MU Researcher Honored for Endangered Language Preservation Efforts (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

MU Researcher Honored for Endangered Language Preservation Efforts

Professor was recently honored for her lifetime service to linguistics
http://www.research.missouri.edu/news/stories/070129_languages.htm

COLUMBIA, MO - Endangered animal and plant species regularly make the
news, but another type of endangered species is often overlooked: human
languages. A University of Missouri-Columbia researcher has dedicated
much of her career to studying and preserving some of these languages,
including indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. and Mexico.

"In the next 100 years, probably half of the world¿s languages will
disappear unless vigorous measures are taken now," said N. Louanna
Furbee, professor emerita of anthropology in MU's College of Arts and
Science. "This is as significant as the loss of animal and plant
species. These are vastly different languages with vastly different
ways of solving problems. If we lose them, we lose unique perspectives
on the world, unique logics and unique ways of encoding the world for
understanding."

Furbee's research focuses primarily on the study and preservation of
Tojolab'al, a Mayan language spoken in the Chiapas region of Mexico,
and Chiwere, a Siouan language spoken by the Otoe-Missouria and Iowa
Tribes in the U.S. Both languages are rapidly becoming extinct as
elderly speakers die without passing the language on to younger
generations. Furbee has worked closely with members of the tribes who
speak these languages to develop an understanding of the languages'
grammars, to archive and translate materials in the languages, and to
train native speakers in language documentation so that they can carry
on the study of the languages and develop courses and materials to
teach others. She also has written a grammar (a description of the
language's grammatical structure), a dictionary and a concordance of
texts for Tojolab'al.

"Losing languages is a loss of local knowledge but also a loss of
general human knowledge," she said. "In Tojolab'al, for example, there
are about 50 grammatically integrated ways for persons to signal how
true they believe information to be when they speak. These include
words or parts of words that indicate that the speaker knows the
truthfulness first hand - that the speaker saw the event happen or has
the information on reliable authority. Similar linguistic markers
signal a range of doubt up to a level that indicates that the speaker
considers the information a rumor, or even believes it to be completely
false. In English, we can make these same discriminations in speaking,
but doing so requires us to use circumlocutions and many extra words."

Furbee recently received the Victoria R. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award
from the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) for her contributions to
the field of linguistics. In addition to her own studies, she has been
a leader in preserving other endangered languages by organizing an LSA
series called "Conversations" about the appropriate roles for the LSA
to take in the archiving of endangered languages. She also organized a
related conference on language documentation and co-edited a book
deriving from the conference. She has been LSA archivist since 1998 and
was co-archivist for two years prior to that. Furbee also served in
various roles within the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the
American Anthropological Association, and the Society for the Study of
the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, for which she served as
president in 1988. She has her doctorate in linguistics from The
University of Chicago and has been at MU since 1974.