upsurge

[Richard Smith]

Yes Kevin,
that was us meeting in the Midland Ontario area,for reburial/repatriation of
our ancestors
remains and to recognize and rekindle the old "Huron" Confederacy in 1999.
Some of us have close brother/sister ties with Wendats of Wendake,Quebec.
I visit Wendake every couple years to hold traditional pottery workshops and
discuss language 
efforts and compare our dialect similarities and differences.
Yes it's my understanding that the Wendat language borrows much from Wyandot
material
and  Mohawk Language is being used to fill in missing gaps by
Michel GrosLouis who recently gained his Masters degree in Quebec in
Linguistics.
Eventually He will most likely be hired as a full time linguist for the
Wendat nation.
There is another Wendat woman preparing to get her masters in
linguistics,and already
ceremonies are restored in Wendake in a beautiful Longhouse.

Yes, our Wyandot language seems closer akin to what is known as "Seneca",
an Iroquoian language of a group of mixed tribes removed from the Ohio
valley,
and yes Craig Kopris who i really respect (a differant linguist) is helping
a good deal
and does alot of study of the shared Iroquoian roots.
It sounds like Lavel University will be helping too

"community driven study" at this point is probably not accurate to describe
us...
But definitely a "community excited to support" language recovery work!

Richard
Wyandotte Oklahoma



On 9/20/07 10:02 AM, "Kevin Brousseau" <brousseau_kevin at YAHOO.CA> wrote:

> This is the first time I hear about work being done on Wyandot - this is a
> community driven study? Are you trying to bring the language back to the point
> of having fluent speakers once again?
>   
>  
>   
> I'm very curious because as you probably know there is a Wyandot community
> here in Quebec and a small diaspora of Wyandot people from the Ohio valley who
> are scattered a little bit everywhere. A few years ago a meeting was organized
> at Georgian bay I think it was called, where some Wyandot people from a few
> different places met in order to discuss language revitalisation and land
> claims I think. This was the first time I heard of Wyadot people organizing in
> order to bring back their language, but I had been hearing about the idea by
> some Wyadot friends of mine for a long time, who wish to bring back the
> language and have been studying Mohawk in the mean time to acquire competence
> in a closely related language, hoping it will help them acquire Wyandot with
> the proper accent or pronunciation. Is your team working with present Iroqiuan
> languages too for comparative purposes and are you involved with the community
> in Quebec?
>   
>  
>   
> Kevin Brousseau
>   
>  
>   
> 
> 
> Richard Smith <rzs at TDS.NET> wrote:
>   
>> thanks Bill,
>> good points to consider...our linguists haven't had the honor
>> to sit with fluent speakers...though they could listen to the various
>> longhouse speeches on recordings for helpful hints
>> 
>> Aidan was pretty much right on target.
>> 
>> Wyandotte or wandat is one of those languages said to be extinct.
>> well .... i never liked that word- "extinct"
>> We have a mass of material left by ethnologists,linguists and even speakers
>> - a huge dictionary and MANY lists,over forty narratives,incredible stories
>> written in Wandat, including recordings of spoken words,over 300 songs and
>> part of a story ,all originally collected on wax cylinders.
>> This was collected here in 1911 by good ol' french canadian Marius Barbeau.
>> Barbeau wasn't educated in Iroquoian morphology ...he simply recorded
>> what he heard often running words together or dividing them in funny places.
>> But actually,He was complimented by Wyandottes in this area for his good
>> pronunciation,though teased for his rather feminine voice.
>> As we have no other record of any outsider given this compliment,
>> we tend to trust his phonetic chart as a pretty good standard,
>> and it actually lines up with specific voiced word examples recorded.
>> We also have a good recording of a Green Corn speech by a Wyandot
>> from this area,though it's spoken in what's referred to as "Seneca".
>> 
>> I don't want to discredit what our linguist has contributed !
>> He is an unpaid hard worker who mostly works in isolation in a distant
>> state. Unraveling patterns of the morphology is a huge success and we're all
>> very grateful.
>> However phoneticly ,he teaches adults a "simplified" pronunciation.
>> one example:
>> On his own,He decided to represent EVERY o written as a nasal ö.
>> but not the original nasal ö as in french "bon" as Barbeau heard,
>> and as i hear it spoken in longhouse speeches.
>> He teaches ö as in "known"
>> which to me is the same o as in "bone"
>> I hear "bone" and "bon" as two differant "o" sounds
>> both important to keep distinct.
>> 
>> another example:
>> -Barbeau indicates-nasal ä as in the french "marchand"
>> our linguist now teaches ä as in "none"
>> ....huh?
>> but he also decided to drop most of the nasal "ä" anyway
>> in his own translation work he reduces them to a simple "a"
>> as in "father" well?...can they do that and still publish?
>> 
>> It's made me realize we need a team of Wyandotte tribal members to
>> form a group who can make important decisions so that linguist work is
>> evaluated, proposals made and decisions can be agreed upon
>> if he is to have the nations endorsement.
>> Then he can truthfully write in his upcoming book,
>> "the present Wyandotte Community prefers..."
>> 
>> am i just being fussy?
>> 
>> Richard
>> Wyandotte Oklahoma
> 
> 
>   
> 
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