Talking online dictionary helps keep Oneida language alive (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Posted April 15, 2007

Talking online dictionary helps keep Oneida language alive
Database designed to help with pronunciation

By Malavika Jagannathan
mjaganna at greenbaypressgazette.com
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070415/GPG0101/704150704/1207/GPGnews

Learning the Oneida word "ahlukh" — roughly translating to "to know a
language" — is a daunting task, especially if you don't know what it should
sound like.

It's a battle for which language teachers have one more weapon, thanks to a
Web site created by University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor Clifford
Abbott with tribal elder Maria Hinton.

They're transforming a printed dictionary into a searchable online database
that includes sound samples to help those learning the Oneida language.

"We decided what we really needed was sound," Abbott said. "It's easy to
look up a word, but to know what it should sound like is another story."

A language historically steeped in oral tradition, Oneida has been in the
written form for only the past few generations. Like other Native American
languages, the danger of extinction has catalyzed preservation efforts.
Today, students at Oneida Nation schools learn to speak and write it.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there are 553 speakers of Oneida — 429 of
them in Wisconsin.

Still, only about a dozen fluent native speakers remain, including Hinton,
who at 96 is one of the oldest.

In the year and a half they've worked together, she and Abbott have put
about 4,000 words online — including about 900 sound samples of
pronunciation. For now, only the English-to-Oneida part of the database is
available.

They're about a quarter of the way through the heavy printed dictionary, but
the Web site already is being used as a basis for a grammar class Abbott
teaches at the university. The site includes texts on grammar and will one
day have sample stories in Oneida.

In the fight for cultural preservation, language is key.

"Culture and language goes together," said Hinton, who learned the language
from her grandparents as a child and started speaking English when she was
7.

The endurance of the language keeps more than the spoken word alive. It
transmits generations of stories, history and faith, Hinton said.

The complexity of the Oneida language isn't easy to translate, especially
online. One of the first challenges in putting the dictionary on the Web
was how to transliterate the non-English characters used in Oneida words so
that all users could see them without downloading a special font.

Then there's the intricacy of the language itself, which unlike most
European language has a system of roots, prefixes and suffixes that is
adapted to create new word meanings.

"A single Oneida verb can be as long as an English sentence," said Abbott, a
professor of communication and First Nation studies who started studying the
Oneida language as a graduate student. "Purely from the written language, it
seems real complicated. But most adults need that writing component to learn
the language."

It could be a few more years before the online dictionary is complete, but
even then, the capacity to add to and improve it is endless, Abbott said.

About the Oneida language

Oneida is in the Iroquoian family of languages and is more distantly related
to Cherokee. It has an extensive history of oral literature, but has been
written down in the past few generations. There are three Oneida
reservations, in New York, Ontario and Wisconsin, but differences in the
language are minor. The language is structurally complicated, although
there are only a small number of sounds.
Source: www.uwgb.edu/oneida