"Come on Baby Light My Fire"

[MiaKalish - LFP]

Robert Mirabal has a new album, "Indians, Indians", and on it is a song called Morrison, where he tells the story of Morrison and his uncle in Albuquerque. On the album, Mirabal sings in English, and in his native Tiwa. On one song, the two languages are layered together, with one voice, a woman, singing in English, and Mirabal in Tiwa. 

When Ilse replied to my post earlier, I Googled "Fairfield Language Technologies", and retrieval algorithms being what they are today, I was given opportunities to explore products characterised as "the best" in some way. I encountered this: "Choose any dialect in the world, and you're virtually assured of finding it among Instant Immersion™ 33 Languages, the revolution in foreign language learning. Ideal for travel or scholarly pursuits, each of the 33 CD-ROMs is devoted to one global language, exploring essential vocabulary and phrases in subjects ranging from Food to First Words; Colors to Countries." 

The underlinings are mine, and I call your attention specifically to the sequence. The initial mention of "scholarly pursuits" leads one to believe that you will be able to converse with your peers and colleagues after having mastered the lessons. But look at the content: "essential vocabularly" is very basic. "Concept" and "anthropomorphize" are not food nor first words, not colors or countries, and there is no mentioned category that would be a placeholder for words such as these. 

A bit ago, I asked if anyone on the list  had a strong, indigenous lexicon for representing arithmetic and mathematics. I received a few replies, but there is apparently nothing sufficiently robust (lexicon, native speakers, cultural concepts) that would faciliate the development of math .learning materials in an Indigenous language. Here, we are looking at building it from scratch. 

The Kauffman Foundation Thoughtbook noted that if intellectuals and academics are convinced of something, then others follow. Every revolution has demonstrated its latent belief in this precept by eliminating intellectuals as one of its first steps. And this takes me back to Morrison, to Robert Mirabal, and the sentiment of the Doors ever-popular song: The time to hesitate is through. (The entire song is easily found by Googling the title of this email). 

Day after day, Phil sends out articles and links to articles that talk about how languages are dying. I believe, especially after the informative comments I have received in response to my earlier posts, that we as academincs need to be rethinking how we are concepualizing what we do with indigenous languages. Language information that sits on a page like yesterday's dead fish may be very helpful to generative linguists, but it doesn't help solve the problem of insufficient lexicon to do even the most basic learning materials. 

Personally, I think Revitalization will happen if people can create Teams, instead of top-down structures that are limited by the expertise of the person at the top. (This is where lots of people will feel immediately intimidated and perhaps angry, says the Cognitive Psychologist in me). But think about it: Good learning materials require knowledge of the IL, knowledge of the subject matter, and a solid grounding at the level of Native Speaker in Technology. Not too many people have all of that. So if the Teams took advantage of the strong skills of each participant, we could reduce the number of links to sad and desperate articles that Phil sends out. 

Best to all, 
Mia

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.  Alfred North Whitehead

Mia Kalish, M.A. 
PhD Student, C&J
Tularosa, New Mexico USA 88352
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