like math," he laughs. Darrell Kipp says the students learn about their ancestors. They are also taught about the Lewis and Clark expedition, including from the Native American point of view. He says many Indians are commemorating rather than celebrating the 200th anniversary of the journey. One reason, he says, is because Native Americans went through tremendous hardship after publicity from the expedition brought an influx of people out West. "Tribes lost enormous land, lost enormous amounts of their homeland," he explains. "They suffered a lot of the influx of diseases that decimated their populations. They were subject to a dominant government. They were ultimately placed on reservations." Mr. Kipp says despite the hardships of the past, and problems that continue today, the Piegan Institute is looking toward the future. He says while many indigenous languages around the world are disappearing, he hopes the Blackfeet language will continue and endure. "Well, it is our dream, and our hope, and our vision many years from now, when we've all left this wonderful place, that those children that are in our schools will be parents and grandparents," he says "and that our language will continue to be used by them and that we'll be probably one of the few tribal languages on this earth that continue to exist." From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Jul 13 15:59:34 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:59:34 -0700 Subject: Dakota language teacher Franklin Firesteel dead at 51 (fwd) Message-ID: Dakota language teacher Franklin Firesteel dead at 51 The Associated Press - Tuesday, July 13, 2004 MINNEAPOLIS http://www.in-forum.com/ap/index.cfm?page=view&id=D83Q06HG1 Franklin Firesteel, who taught the Dakota language and tried to pass on his cultural traditions, has died of liver failure. He was 51. Firesteel, who also went by the name Isna Hoksina, which means Lone Boy, worked to pass along the culture of his people. He taught the Dakota language, culture, history and art at the University of Minnesota and in tribal settings. "He was a natural teacher, an empowering teacher who made learning fun. He made the students want to learn," said Neil McKay, one of Firesteel's former students and teaching assistants and a University of Minnesota language instructor in the Department of American Indian Studies. A member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota tribe in South Dakota, Firesteel worked for the university during the 1990s in the American Indian Studies department and at the Bell Museum. Besides Dakota culture and history, he also taught Dakota art to groups in the Twin Cities and served as a consultant and teacher to the Mendota tribe of the Dakota Nation. Ellen Neale of Shakopee, Firesteel's ex-wife, said she knew at least a half-dozen students who became fluent in Dakota thanks to Firesteel. "He has planted many seeds from the culture and language," she said. Firesteel died of liver failure at the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center on June 30. Services have been held. ___ Information from: Star Tribune, http:// WWW.STARTRIBUNE.COM From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Jul 21 02:21:46 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 19:21:46 -0700 Subject: Lawrence Nicodemus, 94, tribal-language expert (fwd) Message-ID: Tuesday, July 20, 2004, 12:00 A.M. Pacific Lawrence Nicodemus, 94, tribal-language expert By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS The Associated Press SPOKANE ? Lawrence G. Nicodemus, a Coeur d'Alene Indian tribal elder who made preservation of the tribal language his life's work, has died at age 94. Mr. Nicodemus, who died Saturday, was considered a hero within the Northern Idaho tribe for his efforts to preserve Snchitsu'umshtsn, as the language is called. "We will be closing tribal offices on the day of his funeral to remember our past and to pay our respects for this tribal elder," Chief J. Allan, tribal vice chairman, said in a news release. Mr. Nicodemus will be buried today. He wrote a self-study course on the language that was published in 1975. It included a primer, two-volume dictionary and audio cassette tape delivered to every tribal family on the reservation. The course remains in use today, the tribe said. Mr. Nicodemus also wrote an account of tribal family and historical names in the old language and compiled a list of place names in the original territory of the tribe. Mr. Nicodemus was part of a long family legacy of preserving the language, an effort that started in the 1870s when Jesuit missionaries required all Indian children to learn English. Cyprian Kwaruutus Nicodemus, his paternal grandfather, was a principal consultant to ethnologist James Teit in the production of Teit's important 19th-century account of the tribe, which included much information on the language. When Columbia University professor Gladys Reichard began working with tribal elders in the 1920s to help save the Coeur d'Alene language, she developed a working relationship with Dorothy Nicodemus, widow of Cyprian. Lawrence Nicodemus was born on July 21, 1909, to a family that farmed on the reservation near the Washington-Idaho border. He entered boarding school at age 9, a time when he spoke only the Coeur d'Alene language. In 1935, he went to Columbia University with Reichard and spent 13 months working there. The result was a grammar of the tribal language, published in 1938. During World War II, he wrote a newsletter for members of the tribe both at home and serving in the armed forces. "Letters home to Lawrence became, essentially, dispatches from the European and Pacific theaters," said Raymond Brinkman, a student of Mr. Nicodemus who is now director of the tribe's Language Department. After World War II, Mr. Nicodemus was appointed a judge of the Coeur d'Alene Tribal Court and was a member of the tribal council in the 1950s. By the 1990s, the tribe was making enough money from gambling revenues to begin new efforts to preserve its language. Although in his 80s, Mr. Nicodemus helped the tribe create both a high-school and college course in the language. He continued teaching language classes until his 94th birthday last year. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Jul 21 20:05:47 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 13:05:47 -0700 Subject: Tribal elder co-writes book to help save language (fwd) Message-ID: Wed July 21, 2004 Tribal elder co-writes book to help save language By Karen Klinka The Oklahoman http://www.newsok.com/article/1281735/?template=news/main NORMAN - At an age when many people are content to rest on past accomplishments, Creek/Seminole elder Linda Alexander, 87, still is working to preserve the language and culture of her ancestors. Alexander, along with two co-authors, has written "Beginning Creek," a college-level textbook on the language and culture of the Mvskoke-speaking peoples, the Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole Indians. The book was published earlier this year by the University of Oklahoma Press. Alexander's co-authors are her daughter, Bertha Tilkens, a consultant who helps translate and administer health questionnaires to Muscogee and Seminole people for OU's College of Nursing, and Pamela Innes, assistant professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Wyoming at Laramie, who works with American Indian communities on issues of language revitalization and maintenance. Until her retirement several years ago, Alexander taught Mvskoke language classes at OU and at Oklahoma State University campuses in Stillwater and Tulsa. During a recent interview from her home in Norman, Alexander said she helped write the book in order to keep the Mvskoke language alive. "I did not want my language to fade away," Alexander said. "It's getting to the point where a lot of full-blooded Creek and Seminole Indians are getting educated in so many other things, but they aren't learning their own language. "And there are very few elderly Indian people left who know the language and are still able to explain things," she said. The walls of Alexander's living room display some prime examples of fine Oklahoma Indian art. On a tall shelf behind her favorite chair, dozens of photographs offer silent proof that Alexander, the mother of six, is the matriarch of a family that includes 31 grandchildren, 31 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren. Alexander said she hopes Creek, Seminole and other Indian students attending college can use her book to study the Mvskoke language as a way of fulfilling their "foreign" language requirement for graduation. The 256-page volume begins with a basic overview of Creek history and language, then each chapter introduces readers to a new grammatical feature, vocabulary set and series of conversational sentences. Accompanying the book are two compact discs that provide translation exercises from English to Mvskoke and from Mvskoke to English, and help to reinforce new words and concepts. The two audio CDs also present examples of ceremonial speech, songs and storytelling, and include pronunciations of Mvskoke language keyed to exercises and vocabulary lists in the book. Alexander and Tilkens, both fluent Mvskoke speakers, also contributed brief essays on Creek culture and history, with suggestions for further reading. In addition to writing a book, Alexander also serves as a resource for OU music professor Paula Conlon, who teaches world music, Indian music and ethnomusicology classes at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Conlon, who is not Indian, is doing research on contemporary stomp dancing in Oklahoma. Alexander has served as a tour guide for many of the OU professor's visits to some of the state's 17 sacred stomp grounds. "I know Linda has learned things from me," Conlon said, "but she's taught me so many things about the Indian way. She's a treasure." Alexander also has taught Conlon how to strap turtle-shell rattles to her legs and "shake shells" at stomp and corn dances. "Linda and I go to stomp dances together, and stomp dances often can last all night or until 2 a.m.," Conlon said. "On the way back from them, Linda will tell me Creek stories to keep me awake while we're driving. "Fortunately, she has lots of stories." A favorite is Alexander's Creek story of how the turtle got the cracks in its shell, Conlon said. Whenever she can, Conlon tries to write down Alexander's stories or to record them. Alexander approves of that. "I'm not the type of person who says, 'That's a secret,'" Alexander said. "If you die and nothing gets out, then there's no record of the things you do know. "How can people learn if you don't tell them?" From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 23 16:39:37 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 09:39:37 -0700 Subject: Which comes first, language or thought? (fwd) Message-ID: Which comes first, language or thought? Babies think first http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html By William J. Cromie Harvard News Office It's like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first. "Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects," says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. "These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later." Speakers of different languages notice different things and so make different distinctions. For example, when Koreans say that one object joins another, they specify whether the objects touch tightly or loosely. English speakers, in contrast, say whether one object is in or on another. Saying "I put the spoon cup" is not correct in either language. The spoon has to be "in" or "on" the cup in English, and has to be held tightly or loosely by the cup in Korean. These differences affect how adults view the world. When Koreans and Americans see the same everyday events (an apple in a bowl, a cap on a pen), they categorize them in accord with the distinctions of their languages. Because languages differ this way, many scientists suspected that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their language. That's wrong, Spelke insists. Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go unspoken when they get older. Spelke and Susan Hespos, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., did some clever experiments to show that the idea of tight/loose fitting comes before the words that are used/not used to describe it. When babies see something new, they will look at it until they get bored. Hespos and Spelke used this well-known fact to show different groups of five-month-olds a series of cylinders being placed in and on tight- or loose-fitting containers. The babies watched until they were bored and quit looking. After that happened, the researchers showed them other objects that fit tightly or loosely together. The change got and held their attention for a while, contrary to American college students who failed to notice it. This showed that babies raised in English-speaking communities were sensitive to separate categories of meaning used by Korean, but not by English, adult speakers. By the time the children grow up, their sensitivity to this distinction is lost. Other experiments show that infants use the distinction between tight and loose fits to predict how a container will behave when you move the object inside it. This capacity, then, "seems to be linked to mechanisms for representing objects and their motions," Hespos and Spelke report. Their findings suggest that language reduces sensitivity to thought distinctions not considered by the native language. "Because chimps and monkeys show similar expectations about objects, languages are probably built on concepts that evolved before humans did," Spelke suggests. The researchers describe their experiments and conclusions in the July 22 issue of the scientific journal Nature. The sounds of meaning Their findings parallel experiments done by others, which show that, before babies learn to talk for themselves, they are receptive to the sounds of all languages. But sensitivity to nonnative language sounds drops after the first year of life. "It's not that children become increasingly sensitive to distinctions made in the language they are exposed to," comments Paul Bloom of Yale University. Instead, they start off sensitive to every distinction that languages make, then they become insensitive to those that are irrelevant. They learn what to ignore, Bloom notes in an article accompanying the Hespos/Spelke report. As with words, if a child doesn't hear sound distinctions that it is capable of knowing, the youngster loses his or her ability to use them. It's a good example of use it or lose it. This is one reason why it is so difficult for adults to learn a second language, Bloom observes. "Adults' recognition of nonnative speech sounds may improve with training but rarely attains native facility," Spelke adds. Speech is for communicating so once a language is learned nothing is lost by ignoring sounds irrelevant to it. However, contrasts such as loose-versus-tight fit help us make sense of the world. Although mature English speakers don't spontaneously notice these categories, they have little difficulty distinguishing them when they are pointed out. Therefore, the effect of language experience may be more dramatic at the crossroad of hearing and sound than at the interface of thinking and word meaning, Hespos and Spelke say. Even if babies come equipped with all concepts that languages require, children may learn optional word meanings differently. Consider "fragile" or "delicately," which, unlike "in," you can leave out when you say "she delicately placed the spoon in the fragile cup." One view, Bloom points out, "is that there exists a universal core of meaningful distinctions that all humans share, but other distinctions that people make are shaped by the forces of language. On the other hand, language learning might really be the act of learning to express ideas that already exist," as in the case of the situation studied by Hespos and Spelke. There are lots of situations involving the relation between ideas and language that Hespos and Spelke did not address, so the debate is still open. Do people think before they speak or do words shape their thoughts? From mward at LUNA.CC.NM.US Fri Jul 23 20:45:37 2004 From: mward at LUNA.CC.NM.US (Matthew Ward) Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:45:37 -0600 Subject: Which comes first, language or thought? (fwd) Message-ID: Obviously, language is the primary way that human beings express thought, and obviously, language expresses the different ways of thinking practiced by different cultures, but there can be little debate that thought precedes language and is largely independent of it. After all, there are highly intelligent adults who can express complex thought in various ways but who happen to lack language. Clearly, complex thought is not dependent on complex speech. Even for the majority of us who are able to use language, we are all familiar with the experience of having a thought and being unable to express it. And then there are animals?~@~Tthe higher animals are unable to use language, but does that mean they do not have thoughts? Many studies on this subject, like the one below, show that people are somewhat more likely to remember categories or notice distinctions that are explicitly stated in their native languages, and this is interesting evidence of how language interacts with thought. However, the idea (once popular with linguistic determinists and still widely held by educated laypeople) that language is thought or that language is an insidious shaper of thought does not hold up to scrutiny. Many language preservationalists are attracted to the "language is thought" belief, because it seems to be a compelling reason for the preservation of language. Ironically, the same belief is frequently used against language preservation: "Navajo {or Tibetan, Basque, etc.} cannot possibly be used in the modern world because it allows only a way of thinking that somehow precludes understanding nuclear physics, stock markets, and electric nose-hair pullers." While the bigots refuse to acknowledge the enormous flexibility that all human language possesses, the preservationists sometimes miss the real reason for language preservation: how individual languages preserve and reflect the collective thinking of entire cultures: thousands of years of human interaction, idea-sharing and creativity. After all, it is much easier to transfer the simple expression of a world-view from one language to another than it is to transfer the myriad forms of cultural genius contained in each language that the world-view is based on. If the original language is lost, the culture loses this enormous wealth of collective genius, and that is the chief reason why language loss represents intellectual disaster. Cultures have stories, oral or written histories, songs, chants, poems, idioms, folk-sayings, and prayers, to name a few, and although many of these things can be translated with their literal meaning more or less preserved, they essentially become different works of art when they pass into another language. Even simple lexical items, with each word having a unique range of meanings and cultural and historical implications, hold a great key to thousands of years of human interaction. All of this is far more profound and important than mundane things like remembering colors based on the categories that ones native language possesses, or whether one notices that cylinders fit tightly or loosely into containers. I?~@~Ym not dismissing the importance of these studies, but I do not think that they will ever make compelling arguments for language diversity. phil cash cash wrote: >Which comes first, language or thought? >Babies think first >http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html > >By William J. Cromie >Harvard News Office > >It's like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we >speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with >five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first. > >"Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about >objects," says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. >"These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later." > >Speakers of different languages notice different things and so make >different distinctions. For example, when Koreans say that one object >joins another, they specify whether the objects touch tightly or >loosely. English speakers, in contrast, say whether one object is in or >on another. Saying "I put the spoon cup" is not correct in either >language. The spoon has to be "in" or "on" the cup in English, and has >to be held tightly or loosely by the cup in Korean. > >These differences affect how adults view the world. When Koreans and >Americans see the same everyday events (an apple in a bowl, a cap on a >pen), they categorize them in accord with the distinctions of their >languages. Because languages differ this way, many scientists suspected >that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their >language. That's wrong, Spelke insists. > >Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction >between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In >other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe >what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. >But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go >unspoken when they get older. > >Spelke and Susan Hespos, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in >Nashville, Tenn., did some clever experiments to show that the idea of >tight/loose fitting comes before the words that are used/not used to >describe it. > >When babies see something new, they will look at it until they get >bored. Hespos and Spelke used this well-known fact to show different >groups of five-month-olds a series of cylinders being placed in and on >tight- or loose-fitting containers. The babies watched until they were >bored and quit looking. After that happened, the researchers showed >them other objects that fit tightly or loosely together. The change got >and held their attention for a while, contrary to American college >students who failed to notice it. This showed that babies raised in >English-speaking communities were sensitive to separate categories of >meaning used by Korean, but not by English, adult speakers. By the time >the children grow up, their sensitivity to this distinction is lost. > >Other experiments show that infants use the distinction between tight >and loose fits to predict how a container will behave when you move the >object inside it. This capacity, then, "seems to be linked to >mechanisms for representing objects and their motions," Hespos and >Spelke report. > >Their findings suggest that language reduces sensitivity to thought >distinctions not considered by the native language. "Because chimps and >monkeys show similar expectations about objects, languages are probably >built on concepts that evolved before humans did," Spelke suggests. > >The researchers describe their experiments and conclusions in the July >22 issue of the scientific journal Nature. > >The sounds of meaning > >Their findings parallel experiments done by others, which show that, >before babies learn to talk for themselves, they are receptive to the >sounds of all languages. But sensitivity to nonnative language sounds >drops after the first year of life. "It's not that children become >increasingly sensitive to distinctions made in the language they are >exposed to," comments Paul Bloom of Yale University. Instead, they >start off sensitive to every distinction that languages make, then they >become insensitive to those that are irrelevant. They learn what to >ignore, Bloom notes in an article accompanying the Hespos/Spelke >report. > >As with words, if a child doesn't hear sound distinctions that it is >capable of knowing, the youngster loses his or her ability to use them. >It's a good example of use it or lose it. This is one reason why it is >so difficult for adults to learn a second language, Bloom observes. >"Adults' recognition of nonnative speech sounds may improve with >training but rarely attains native facility," Spelke adds. > >Speech is for communicating so once a language is learned nothing is >lost by ignoring sounds irrelevant to it. However, contrasts such as >loose-versus-tight fit help us make sense of the world. Although mature >English speakers don't spontaneously notice these categories, they have >little difficulty distinguishing them when they are pointed out. >Therefore, the effect of language experience may be more dramatic at >the crossroad of hearing and sound than at the interface of thinking >and word meaning, Hespos and Spelke say. > >Even if babies come equipped with all concepts that languages require, >children may learn optional word meanings differently. Consider >"fragile" or "delicately," which, unlike "in," you can leave out when >you say "she delicately placed the spoon in the fragile cup." > >One view, Bloom points out, "is that there exists a universal core of >meaningful distinctions that all humans share, but other distinctions >that people make are shaped by the forces of language. On the other >hand, language learning might really be the act of learning to express >ideas that already exist," as in the case of the situation studied by >Hespos and Spelke. > >There are lots of situations involving the relation between ideas and >language that Hespos and Spelke did not address, so the debate is still >open. Do people think before they speak or do words shape their >thoughts? > > > From miakalish at REDPONY.US Fri Jul 23 20:57:37 2004 From: miakalish at REDPONY.US (Mia - Main Red Pony) Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:57:37 -0600 Subject: Which comes first, language or thought? (fwd) Message-ID: I can recommend Vygotsky, Thought and Language, translated by Hanfmann and Vakar. Although old, it contains a precise and developmentally detailed discussion of the issue using analysis of the writings of Piaget, who for a long time dominated developmental psychology, and other theories of language development. Current research in biology has uncovered dynamical systems that require language as representation. Additional research has shown that bats have more than 40 meaning-laden "calls". Certain wasps create and care for up to 15 nests, with differently-aged larvae in each, where each requires a different type of food. Such systems are complex, and require representational systems, which in human sytems are called 'language'. I believe that the assumption that only humans have language is false and is based both on unexamined assumptions and independent biases, some fueled by religious beliefs and others by discussions of Chomsky's proposed and vehemently defended "language module". What is most true about language and thought is that most people don't understand either one, nor the relationship between the two. Patricia Kuhl has done extensive research on how human infants form models of understanding. What is clear from her research is that the children, even the infant-sized ones, have cognitive models to which they are matching movements. Some of these movements include word formation and speechifying. Children first mold themselves to the models in their heads, and then move the modeled understandings to their extremities. "Language" is a multi-component object. When one understands and can physically represent each and every component, and each component's function in different processes, plus each component's diachronic variation over time and by process, then one sees the quetion of chickens, eggs, thought, and language as an exercise in sophistry. Mia Kalish Tularosa ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matthew Ward" To: Sent: Friday, July 23, 2004 2:45 PM Subject: Re: Which comes first, language or thought? (fwd) Obviously, language is the primary way that human beings express thought, and obviously, language expresses the different ways of thinking practiced by different cultures, but there can be little debate that thought precedes language and is largely independent of it. After all, there are highly intelligent adults who can express complex thought in various ways but who happen to lack language. Clearly, complex thought is not dependent on complex speech. Even for the majority of us who are able to use language, we are all familiar with the experience of having a thought and being unable to express it. And then there are animals?~@~Tthe higher animals are unable to use language, but does that mean they do not have thoughts? Many studies on this subject, like the one below, show that people are somewhat more likely to remember categories or notice distinctions that are explicitly stated in their native languages, and this is interesting evidence of how language interacts with thought. However, the idea (once popular with linguistic determinists and still widely held by educated laypeople) that language is thought or that language is an insidious shaper of thought does not hold up to scrutiny. Many language preservationalists are attracted to the "language is thought" belief, because it seems to be a compelling reason for the preservation of language. Ironically, the same belief is frequently used against language preservation: "Navajo {or Tibetan, Basque, etc.} cannot possibly be used in the modern world because it allows only a way of thinking that somehow precludes understanding nuclear physics, stock markets, and electric nose-hair pullers." While the bigots refuse to acknowledge the enormous flexibility that all human language possesses, the preservationists sometimes miss the real reason for language preservation: how individual languages preserve and reflect the collective thinking of entire cultures: thousands of years of human interaction, idea-sharing and creativity. After all, it is much easier to transfer the simple expression of a world-view from one language to another than it is to transfer the myriad forms of cultural genius contained in each language that the world-view is based on. If the original language is lost, the culture loses this enormous wealth of collective genius, and that is the chief reason why language loss represents intellectual disaster. Cultures have stories, oral or written histories, songs, chants, poems, idioms, folk-sayings, and prayers, to name a few, and although many of these things can be translated with their literal meaning more or less preserved, they essentially become different works of art when they pass into another language. Even simple lexical items, with each word having a unique range of meanings and cultural and historical implications, hold a great key to thousands of years of human interaction. All of this is far more profound and important than mundane things like remembering colors based on the categories that ones native language possesses, or whether one notices that cylinders fit tightly or loosely into containers. I?~@~Ym not dismissing the importance of these studies, but I do not think that they will ever make compelling arguments for language diversity. phil cash cash wrote: >Which comes first, language or thought? >Babies think first >http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html > >By William J. Cromie >Harvard News Office > >It's like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we >speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with >five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first. > >"Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about >objects," says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. >"These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later." > >Speakers of different languages notice different things and so make >different distinctions. For example, when Koreans say that one object >joins another, they specify whether the objects touch tightly or >loosely. English speakers, in contrast, say whether one object is in or >on another. Saying "I put the spoon cup" is not correct in either >language. The spoon has to be "in" or "on" the cup in English, and has >to be held tightly or loosely by the cup in Korean. > >These differences affect how adults view the world. When Koreans and >Americans see the same everyday events (an apple in a bowl, a cap on a >pen), they categorize them in accord with the distinctions of their >languages. Because languages differ this way, many scientists suspected >that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their >language. That's wrong, Spelke insists. > >Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction >between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In >other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe >what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. >But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go >unspoken when they get older. > >Spelke and Susan Hespos, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in >Nashville, Tenn., did some clever experiments to show that the idea of >tight/loose fitting comes before the words that are used/not used to >describe it. > >When babies see something new, they will look at it until they get >bored. Hespos and Spelke used this well-known fact to show different >groups of five-month-olds a series of cylinders being placed in and on >tight- or loose-fitting containers. The babies watched until they were >bored and quit looking. After that happened, the researchers showed >them other objects that fit tightly or loosely together. The change got >and held their attention for a while, contrary to American college >students who failed to notice it. This showed that babies raised in >English-speaking communities were sensitive to separate categories of >meaning used by Korean, but not by English, adult speakers. By the time >the children grow up, their sensitivity to this distinction is lost. > >Other experiments show that infants use the distinction between tight >and loose fits to predict how a container will behave when you move the >object inside it. This capacity, then, "seems to be linked to >mechanisms for representing objects and their motions," Hespos and >Spelke report. > >Their findings suggest that language reduces sensitivity to thought >distinctions not considered by the native language. "Because chimps and >monkeys show similar expectations about objects, languages are probably >built on concepts that evolved before humans did," Spelke suggests. > >The researchers describe their experiments and conclusions in the July >22 issue of the scientific journal Nature. > >The sounds of meaning > >Their findings parallel experiments done by others, which show that, >before babies learn to talk for themselves, they are receptive to the >sounds of all languages. But sensitivity to nonnative language sounds >drops after the first year of life. "It's not that children become >increasingly sensitive to distinctions made in the language they are >exposed to," comments Paul Bloom of Yale University. Instead, they >start off sensitive to every distinction that languages make, then they >become insensitive to those that are irrelevant. They learn what to >ignore, Bloom notes in an article accompanying the Hespos/Spelke >report. > >As with words, if a child doesn't hear sound distinctions that it is >capable of knowing, the youngster loses his or her ability to use them. >It's a good example of use it or lose it. This is one reason why it is >so difficult for adults to learn a second language, Bloom observes. >"Adults' recognition of nonnative speech sounds may improve with >training but rarely attains native facility," Spelke adds. > >Speech is for communicating so once a language is learned nothing is >lost by ignoring sounds irrelevant to it. However, contrasts such as >loose-versus-tight fit help us make sense of the world. Although mature >English speakers don't spontaneously notice these categories, they have >little difficulty distinguishing them when they are pointed out. >Therefore, the effect of language experience may be more dramatic at >the crossroad of hearing and sound than at the interface of thinking >and word meaning, Hespos and Spelke say. > >Even if babies come equipped with all concepts that languages require, >children may learn optional word meanings differently. Consider >"fragile" or "delicately," which, unlike "in," you can leave out when >you say "she delicately placed the spoon in the fragile cup." > >One view, Bloom points out, "is that there exists a universal core of >meaningful distinctions that all humans share, but other distinctions >that people make are shaped by the forces of language. On the other >hand, language learning might really be the act of learning to express >ideas that already exist," as in the case of the situation studied by >Hespos and Spelke. > >There are lots of situations involving the relation between ideas and >language that Hespos and Spelke did not address, so the debate is still >open. Do people think before they speak or do words shape their >thoughts? > > > From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 26 17:02:39 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:02:39 -0700 Subject: Senate speech printed in Lakota (fwd) Message-ID: Senate speech printed in Lakota http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2004/07/24/news/state/state04.txt WASHINGTON ? Tunkasila Mila Hanska Oyate ki lel un gluwitapi. No, that wasn't a typographical error covering two-thirds of page S8579 of the Congressional Record published Friday. It was a speech Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., had delivered in English in the Senate on Thursday and had printed in the record in both English and Lakota, an American Indian language. It is unusual for a foreign language to appear in the record, the official chronicle of remarks made in the House and Senate since 1876. It is rarer still for the comments to be in an American Indian language. "I'm certainly not aware of anything like this happening earlier in the Congressional Record," Senate Historian Richard Baker said of an Indian language being printed in the daily publication. The Lakota words at the beginning of Daschle's speech mean, "President, Americans are united." Senators usually open their floor comments by addressing the senator who is presiding over the chamber, technically the Senate's president pro tempore or acting president. In his comments, Daschle did not mention that he is in a tight re-election race this fall in a state whose population is 8 percent American Indian. The Lakota are a branch of the Great Sioux nation. Daschle used his speech to hail the "code talkers" of World War II. Those were troops from the Navajo, Lakota and about 15 other American Indian nations who sent messages in their own languages during World War I and World War II that the enemy could not understand. Daschle said one way to honor the code talkers would be try preserving Indian languages, which are rapidly fading away. Only half the 300 Indian languages once used in what is now the United States are still spoken, and the rest are expected to vanish in decades, he said. It costs $611 per page to publish the record each day, distribute it and place it on the Internet, said Government Printing Office spokeswoman Veronica Meter. About 7,000 copies are printed daily. Meter said she did not know if the record has been printed before in a Native American language. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 26 17:11:32 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:11:32 -0700 Subject: Study of ancient local languages seeing revival in North County (fwd) Message-ID: Study of ancient local languages seeing revival in North County By: BRUCE KAUFFMAN - Staff Writer http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/07/25/special_reports/science_technology/19_48_107_24_04.txt SAN MARCOS ---- Palomar College teacher Linda Locklear became a student again this summer, enrolling in a class in Luiseno, a language indigenous to San Diego County and believed to be the first spoken here. It's the second summer she's studied the language in a formal Palomar course, a course the 30-year veteran American Indian studies professor lobbied for years to get in the regular curriculum for credit. A unanimous vote of the Palomar board of trustees in December 2001 put Luiseno, a language spoken in North County for centuries before Europeans arrived, into the catalogue. Now the movement is building to develop an entire new generation of people who speak this ancient language of several North County and Southwest Riverside County tribes, including the Rincon, La Jolla, Pechanga, Pauma and Pala. Luiseno, educators said in interviews this week, is spoken now by a sparse few and needs to be nurtured. And along with offerings this academic year that will advance the skills of those who took introductory Luiseno, the college for the first time this August begins a formal, for-credit course in Cupeno. It is among 90 to 100 pre-European languages native to Southern California, and the language spoken by a tribe known as the Cupeno who were forced in 1903 to leave its land in Warner Hot Springs and resettle at the Pala Reservation. Both Luiseno and Cupeno are now to count toward meeting the requirement in both the California State University and the University of California systems that students learn a foreign language in order to graduate, said Steven Crouthamel, the chair of the American Indian studies department at Palomar. At Cal State San Marcos, senior Shalene Molina is getting university credit for her study of Luiseno. She will have taken three ever-more advanced classes at Palomar by the time her undergraduate course work is done at the end of the fall 2004 semester. A human development major who lives on the La Jolla Indian Reservation, Molina, who describes herself as Luiseno, Cupeno and Diegueno, said Luiseno should survive to serve as a living expression of American Indian culture. "I just don't want the language to be lost," she said by phone from the reservation Friday. "It's important to carry it on." Molina is one of 425 students who have studied Luiseno and Cupeno in 16 non-credit and for-credit classes at Palomar since 2002, college officials said. Trial runs of the courses go back to the mid-1970s. By 2005, said professor Locklear, a plan to add Kumeyaay, the language of Los Coyotes, may be realized. Said Locklear, who took the course with her 6-year-old grandson, Narsall, "I can count to five (in Luiseno), I know my colors, and I can tell a story." The story is one that linguist Eric Elliott, the sole Luiseno teacher at Palomar, aims to have his students passing on in the original from generation to generation. In English, it would be called "Mr. and Mrs. Tiger and the Frog." The story, as Elliott related it in an interview Thursday, involves a boastful frog who is caught alone with Mrs. Tiger by her husband. The male tiger examines the frog's every tale and finds them to be full of falsehoods, including the frog's claim to have been a decorated soldier who can beat anybody up. "Do anything to me," the frog pleads with Mr. Tiger after being thoroughly unmasked, "but don't kick me into the pond." And that's exactly what Mr. Tiger does, as the frog swims off and survives because of the wiliness of his plea. It's about the eternal battle between truth and falsehood, said Elliott, and a worthy vessel to carry the intricate Luiseno language and instill its sounds and words in children. Elliott, 43, a part-time professor at the college and a married father of three who says he's very aware that he's a white man, taught the course for the first time in 2002 "live" at the Palomar Education Center on the Pauma Reservation. But after he was named to a full-time teaching post at the Pechanga Reservation, the Chula Vista resident turned to the World Wide Web and online classes as a way to solve the grueling problem of his commute. In 2003 and earlier this year, students heard Elliott teach the language spoken via audio stream after they linked to their electronic classroom from the college Web site at www.palomar.edu. For the fall semester, online video of Elliott holding forth will be added. "This is pretty revolutionary," Elliott said. "I don't know any place except Palomar that's trying to get these courses out there, especially in Southern California." Elliot studied with the late Villiana Hyde, a native speaker of the Rincon dialect of Luiseno who in "Yumayk, Yumayk" (translated as 'long, long ago') wrote down the fairy tales and various histories that were spoken and passed down through the generations. Her first book, "Introduction to the Luiseno Language," was published in 1971. Elliott expects to be working with a 19-year-old Palomar graduate and UC Riverside Native American studies major named Paul Miranda this fall semester as Palomar offers Cupeno online for the first time. Miranda, who grew up on the Pala Reservation and calls it home, said he would be the first Cupeno person to teach college-level Cupeno in the region. Miranda says he will draw from a English-Cupeno dictionary, complete with Cupeno legends, that has been in his family "a long time," a work by the late Rocinda Nolasquez called "Mulu'wetam." It's all the more important that the language be revived, Miranda said, because, along with the other indigenous languages, it was suppressed. "There was a story about one girl who spoke Cupeno in class and the nun took her tongue and put it on a frozen pole and a piece of it chipped off," Miranda said. Palomar's Locklear, a sociologist and a Lumbee Indian from the southeast part of North Carolina, said preserving languages such as Luiseno and Cupeno is vital because the words reflect the special views of the world held by those peoples. "You can't pray the same way in English," she said. "The songs are not the same, the world view is not the same. The language is really kind of the heart of the culture and, without the language, your culture is really deprived." Contact staff writer Bruce Kauffman at (760) 761-4410 or bkauffman at nctimes.com. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 26 17:32:06 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:32:06 -0700 Subject: Dompok: Big leap in preserving mother tongues (fwd) Message-ID: Dompok: Big leap in preserving mother tongues 25 July, 2004 http://www.dailyexpress.com.my/news.cfm?NewsID=28287 THE first Timugon Murut-Malay dictionary was launched Saturday after two decades of meticulous research headed by linguists, Richard Brewis and wife Kielo Brewis. The project for the dictionary, containing 3,700 word roots, began in 1983 when the Brewises, who are attached with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) Malaysia branch, started collecting data for the language as well as information on the culture and customs of the Timugon people. Timugon is one of the Murut tribes. Murut, in turn, is among the major native ethnic groups in Sabah. Minister in the Prime Minister?s Department Tan Sri Bernard Dompok, who launched the dictionary, said its successful completion signified a major achievement in the effort to preserve the mother tongues of the people in Sabah. ?It will be in danger of dying out along with other minority languages if we do nothing to preserve it,? he said. The dictionary was also another step forward towards providing teaching materials in the event that the language be taught in schools in the future, he said. ?There?s still a lot more to be done...the Murut language has been proposed to be accepted as a subject in the Malaysian schools curriculum but I think the problem lies with insufficient teaching materials. ?The Government is sympathetic with the proposal but perhaps we are not quite ready in terms of teaching materials and also the staffing,? he said. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Jul 26 17:36:31 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:36:31 -0700 Subject: Maori language week kicks off (fwd) Message-ID: Maori language week kicks off http://tvnz.co.nz/view/news_national_story_skin/438183%3fformat=html Jul 26, 2004 Maori language week starts on Monday as part of a continuing campaign to encourage more people to embrace New Zealand's indigenous language. It's 30?years since a movement began aimed at recognising the importance of Te Reo Maori. A petition in support of the language was?presented at the steps of parliament.? Te Reo Maori was the most frequently spoken and written language in New Zealand?in the 1840s. Since then the struggle to maintain Te Reo Maori as an?official language has been an uphill battle. See related video for more information From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Tue Jul 27 19:00:56 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 12:00:56 -0700 Subject: Better Late Message-ID: DAY OF ACTION TO SAVE KLAMATH SALMON Let Scottish Power hear from you! http://capwiz.com/friendsoftheriver/mail/compose/?alertid=6090101&target=CU&customid=6089531&type=CU WEDNESDAY, JULY 21 is a day of action for Klamath River supporters. Members of the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, and Klamath Tribes and staffers from Friends of the River and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen~Rs Associations need your help to make an impression on Scottish Power! You can help by sending an email to the Scottish Power Board of Directors on July 21, just days before their annual shareholders~R meeting. In your message let the Board of Directors know that: -Their American subsidiary, PacifiCorp, is not living up to their ~Sgreen~T standards -The Klamath fishery is the basis for unique and important Native American cultures. These cultures cannot exist without salmon. -The dams block access to over 350 miles of historic spawning habitat -Share your personal experiences and feelings The leaders of the Karuk, Hoopa, Yurok, and Klamath Tribes request that your letters be kind. The goal is to let the companies leaders in Scotland know more about the situation and the people of the Klamath Basin. WHO IS SCOTTISH POWER? Scottish Power is a large multinational energy company that owns PacifiCorp who in turn own and operate the Klamath dams. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH KLAMATH DAMS? The Klamath dams are in the process of being relicensed by the federal government. Since the new license will last from 30 to 50 years, now is the time to make changes. We hope to convince the federal government and Scottish Power, to work Tribes, environmentalists, and fishermen to provide for fish passage. This means some dams, like the towering Iron Gate, will need to be removed and other smaller dams fitted with functional ladders. From miakalish at REDPONY.US Wed Jul 28 13:09:47 2004 From: miakalish at REDPONY.US (Mia - Main Red Pony) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 07:09:47 -0600 Subject: Better Late Message-ID: Is this still current? Today is the 27th, and this just ended up in my box. ????? Mia ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andre Cramblit" To: Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2004 1:00 PM Subject: Better Late DAY OF ACTION TO SAVE KLAMATH SALMON Let Scottish Power hear from you! http://capwiz.com/friendsoftheriver/mail/compose/?alertid=6090101&target=CU& customid=6089531&type=CU WEDNESDAY, JULY 21 is a day of action for Klamath River supporters. Members of the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, and Klamath Tribes and staffers from Friends of the River and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen~Rs Associations need your help to make an impression on Scottish Power! You can help by sending an email to the Scottish Power Board of Directors on July 21, just days before their annual shareholders~R meeting. In your message let the Board of Directors know that: -Their American subsidiary, PacifiCorp, is not living up to their ~Sgreen~T standards -The Klamath fishery is the basis for unique and important Native American cultures. These cultures cannot exist without salmon. -The dams block access to over 350 miles of historic spawning habitat -Share your personal experiences and feelings The leaders of the Karuk, Hoopa, Yurok, and Klamath Tribes request that your letters be kind. The goal is to let the companies leaders in Scotland know more about the situation and the people of the Klamath Basin. WHO IS SCOTTISH POWER? Scottish Power is a large multinational energy company that owns PacifiCorp who in turn own and operate the Klamath dams. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH KLAMATH DAMS? The Klamath dams are in the process of being relicensed by the federal government. Since the new license will last from 30 to 50 years, now is the time to make changes. We hope to convince the federal government and Scottish Power, to work Tribes, environmentalists, and fishermen to provide for fish passage. This means some dams, like the towering Iron Gate, will need to be removed and other smaller dams fitted with functional ladders. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Jul 28 12:55:35 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 05:55:35 -0700 Subject: Native American Languages Pull Disappearing Act (fwd) Message-ID: Wednesday??July 28, 2004??? ??? KGUN 9 NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGES PULL DISAPPEARING ACT By Dave Hecht (7/16/04) http://www.kgun9.com/story.asp?TitleID=3835&ProgramOption=News In their small office at the University of Arizona, Dr. Susan Penfield and graduate student Phillip Cash Cash are working against the clock to save a cultural treasure before it's too late. "Language is really the backbone of our culture," said Cash Cash.?? "And even if you don't speak the language, we're at a loss when you lose that kind of diversity," added Penfield. Today, fewer and fewer Native Americans are able to speak their tribal language.??Of those languages, many dialects are on the verge of extinction.??For example, only 30 people are able to speak Mohave.??And to make matters worse, the majority of those people are 70-years old. Here in the United States, there are 150 native languages still being spoken today.??And as the number of native speakers continues to dwindle, "by the year 2050, only 30 of those languages will survive," said Cash Cash. It's a problem not limited to the United States.??Nearly 90-percent of the world's six thousand spoken languages will also disappear by 2050. To save the spoken word, Penfield and Cash Cash are counting on technology.??Thanks to a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they are teaching tribal members how to use 21st century technology to preserve their native languages.??So far they have helped tribes all across the country including Tohote Otum, Hopi, Apache and the Navajo. With computers, voice recorders, video tape recorders and any other electronics the tribes can lay their hands on, "they produce a language lesson in their native language and target that lesson to everyone from grade school students on up to adult learners," Their goal is simple, to increase the number of native speakers so that these cultural treasures don't become the Latin of tomorrow. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Jul 28 13:27:28 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 06:27:28 -0700 Subject: Academic says Maori immersion classes divisive (fwd) Message-ID: Academic says Maori immersion classes divisive 27 July 2004 http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2984005a8153,00.html An Auckland academic has been accused of putting a damper on Maori Language Week by describing Maori immersion teaching as a major cause of ethnic division. Elizabeth Rata, a lecturer at the Auckland College of Education, has been criticised by Maori language leaders for a 19-page report she released this month. In her report, Ethnic Ideologies in New Zealand Education: What's Wrong with Kaupapa Maori, she described Maori initiatives such as total Maori immersion language schools, or kura kaupapa Maori, as being flawed. "Kaupapa Maori contributes to creating ethnic division, is anti-democratic and fundamentalist," Dr Rata said. "Nothing is sacred, everything must be scrutinised and I am simply calling on New Zealanders to do that." Dr Rata, a principal lecturer in the faculty of postgraduate studies and research, also claims that kaupapa Maori: # Is not scrutinised enough. # Has become too influential in government education policy. # Reinforces the victimhood mentality. # Is intellectually flawed. # Is scientifically flawed. The chief executive of the Maori Language Commission, Haami Piripi, said he welcomed scrutiny, but he described Dr Rata as being the "female equivalent of Don Brash". "She's an ignorant academic who has had her head in the books for too long. I had never heard of her until three weeks ago when I attended a conference she spoke at. "A lot of people walked out of the room when she spoke and even the Pakeha academics there were questioning her. Apparently she has got personal hang-ups with some Maori people." Mr Piripi said Maori Language Week would go ahead full steam. "This is going to be our biggest Maori Language Week ever, and if she thinks she can get rid of kaupapa Maori then she needs to wake up." Wiremu Doherty, the tumuaki (principal) at New Zealand's first total immersion Maori language school, Te Kura o Hoani Waititi in Waitakere City, said kaupapa Maori was about being inclusive, not exclusive. "Kaupapa Maori has nothing to do with anything that she is talking about. It's about empowering Maori, not defying other groups. "Kaupapa Maori is about being independent and self-sufficient, knowing who you are as a Maori, where you come from and where you are going." Dr Rata, who is also an honorary research fellow in the department of political studies at the University of Auckland, said she had been researching kaupapa Maori for the past 10 years. But when asked if she spoke Maori or had ever visited a Maori language school or traditional marae, she refused to answer. "That is personal information," Dr Rata said. "It has nothing to do with what I'm researching." The Education Review Office regularly issues reports evaluating kura kaupapa Maori, as it does with mainstream schools. In a 2002 report it said this about the effectiveness of kura kaupapa Maori: "While ERO has concerns about the delivery of education at many kura kaupapa Maori, some kura are providing excellent educations for their students. "Many of the factors which make for good performance in kura kaupapa are the same as those which would be found in high-performing mainstream schools." From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Jul 28 13:30:38 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 06:30:38 -0700 Subject: Maori And Indigenous Education (Iri) Statement (fwd) Message-ID: Maori And Indigenous Education (Iri) Statement Wednesday, 28 July 2004, 8:54 am Press Release: International Research Institute http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/ED0407/S00077.htm International Research Institute For Maori And Indigenous Education (Iri) And Te Aratiatia (Maori Education, The University Of Auckland. The recent attack by Elizabeth Rata on Kaupapa Maori developments highlights a disturbing trend of racism being disguised as public debate. Director of the International Research Institue for Maori and Indigenous Education, Dr Leonie Pihama, states that the comments by Elizabeth Rata where couched within an "almost unintelligible academic language" do in fact merely reflect the Don Brash position that Maori language and culture have little significance in this country. Dr Pihama states "Elizabeth Rata has used her academic position to promote a totally uninformed view of Kaupapa Maori and Maori Education. The 'research' she purports to have undertaken is seriously devoid of any input by Maori in the sector and rehashes a range of articles and reports that have already been challenged". Claims by Rata that Kaupapa Maori is 'anti-democratic and fundamentalist' have no substance in that all Kaupapa Maori initiatives have been open for others, including Elizabeth Rata, to be involved. Furthermore, Dr Pihama highlights that the claim that Kaupapa Maori is 'intellectually and scientifically flawed' is one that Rata fails to verify. Dr Pihama notes that "Kaupapa Maori initiatives are grounded within a strong Maori intellectual, cultural, spiritual and scientific base. Just because Maori knowledge is not viewed in the same way as western knowledge by people like Elizabeth Rata, does not make it any less robust." As Director of IRI, Dr Pihama advocates a Kaupapa Maori approach to research and in fact Maori authors, Dr Graham Smith, Dr Linda Smith and Dr Fiona Cram, referred to by Rata in her paper are closely involved with the Institute. A Kaupapa Maori approach acknowledges clearly that matauranga Maori is a valid and highly complex knowledge system that offers a unique way of analyzing issues for Maori both historically and in contemporary times. The underlying assumptions are clearly stated, it is about validating a cultural knowledge base and approach to research and education. Dr Pihama contends that where Kaupapa Maori clearly states up front its intentions, Elizabeth Rata does not afford the public with the same , rather she operates under a guise of academic scrutiny when there is in fact much more going on. Dr Pihama states; "Elizabeth Rata is a Pakeha woman who has had major personal differences with Maori people working in Kaupapa Maori initiatives and as such I seriously question her intentions. Hiding her own intentions under a claim that she is seeking subjective scrutiny is quite unacceptable, as it denies her own self-interest." Maori Academic, Jenny Lee, also questions Rata's criticism of Kaupapa Maori as promoting primordial ethnic divisions. Lee, who teaches in the area of race, ethnicity and Education, notes that such statements show an ignorance of Kaupapa Maori and a limited understanding of ethnicity. Lee states "definitions of ethnicity are widely debated, complex and range from primordial to political explanations of ethnic formation. Most theorists, however, acknowledge that ethnicity is usually influenced by both primordial and political elements, that is, culture (and knowledge) is protected and passed down to the next generation while simultaneously responding to challenges in the contemporary context." Ms Lee contends that the promotion of ethnic cultural traditions does not mean that there is a non-acceptance of ethnic fluidity, to the contrary Kaupapa Maori acknowledges that as a result of colonisation Maori are as diverse as any other group. Furthermore Lee states "Strengthening Maori ethnicity, whether it be primordial or political, is about asserting and exploring our indigeneity, our position as tangata whenua, that is not creating divisions. There is no reason for Elizabeth Rata or any other person to be threatened by that". ENDS From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Wed Jul 28 16:20:31 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 09:20:31 -0700 Subject: Contacting Scottish Power Message-ID: If You want to write the man, feel free: gordon.mcgregor at scottishpower.com If you have any queries on their commitment to communities please contact the ScottishPower Corporate Communications, 1 Atlantic Quay, Glasgow G2 8SP or email at communityreport at scottishpower.com From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Wed Jul 28 16:50:56 2004 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 09:50:56 -0700 Subject: Better Late In-Reply-To: <000d01c474a4$2b140f50$6400a8c0@computer> Message-ID: A letter will still help Mia - Main Red Pony wrote: >Is this still current? Today is the 27th, and this just ended up in my box. > >????? > >Mia > >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Andre Cramblit" >To: >Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2004 1:00 PM >Subject: Better Late > > >DAY OF ACTION TO SAVE KLAMATH SALMON >Let Scottish Power hear from you! >http://capwiz.com/friendsoftheriver/mail/compose/?alertid=6090101&target=CU& >customid=6089531&type=CU > >WEDNESDAY, JULY 21 is a day of action for Klamath River supporters. >Members of the Karuk, Yurok, Hoopa, and Klamath Tribes and staffers from >Friends of the River and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen~Rs >Associations need your help to make an impression on Scottish Power! > >You can help by sending an email to the Scottish Power Board of >Directors on July 21, just days before their annual shareholders~R >meeting. In your message let the Board of Directors know that: > >-Their American subsidiary, PacifiCorp, is not living up to their >~Sgreen~T standards > >-The Klamath fishery is the basis for unique and important Native >American cultures. These cultures cannot exist without salmon. > >-The dams block access to over 350 miles of historic spawning habitat > >-Share your personal experiences and feelings > >The leaders of the Karuk, Hoopa, Yurok, and Klamath Tribes request that >your letters be kind. The goal is to let the companies leaders in >Scotland know more about the situation and the people of the Klamath Basin. > >WHO IS SCOTTISH POWER? >Scottish Power is a large multinational energy company that owns >PacifiCorp who in turn own and operate the Klamath dams. > >WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH KLAMATH DAMS? >The Klamath dams are in the process of being relicensed by the federal >government. Since the new license will last from 30 to 50 years, now is >the time to make changes. We hope to convince the federal government and >Scottish Power, to work Tribes, environmentalists, and fishermen to >provide for fish passage. This means some dams, like the towering Iron >Gate, will need to be removed and other smaller dams fitted with >functional ladders. > > > -- Andr? Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org is the Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs of American Indians To subscribe to a news letter of interest to Natives send an email to: IndigenousNewsNetwork-subscribe at topica.com or go to: http://www.topica.com/lists/IndigenousNewsNetwork/subscribe/?location=listinfo From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Jul 29 15:46:09 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 08:46:09 -0700 Subject: Aboriginal languages for curriculum (fwd) Message-ID: Aboriginal languages for curriculum 30jul04 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10289061%255E421,00.html ABORIGINAL language studies will become a major part of the school curriculum in an Australian first that takes indigenous education to a new level across New South Wales. The formal lessons in Aboriginal languages will be driven by demand from local communities, but it is hoped thousands of non-indigenous students will support the program. NSW Education Minister Andrew Refshauge today will launch a new syllabus for mandatory and elective courses in Aboriginal languages for students from Kindergarten to Year 10. Students in Government and independent schools will be able to study an Aboriginal language subject in primary school, for their School Certificate and for the HSC. Initiatives to teach and revive the state's 70 indigenous languages will be spearheaded by specialists who will help teachers in the classroom. Under the new policy: * A KINDERGARTEN to Year 10 syllabus will be introduced from 2005, enabling any student in the state to study an Aboriginal language; * MORE than $1 million already has been spent establishing an Aboriginal Languages Research and Resource Centre providing technical support to indigenous communities; * AN Aboriginal languages database will become available to schools and communities from 2005; and * NEW guidelines will help Aboriginal communities trying to revive or teach their local language Education sources indicated yesterday that primary schools could spend at least half an hour a week on Aboriginal language lessons. At Darlington Public School, children already are learning how to count, sing and identify body parts in the Wiradjuri language. Teachers said reaction had been positive, but they were careful not to "tread on the toes" of community members who were not supportive. Primary principal Cheryl McBride said the syllabus would give Aboriginal pupils a sense of pride and recognition. Opposition spokeswoman Jillian Skinner also supported the plan, as long as core subjects were not neglected. It is understood about 80 schools have applied for resources to run the programs; about 25 are being funded. Dr Refshauge said learning a language helped improve comprehension and literacy. ? The Australian From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Jul 29 15:50:06 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 08:50:06 -0700 Subject: Minding the language: students give voice to endangered words (fwd) Message-ID: Minding the language: students give voice to endangered words By Kelly Burke, Education Reporter July 30, 2004 http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/29/1091080381836.html?oneclick=true# [photo insert - Hear us out ... students at Darlington Public School with a banner created by them and used in the teaching of the endangered Wiradjuri language. Photo: Tamara Dean] It's little lunch at Darlington Public School, and between mouthfuls of bread and peanut butter Mikaela Welsh is trying out her newly acquired skills in the Wiradjuri language. "Nyan," she says, pointing to her shy, sticky grin. "Nyan - that's mouth." Although her Dhan-gadi family hail from the opposite end of the state to where the Wiradjuri language is spoken, Mikaela - as much as any seven-year-old is capable of seeing the bigger picture - knows she is contributing to the revitalisation a crucial part of Aboriginal culture under threat of extinction. Her classmate, Ji Duncan-Weatherby, whose mother comes from the Kamilaroi language group in central NSW, shares the passion, along with fellow year 1 and 2 students Jonathon Sandstrom, Mali Sinclair and Nericia Brown, whose family origins lie in Lebanon, Fiji and China respectively. It is two years since the NSW office of the Board of Studies admitted there was not a single child in the state who could competently speak one of more than 60 indigenous languages. Now, Darlington Public, in the inner Sydney suburb of Chippendale, where a quarter of the students are Aboriginal, is part of a changing tide, precipitated by this country's first indigenous languages policy. Advertisement Advertisement Today, the NSW Education Minister, Andrew Refshauge, will launch the cornerstone of that policy - a new Aboriginal language syllabus for kindergarten to year 10, expected to be adopted by about 80 schools across the state from the beginning of next year. Dr Refshauge said the new syllabus would establish NSW as Australia's leader in Aboriginal languages education. It would help to revitalise existing languages and provide a blueprint for recreating lost languages such as Sydney's local Eora, which has fewer than 200 surviving words. "We know that language is at the heart of Aboriginal culture and identity - revitalising languages is therefore critical to ensuring Aboriginal cultural identity is strong," he said. The Department of Education will also be looking to the new syllabus to help lift the state's indigenous school participation rate. Nationally, only 38 per cent of Aboriginal students finish year 12, half the national rate of 77 per cent. A review of NSW's Aboriginal education policy and practice is expected to be handed to the minister next month. Today's launch of the syllabus coincides with a meeting between the University of Sydney and the Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages, to work out a proposal for an institute of Aboriginal languages. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 30 03:46:06 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 20:46:06 -0700 Subject: Language Barrier in Info Society (fwd) Message-ID: Language Barrier in Info Society Daily Champion (Lagos) OPINION Posted to the web July 29, 2004 By Remmy Nweke South Down to Northern Hemisphere http://allafrica.com/stories/200407290494.html Despite the burgeoning progress made by individuals, corporate organisations, government, and stakeholders in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) all over the world, the language limitation has continued to constitute major hurdle for Information Society (IS). A language is a way of communication either by writing or spoken words, which is used by the people of a given society, area or country. Information Society is one without borders which describes the 'global village' whereby every one is not only invited but included in the scheme of things, in all ramifications without emphasise on race, gender, colour, societal status among others. This sort of society is possible today with the acceptance of Internet, which little or no restriction offers people the right to communicate more freely than ever before without much hindrance. Except in the cases of dealing with Internet fraudulent practices, such as the 'spam', hackers and online scams, there seems to be in 'existence' because Internet has empowered humanity tremendously and opened doors, which ordinarily were impossible. But these achievements still have hindrance in language barriers, which if not well managed could form the toughest amongst the obstacles facing digital divide, mostly in developing countries as prevalent in Africa. In Nigeria, for instance, there are over 500 recognized languages, according to linguists. Out of this number, there are three major languages, namely the Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa, while English was adopted as the official lingua franca. The three local languages are used for local radio and television broadcasts. A West African indigenous version of English called "Pidgin English" also exist and is very popular among Nigerians. Experts said that about 65 per cent of the nation's population speak one of these languages, that is, Hausa is widely spoken in the north, Igbo in the southeast and Yoruba in the west. In the world today, especially on the Internet, several languages are also emerging as individuals and corporate organizations as well as governments try to promote their languages through encouraging the citizens to use local or native languages in their websites daily, running with options of other languages like French, Spanish, Arabic, English and so on. Apparently a major reason for this is what some analysts saw as a way of averting neo-colonialism, at this 21st century. Although multiplicity of language application on the Internet could avert neo-colonialism, this on its own has the negative multiplier effect, in which every community endeavours to be represented electronically, or in the global village; thus language seems to be a thorn in the flesh of Information Society. This plurality as much as it could be encouraged, should also be envisaged in the futuristic acceptance, because the number of languages would increase with few people understanding just a handful, except those who depend on it for livelihood. In the light of the aforementioned, the major languages chosen as nation's lingua franca, would still have upper hands, while few of them must have been subsumed overtime. An instance of recognizing language as a barrier was witnessed recently where a discussant could not respond to questions raised by another participant in an online discussion, simply because one speaks English and the other French. It took weeks for the French speaker to realize this and had to re-send the questions and contributions raised thereof in English to get a response from fellow discussant. Confirming this, Zambian female journalists, Mrs. Brenda Zulu noted that language is a core barrier in development of ICT, mostly in the African continent, which has remained among Least Developed Countries (LDCs). For her, the media has a lot to do in promoting the use of African local languages in application of ICT. She said that Zambia with 73 local languages, for example, the media uses only seven main local languages to broadcast and disseminate information. Zulu also said that she learnt Microsoft had designed a Swahili software, describing it as a plus for Africa, because, "if you look at the use of Internet we only have foreign languages". She said, language barrier remains a great challenge to Africa, which has many languages. "In broadcast we have tried to meet the challenge by providing our listeners with the programmes in local languages". Noting that in several online discussions, "it's clear that the Arab and Portuguese speaking people based in Africa are being left out on so many things" and called on African professionals and media to be precise, to develop an appropriate translating mechanism, which would benefit all in the heels of being part of Info Society. Already, a campaign to teach people Igbo language on the Internet for $38 is another business opportunity for south-easterners. In western Nigeria for instance, dominated by Yorubas, the use of local languages seems to be on the rise, especially in number of local community newspapers in existence currently. Dr. Uwe Seibert, Department of Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts University of Jos, while discussing "Documenting Nigerian languages" said that taking this as a scale, "only a small proportion of about 500 languages of Nigeria could be classified as "well documented". He attributed this to what he called "sad fact" which includes lack of interest, trained linguists, funds and research equipment. All these could be listed as possible reasons if not excuses and apart from that, there are political reasons, he said, wondering if developing all these minority languages would not create disunity, and if nations should not strive for one national language only? Certainly every government has to settle the issue which languages should be developed to which stage in a wise and fair national language policy. But in order to make wise decisions, languages first need to be surveyed: Where are they spoken? By how many speakers? How many speakers are bilingual in another language and in which? What is the attitude of the speakers towards their own and other, major languages? The younger members of the language community in the country, the linguist said, no longer actively speak many languages. Although, they may still be able to understand the language, but they prefer to speak English, Hausa or some other language of wider communication among themselves and to their children. The consequence is that these languages will become extinct in the next generation, citing some Nigerian languages that are nearly extinct, such as Holma, a Chadic language spoken in Adamawa State or have already ceased to exist such as Auyokawa and Teshenanci, two Chadic languages formerly spoken in Jigawa State. Stressing that for many Nigerian languages, there are already a certain amount of published materials available. Mostly religious literature - Bible portions, the New Testament, portions of the Bible, Catechisms and so on. But not all the languages of Nigeria have been well described and developed to an extent that would allow them to be used for educational purposes. Nigeria is presently in the verge of upgrading its three main local languages, namely Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba, by translating the 1999 Constitution into these languages. This was disclosed by the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Chief Chukwuemeka Chikelu, last April. The idea, according to him, was to deepen citizens' knowledge of democratic principles and values, even as translations in smaller languages would also follow. The country is place in one of the world's highest language diversity area; given this diversity, Nigeria has strictly followed the principle of only having one official language; that of the former colonial master - English. The official beginning of the translation process commenced with the leaders of the team of language experts' visit to Chief Chikelu in Abuja recently. They included Prof. Saidu Mohammed Gusau of the Bayero University, leading the Hausa team, Prof. Kola Owolabi of the University of Lagos, leading the Yoruba team and Prof. Sam Ugochukwu, also of University of Lagos, leading the Igbo team. Speaking on behalf of the team leaders, Prof. Owolabi had stated that though the federal government move to translate the Constitution into local languages, "is belated, it is a big and historic venture that would encourage people to be proud to speak their local languages. It is the first time in Nigeria's history". As Nigerians await the team to submit their draft of the translated version of the Constitution, after a three-month duration, before another set of experts would also review it, prior for its official adoption. It is worthwhile also to incorporate African language advocacy in the agenda for developing the continent's Millennium Development Goal (MDG), as much as poverty, and health via the dreadful HIV/AIDS. African government through the New Partnership for Africa Development (NEPAD), therefore, should evolve systems that encourages the citizens to learn an official languages, by emulating the French government. This could be done by first trying to adopt few African languages as official continental languages. And followed up with setting up of language learning sections among African nations as well as making it almost free-of-charge, just as obtained at the Alliance Francise, globally. Copyright ? 2004 Daily Champion. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 30 16:21:03 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 09:21:03 -0700 Subject: NSW REVIVES INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES AT SCHOOL (fwd) Message-ID: NSW REVIVES INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES AT SCHOOL 30.7.2004. 17:35:37 http://www9.sbs.com.au/theworldnews/region.php?id=90523®ion=7 Students across New South Wales will be able to study an Aboriginal language under changes to the state education curriculum. The Minister for Education and Aboriginal Affairs, Andrew Refshauge, launched the policy today at Darlington Primary School in Sydney, where many students are studying Wiradjuri. Mr Refshauge says students from kindergarten to year 10 will be affected by the changes, which are an attempt to preserve and revitalise the state's 70 Aboriginal languages. The curriculum was piloted earlier this year in six schools statewide, and Mr Refshauge says it has already had a number of un-looked for benefits. "And that is Aboriginal children themselves who've studied it find school more relevant and therefore their attendance rate is better. "It also means, following the increased attendance rate, their own school achievement is improving as well, so it's having a direct benefit - for Aboriginal students who take these language courses - on their other subjects as well." A youth worker in Sydney's indigenous centre of Redfern, Richard Green, says the program is an exciting step towards reviving the indigenous cultures of Australia's eastern coast. "Sydney Wiradjuri dialect; Badjalang; Gidabal; Gumbainggirr; Gamilaraay. "If we could be speaking all these lingos, we could be speaking all along the east coast. "Let's walk into the future and make a difference. "We've got a tongue, let's start speaking it." Under the program, a new syllabus will be introduced from next year, with Aboriginal communities working closely with schools in the development and delivery of the new curriculum. SOURCE: Radio News From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Jul 30 16:17:35 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 09:17:35 -0700 Subject: Sealaska Heritage offers immersion retreats (fwd) Message-ID: Sealaska Heritage offers immersion retreats http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/073004/sta_nwdigest.shtml JUNEAU - Sealaska Heritage Institute is offering Tlingit immersion retreats in Hoonah and near Sitka this summer in an effort to revitalize the endangered language. Tlingit speakers and serious students of the language will live in a Tlingit-speaking world 24 hours a day from Aug. 9-19 during an immersion retreat at Icy Strait Lodge in Hoonah. A second retreat is scheduled for Aug. 11-21 near Sitka at Dog Point Fish Camp, called in Tlingit Waashdaanx'. "The program gives both speakers and learners a habitat where Tlingit can flourish," said SHI President Rosita Worl. "The immersion approach appears to accelerate the rate at which learners acquire the Tlingit language." Daily activities will include gathering and processing Native foods while fluent speakers give directions in Tlingit. Participants also will sing, drum, dance and tell stories in Tlingit. A grant from the Administration for Native Americans is funding two language immersion retreats per year in 2003, 2004 and 2005 in Sitka and the Glacier Bay-Hoonah area. About 74 percent of the project, or $148,000, will be funded through federal dollars, and 26 percent will be funded through non-government sources this year. Call 463-4844 for more information. From coyotez at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU Fri Jul 30 20:37:42 2004 From: coyotez at DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU (David Lewis) Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 13:37:42 -0700 Subject: [Fwd: development advertisement1] Message-ID: Development Director The American Indian Graduate Center, a national scholarship administrator located in Alb., NM seeks an experienced fundraising professional to create and implement a $1 million annual campaign. The candidate will demonstrate past success at independently creating a fundraising plan, cultivating donors, developing program proposals, generating revenue from private and public sources and managing a department budget.The Development Director also serves as the organizations Information Officer and will oversee the design and development of marketing strategies and public information. A bachelors or advanced degree is required; history of progressive fundraising results, exceptional writing skills, and history of outstanding leadership will be strongly evaluated. AIGC is an Equal opportunity employer that practices Indian preference.To Apply: Send a letter of interest, resume, salary history and three professional references to the American Indian Graduate Center, Inc., 4520 Montgomery Blvd. N.E., Suite 1-B, Albuquerque, NM 87109. Fax to (505) 884-0427 or email to susan at aigc.com . Resumes will be accepted until September 1, 2004. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Sat Jul 31 16:38:32 2004 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (phil cash cash) Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 09:38:32 -0700 Subject: Alutiiq language program gets federal grant (fwd) Message-ID: Alutiiq language program gets federal grant The Associated Press http://www.adn.com/alaska_ap/story/5358961p-5297521c.html KODIAK (July 30, 10:54 am ADT) - A $171,000 federal grant will help expand a master-apprentice language program aimed at preserving the Alutiiq language. The money is part of $3.5 million in grants to Alaska programs announced this week by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson during a swing through Alaska. The agency's Administration for Native Americans is administering the grants, including the language preservation grant to the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak. The grant to the museum will help fund a three-year Alutiiq language revitalization project, which has a total budget of $652,380. Alutiiq, also called Alutiitstun or Sugt'stun, is the indigenous language of Kodiak Island and parts of the Alaska Peninsula, and belongs to the Eskimo-Aleut family of languages. Only about 50 people still speak the language fluently, but their average age is over 70 years. Leanne Hinton, a University of California Berkeley linguist, developed the master-apprentice model for a language-preservation effort involving 10 Native languages in California facing extinction. The model - used in the Alutiiq program - matches participants with fluent elders for daily lessons and practice. The museum is accepting applications. Organizers plan to select the participants in September and begin activities early in October. The program requires a three-year commitment, the minimum time for an adult to achieve fluency, said April Laktonen Counceller, the museum's education coordinator. After as little as one year, apprentices may be available for outreach activity to Kodiak schools, to start bringing the language to younger children and "grow new speakers," Counceller told the Kodiak Daily Mirror. For the past year, the program has survived mostly on local funding and donations, with two apprentices, Counceller and Shauna Hegna, who recently moved to Anchorage. It is one of several methods the museum is pursuing to preserve the language.