Yahgan language discussion list at Yahoo groups

[jess tauber]

Hi. I'm new to the list. Hello out there to the lurkers who know me!

Usually I read through earlier postings from lists I join- I noticed early on you folks heard about the Linguistic Discovery report by Lindsey Whaley and Lenore Grenoble "What does Yahgan have to do with digital technology?".

While throwing materials together for an endangered grant application a month ago I started thinking that a discussion list would be a good "clearinghouse" for information on Yahgan, which I've been working on for a number of years, at least until a permanent scholarly home could be found (and pages will be going up at Dartmouth, thanks to Prof. Whaley).

In just a few days we already have a set of serious discussions going on about phonology, spelling conventions, dialects, and the beginings of syntax. In addition to the academic people we also now count in our number the granddaughter of one of the last speakers, Cristina Zarraga, who has been doing what she can back in Ukika, in Tierra del Fuego, to try to help revitalize the language.

There is a lot to do. Even though there is a mass of information about the language, much of it has been tucked away in obscure corners, unavailable to most scholars as well as to the people who need it most. I hope the list and the web pages will help to get around these problems. And there has been a major discovery in Yahgan linguistics- a copy of the "lost" grammar of Thomas Bridges was located serendipitously in the Library of Congress this past summer- I've been re-editing it and it will be one of the documents that will serve as a base for revitalization.

The unusable published dictionary (which should get the "worst" award for dictionaries edited by people with doctorates) is being completely reworked, from original manuscripts as well as many other materials that will be added to it. I'm hoping to get an interactive version up and running within the next year at the Dartmouth site.
Terry Langendoen has offered to help (you still out there? I can be a bit uncommunicative during the winter!).

In addition to published texts in the language (Bridges' translations of the Acts of the Apostles as well as the Gospels of John and Luke- which were in Yahgan only and are being back-translated morpheme-by-morpheme into English and Spanish) there are also new recordings- some done for documentaries over the past 15 or so years (I'm trying to get the unedited footage as these contain conversations as well as speech of people now gone), and more recently those done on site by the OMORA bioconservancy group. I'm hoping also to get down there myself soon to gather missing information on prosody, complex predicational structure, and pragmatics.

If you read the piece on Linguistic Discovery mentioned at the top, you may have noticed the sound file of Furlong cylinder excerpts. I was just in contact with a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory who has new technology which allows scanning and digitization of information off old wax recordings without doing them any damage, and which allows the data to be cleaned up to remove distortions from cracks, wax degradation, etc. I'm hoping to be able to take at least the linguistically salient cylinders to the lab for scan. It would be wonderful to be able to clearly hear Yahgan recorded in 1908, which not only is the earliest known, but the only such for the next three quarters of a century.

It would be great to be able to find funds (which I know is not easy) to help provide teaching aids for the small Yahgan community in Ukika (about 70 people, half the known ethnically Yahgan population alive today, out of an estimated 10000 in 1800) beyond the usual pen and paper. The technologies available today which allow interactive learning environments, fast desktop publication, etc., could be invaluable to the revitalization of the language, now spoken by one (maybe two) fluent elders. And without the conveniences offered by the modern computer I don't know where my own efforts would be today.

Anyway, that's my say about Yahgan and technology (for now). The online discussion (if any of you care to visit- the post archives are public, though if you join you get to look at the great links, including a link to an online streaming video version of one of the documentaries I mentioned - 60 minutes long where you can hear quite a bit of spoken Yahgan) is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/waata_chis  ("Old News/Stories" in Yahgan). I look forward to interaction with folks here on the list.

Best regards to all,
Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net