Handheld 'Phraselator' helps preserve North American native languages

[Richard Smith]

The Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma has a device similar to what you described
Though not portable.
Slide a card with a word or phrase through it and it ³speaks² the word.
The thing may have a  function for preserving pronunciation,
But I'm beginning to see first hand
That language itself will not return because of any cool technology.
Technology tends to beget more complex technology
Technology has in many ways shattered community

Now we no longer NEED one another.
We no longer NEED to pray together.
Ceremonies are becoming ³our Indian culture events²
Something we can ADD to our life,if we choose to do so.
We used to be a tight interdependent unit looking out
It almost seems we are now on the outside looking in.
Our own language sounds foreign
uncomfortable in our Latin-based thinking processes.
I¹ve heard it referred to as ³talkin¹ ndn²

Our Language will return only when there is a
NEED to become true and separate community again
And we just have to be ready when or if that time comes
We work with HOPE into an uncertain future
A time when we are rebonded once more till
we won¹t even think we¹re ³talkin¹ ndn²

Richard Zane Smith
Wyandotte, Oklahoma


On 8/27/06 4:54 PM, "William J Poser" <wjposer at LDC.UPENN.EDU> wrote:

> I've seen some information about this. What distinguishes it
> from any old digital audio player is the interface, which lets you
> select the utterance that you want to play. The reason that a
> defense contractor is involved is that the US military is using
> these things in Iraq. Since most soldiers speak little or no Arabic,
> they can find the utterance that they need, e.g. "Hands in the air!",
> and play it back in real Iraqi Arabic. If you just had a long list
> to scroll through as on many music players, somebody would be dead
> by the time you found the right phrase.
> 
> As a means of documenting endangered languages these are not
> of much interest since they they are much more expensive than
> regular digital recorders. For language learning again it is cheaper
> and more versatile to put the recordings on a regular computer.
> The putative virtue of these things is that language learners can use
> them to have real conversations. I suspect that they aren't worth the
> cost. Even with several hundred or thousand utterances on them, they
> can't cover a very wide range of things that one wants to say,
> especially in languages with elaborate morphology. My impression is
> that they get people excited because they can carry around with them
> some "real language", but that they are actually not very useful.
> I think that the people pushing this probably have good intentions,
> but it looks like more "eye candy" to me.
> 
> Bill

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ilat/attachments/20060828/5771c3a2/attachment.htm>