"New World" Film Revives Extinct Native American Tongue (fwd)

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"New World" Film Revives Extinct Native American Tongue

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
January 20, 2006
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0120_060120_new_world.html

For his movie The New World, which arrives in U.S. theaters nationwide
today, director Terrence Malick wanted to accurately recreate the
sights and sounds of a 17th-century English colony.

The film depicts the clash between the native Algonquian Indians and
English settlers at the founding of Jamestown in present-day Virginia.
Malick therefore decided to have the Native American characters speak
the indigenous language of the time—Virginia Algonquian.

[Photo: Movie still from The New World]

There was only one problem: No one had spoken the tongue for about 200
years.

Enter Blair Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte. As the amount of Virginia Algonquian dialogue spoken in the
movie increased from just two scenes to more than a third of the film,
Rudes found himself reconstructing an entire language that had long
gone extinct.

(Click here to download an audio clip.)

National Geographic News recently spoke with Rudes about the challenges
of bringing a language back from the dead.

It sounds like the filmmakers had no idea what they were getting
themselves into with this language restoration project.

Terrence Malick wanted the movie to be as authentic as possible. It was
his decision to use the native language indigenous to the area at the
founding of Jamestown. What he didnt know was that the language had
been extinct since the late 18th or early 19th century.

Virginia Algonquian is part of a family of languages known as
Algonquian, right?

Yes, there were about 800 native languages in North America, and five or
six families. The Algonquian family was one of the largest. It extended
from the province of Manitoba [in Canada] to the eastern seaboard and
down to North Carolina. On the East Coast, there were perhaps 15
Algonquian languages. Most no longer have any speakers.

Why did the languages on the coast go extinct first?

That was simply a contact phenomenon. When the English first arrived,
they were the minority population, and they were dependent upon the
majority Algonquian speakers for their survival. So initially they
learned some Algonquian.

But then the number of English kept increasing. Once the colonies could
survive on their own without being dependent on the Algonquian Indians,
the English stopped learning Algonquian.

Meanwhile, the Algonquian ended up being dependent on the English
colonies for trade goods. So they continued to learn English, because
there was a long tradition going way back into pre-history of
bilingualism among East Coast Native American people. They didn't mind
learning another language. Gradually their own language faded out.

[Photo: Movie still from The New World]

Did the English make any written records of Virginia Algonquian?

One of the [colony's] secretaries, a man named William Strachey,
recorded a vocabulary of about 500 words of Virginia Algonquian. Then
there was the word list that John Smith recorded, which was less than
50 words. That's basically all the material there is.

And from this you had to reconstruct an entire language. It's fair to
say the resources at your disposal were pretty limited.

I had been doing similar work for [another tribal nation] in terms of
reviving their ancestral language, Pequot, which is also an eastern
Algonquian language. I pulled together everything that was known about
every eastern Algonquian language.

The real job was to figure out what Virginia Algonquian looked like in
terms of pronunciation and grammar and trying to figure out which of
the other eastern languages it was similar to, so I knew where to go
when I needed to have a word or grammatical structure that was not
attested by Strachey or Smith.

How often was that?

A lot. This is why I jokingly refer to the language in the film as the
Blair Rudes dialect of Virginia Algonquian. The core of it is based on
the material collected by Strachey and John Smith. But only maybe a
quarter of the words necessary to translate the dialogue were attested
in that material. I had to go elsewhere for the rest.

So what would you do when you didn't have the material from Strachey and
Smith to consult?

I would turn to three other Algonquian languages and say, How would you
say this word in those languages? If I could find two of them that
agree, then I would say, OK, that's probably how the majority of the
eastern Algonquian languages do it, and the third one is doing
something weird. And I would make the assumption that Virginia
Algonquian is saying it the same way.

What is the language's sentence structure like?

For the most part, subjects would come first, objects would come second,
verbs would come last. But sometimes objects would come after verbs.
Adverbs would frequently come at the very beginning of a sentence. So
if they're saying, "I love you always," it would be, "Always I love
you."

Were there any particular words or expressions that were difficult to
translate?

[In the script] 
 when Smith and Powhatan were first speaking, Smith
said, "I come from a land to the east." But at the time Smith arrived
in Jamestown, the only thing [the tribe knew of] to the east was the
ocean. What we ended up saying is something like, "I come from an
island at the other side of the sea." That would be conceivable, that
there would be an island out there beyond what they could see.

What did the language sound like to the British colonists? Would it have
been difficult for them to learn?

The Algonquian are among the easier [Native American languages] in terms
of pronunciation for a European. They tend to be somewhat like Spanish,
for example, in terms of having a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel
structure. This is one of the reasons why the English borrowed quite a
number of words from the Algonquian language that we still have today,
like pecan, opossum, and moccasins.

How difficult was it for the actors to speak the language?

They picked it up quite quickly. Some of the seasoned actors memorized
their lines. The younger actors, like Q'Orianka Kilcher [who plays
Pocahontas], were willing to learn the language like you would any
foreign language. She would learn the pronunciation and the meaning of
every single word and then string them together to make the dialogue.

It must have been incredibly demanding for you too.

I had no life for two months. During those first two weeks when the
decision had been made to move from 2 to 40-something scenes, I
basically stayed in my hotel room and translated, translated,
translated and recorded, recorded, recorded. Then I had to be on
location whenever they filmed a scene where Virginia Algonquian was
spoken.

The thing that was the most challenging was when Terrence Malick would
change his mind and want an actor to say something else. He would call
me in and say, OK, teach him how to say this, and I would have to do it
right there and then.

Sometimes I would know off the top of my head. Other times, I would have
to make up something that I felt would have enough syllables in it that
the actor could say it, and later we could do a voice-over to put in
what should have been said.

This project doesn't end with the movie for you.

As soon as the DVD is released, we are going to turn over all the CDs
and scripts that I had prepared for the film to the Virginia tribes for
them to use in their language revitalization efforts. My job will be to
consult in those efforts. Meanwhile, I'm working on an expanded full
dictionary of Virginia Algonquian. All of this will be useful to the
Virginia tribes in revitalizing their language.