Linguistic Matls IN the language of study

[Mia Kalish]

People are always having conferences on uses of technology for Indigenous
languages. Most of them are too far away for me to go  . . . until I get a
faculty position  . . . 

 

But imagine if people didn't have to choose a single sequence. Imagine if
they could have it any way they want . . . by category, pronoun (1, 2, 3,
1s, 2s, 3s), -stem, keyword, source, date. This is all information that is
usually available in English - and the Hopi - dictionary. It's not very hard
to plop it into an Access or MS SQL data base. They both support Indigenous
fonts of the type where the characters are in the effective sort range. 

 

Then people could search. I have a copy of the Carolinian dictionary. It
would be cool to have this, but first, it would have to be scanned . . .
sigh. 

 

But I agree with Sue that we need to talk about this more. Here is a little
passage from a conference paper I did in 2001. . . Gee, I sure haven't
changed much :-) 

 

When faced with a linguistic ontology quite different from that of European
languages, John Peabody Harrington approached the issue apparently
prosaically and without a sense of ideological misunderstandings that would
follow from his mapping. "There are many 'parts of speech'," he says, "each
of which behaves differently, and for which we have in English no
satisfactory nomenclature. Perhaps they may all be reduced to 'nouns,'
'pronouns,' 'verbs,' and 'modifying elements'" (Harrington, 1910). This
normalization results in a loss of the data that would otherwise have
defined the true nature of the Tewa language and simultaneously requires the
"invention" of linguistic structures and rules that are not present in Tewa,
but are essential to establishing the (supposed) integrity of the linguistic
representation  (Kalish, 2001).

 

 

 

 

  _____  

From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Susan Penfield
Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2006 11:15 AM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] Linguistic Matls IN the language of study

 

All,
I think the whole question of categories is something worth discussing. The
Mohave and Chemehuevi communities I am working with repeatedly requests
dictionaries organized by theme (or concept). Ideally, though much more
difficult for languages with few remaining speakers I think, the themes
would be determined by speakers (and not representative of English). For
instance, what would speakers include under a category like 'living things'
? I'm just guessing here, but I can imagine that it might include things
that English speakers don't consider 'living' -- 

The importance of this is two-fold. 1) it captures traditional categories
--hence adds to language documentation and 2) it is a more user-friendly
presentation for community members to access.  I'm looking at a new software
that essentially creates a Thesaurus of this type. 

Other thoughts?
Susan

On 2/25/06, d_z_o <dzo at bisharat.net> wrote:

Hi Mia, Back in Futa Jalon, Guinea in the mid-80's I think I saw a
grammar of Pular in Pular. I know I saw a monolingual dictionary in
Pular, done by a grad student in linguistics, typed and stenciled a
few years earlier (I regret that I couldn't get a copy and hope that 
there is at least one still extant! Unfortunately don't have the
reference handy).

There may be more of such materials in some major languages of
Africa - there is a university in SW Nigeria for instance where one 
can write theses in Yoruba, and it wouldn't surprise me if one has
pertained to the language itself. This should be possible to verify
if of interest.

One last point is tangential, but when studying Chinese, I got the 
impression that the grammar as presented conformed to Western
categories, whereas in a few instances I thought the feature of
Chinese in question was more similar to an African language I know
(one example is "present - past" vs. "accomplished - 
nonaccomplished" in verb tenses - the latter of which helped me
understand the use of "le" better than the attempts to explain in
terms of present & past). This in turn made me wonder if the Chinese 
materials in Chinese use original Chinese categories or whether they
too conform to Western categories but in translation. So that might
be another level of analysis beneath the language of presentation
(but certainly you've thought of that already). 

Don


Quoting Mia Kalish <MiaKalish at LEARNINGFORPEOPLE.US>:
> Hi,
>
>
>
> Does anyone know of any cases where the results of linguistic 
study of
> Indigenous language have been codified IN the language of study?
That would
> be a grammar actually written in, for example, Navajo or
Jicarilla, rather
> than in English, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, etc? 
>
>
>
> Thanks for your help. I am currently writing in my dissertation
that there
> are no known cases. . . . I've never seen one, but maybe in Maori?
Hawaiian?
> Quecha?
> 
>
>
> Mia
>
>
>
>
>
>




-- 
Susan D. Penfield, Ph.D.

Department of English
Affiliate faculty: Department of Linguistics 
and the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Program
American Indian Language Development Institute
Phone for messages: (520) 621-1836 

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