From jgoodtracks at gmail.com Tue Jul 1 23:52:52 2008 From: jgoodtracks at gmail.com (Jimm GoodTracks) Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 18:52:52 -0500 Subject: Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Pat Benabe To: Jimm Goodtracks Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 4:46 PM Subject: Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages ----- Original Message ----- Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 4:40 PM Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages Press Release: June 30, 2008 (Santa Barbara, CA, June 18, 2008) - Ekegusi - a language spoken by 1.8 million people in Western Kenya - and Mandan - a language spoken by Sacajawea, which has just one remaining fluent speaker - are both in danger of dying out. They are only two of the thousands of the world's languages that are predicted to disappear before the end of this century. And along with these languages entire cultures and ways of life may also be lost. Fighting this trend are linguists, academics who study languages scientifically, and members of communities who are actively working to stop their own languages from losing ground to more dominant national or regional tongues. Over 120 of these linguists and activists will meet at the University of California, Santa Barbara for two weeks beginning June 23 for "Infield" - the Institute on Field Linguistics and Language Documentation - to examine successful models of language preservation and to train participants in techniques for working in endangered language communities. At Infield, language activists from Native American communities across North America will work with linguists and activists from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Pacific Rim, including Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. They will examine successful examples of language revitalization and share current techniques for documenting languages. And in a change from past practice, they will collaborate as partners in this training. "Infield offers a new way for language activists and linguists to come together," said Dr. Carol Genetti, Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara and organizer of InField. "This institute offers both groups the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the perspectives, resources, and goals of the other. This will allow us to develop more effective partnerships as we work together to preserve this important human heritage." Some InField participants are members of the language communities who are also trained linguists and are working with their elders to preserve not only their languages, but their customs and traditions. Jenny Davis, a Ph.D. student in linguistics at the University of Colorado, is a member of the Chickasaw Nation, which was originally based in the southeastern United States but was removed to Oklahoma during the early 19th century. Today only 70 Chickasaws, out of some 40,000 members of the tribe, are fluent speakers of their language. Davis, one of the only linguists working with the Chickasaws and the only member of the tribe with linguistics training, is active in efforts to revitalize the Chickasaw language. Her community has recently begun a "Master/Apprentice" program, which pairs native speakers with younger members of the tribe, who agree to speak Chickasaw for a minimum of 10 hours per week. "The Chickasaw nation now employs two fluent speakers as 'Masters' who are resources for our community," said Davis. "The 'Masters' receive a subsidy from the tribe in recognition of their service to the Nation, and they mentor neighbors, members of their own families or work colleagues." The program complements efforts to teach young children Chickasaw in pre-schools and Head Start, and the tribe is working to open an immersion school as well. The Master/Apprentice approach was developed by Leanne Hinton, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. At InField, Hinton will discuss this approach as well as the "Breath of Life" workshop which took place earlier this month and focused on California's native languages. The experience of revitalizing Samala, one of six languages spoken by the Chumash, the native people of Central and Southern California, will be shared at InField by Dr. Richard Applegate. Earlier this year Dr. Applegate completed a 4,000 word dictionary of Samala, which is spoken by the Santa Ynez branch of the Chumash. Dr. Applegate has been working with the Santa Ynez Chumash for the past five years to develop a language program, and has appointed five "apprentices" who teach Samala words to their own children and other members of the tribe. Professor Larry Kimura of the University of Hawaii will present the story of how Hawaiian was brought back from near extinction. In a state where until 1987, it was against state law to teach Hawaiian in the public schools, except as a foreign language, students may now pursue Hawaiian-medium studies up to the level of a Master's degree. Other models being presented at InField will show how modern technology can be used to document and revitalize languages. In addition to techniques in audio and video recording, and data management, participants will learn how to use the Internet and "wikis" (websites that can be edited collectively) as tools. Professor Shobhana Chelliah of the University of North Texas, who documents minority and endangered languages of Northeast India, said that ". the internet is going to be the safest and most efficient way for me to keep in touch with . the politically troubled Northeast Indian region." Dr. Te Taka Keegan, a Maori from New Zealand who was trained as a computer scientist, will present his work in developing Maori language software. Jeanne LaVerne, who is a Hopi Indian and has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wants to develop a Hopi database that can be more easily accessed and updated. The coordinators of the Ekegusi Encyclopedic Project, from Kenya, are working to document their language before it is eroded by migration and the younger generation's preference for English or Kiswahili, which are taught in the school system. Kennedy Bosire and Gladys Machogu are researching an encyclopedic Ekegusii- English dictionary, which currently has 30,000 words translated into English, and includes pictures of plants, animals, birds, insects, and physical features. Along with the language, says Machogu, the project is researching and compiling data on the traditions of the Ekegusi community - including the naming and raising of children, marriage, health and medicine, and religion and socio-economic activities. This is increasingly difficult since the older generation is aging and dying. The Ekegusi activists are working to preserve their language while there are still large numbers of speakers, although they are ageing. On the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, Edwin Benson, age 75, is the last remaining fluent speaker of Mandan, the language spoken by Sacajawea, Lewis and Clark's young Indian guide. Alyce Spotted Bear, an educator, activist and leader of the Mandan tribe who will be attending InField, reports that children learn vocabulary from "Uncle Edwin" in the Twin Buttes Elementary School, and a few people meet weekly to try and learn the language. There is great urgency to learn and document the language while the last speaker is still alive. Another group of activists attending InField are members of the Lakota and Dakota tribes of North and South Dakota who are also linguistics students. The members of this group, students of Professor David Rood of at the University of Colorado at Boulder, are enrolled in a Master's degree program in which they are studying linguistics and ethnographic videography. They will be able to serve as language resources for their own tribes. The program is supported by the National Science Foundation as part of its Documenting Endangered Languages project. For two weeks, from June 23 to July 3, InField will present a course of workshops on language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization. . This will be followed by a four-week session of field training from July 7 to August 1. This intensive course is similar to a doctoral course on linguistic field methods, where students will utilize the skills taught in the workshops. In addition to technical work, participants may learn about moral, ethical, and practical issues of working within foreign speech communities. Other participants from North America include activists from diverse communities: White Mountain Apache (Arizona); Kwak'wala (Northern Vancouver Island); Seneca (New York State and Canada); Cheyenne (Montana); Karuk (Northern California; Central Pomo (Mendocino County, California); and Algonquin (Western Quebec and Eastern Ontario) Also taking part will be speakers and scholars of Ese Eja (Bolivia and Peru); Baram and Bhujel (Nepal); Lamkang and Haroti (India); Banda, Krim and Bom' (West and Central Africa); Kiong and Ibani (Nigeria); and Jambi and Papuan Malay (Indonesia). InField is funded in part by the Documenting Endangered Languages program, co-funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Further information is available at http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/infield/index.html. Note: The workshops for InField will take place June 23-July 3 at various locations on the UC Santa Barbara campus. Each day there will be a plenary session focusing on specific language models: Hawaiian language revitalization, Australian Language Centres, Seneca, Chumash, Manx Gaelic, Indonesian, Maori, and the "Breath of Life" workshop on Californian native languages. These will take place in the McCune Conference Room of the Humanities and Social Sciences Building. http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1808 Material appearing here is distributed without profit or monitory gain to those who have expressed an interest in receiving the material for research and educational purposes. 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URL: From carudin1 at wsc.edu Wed Jul 2 17:57:03 2008 From: carudin1 at wsc.edu (Catherine Rudin) Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 12:57:03 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project Message-ID: Hi, all. No one has responded to this, so I guess we must all be more or less in agreement. (Or not reading e-mail.) I personally DO have a very deep (sorry) interest in what Bob and Johannes call "invisible" structures. And I'd argue that it's pretty much impossible to talk about grammar without invoking some degree of abstraction: "Noun Phrase", for instance, is an abstract, "invisible" concept - even phonemes are abstractions --- However, that said, I agree with Johannes that this project should focus on (relatively surface-y) typological description. That will be hard enough!! After the project is done, anyone who wants can take the results and analyze them from a historical or theoretical syntactic or whatever other view. Just my 2 cents - Catherine >>> "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" 06/26/08 6:56 AM >>> Dear Siouanists, Bob touches quite fundamental questions with regard to the Comparative Siouan Grammar project and I think it would be helpful for the entire project but also for each individual contributor and contribution if we find some answers to these questions in advance. My personal view on this is the following. First of all, I think the overall goal is to describe the morphosyntactic diversity among the Siouan languages. Most of us are experts for just one or two of the Siouan languages, but have only a cursory knowledge of the other SL. Or, we perceive SL through the glasses of the better documented SL like Lakhota. Such a project forces us to look deeper into the other SL at least with regard to a certain grammatical domain. My hope and conviction is that the more we know about the divers grammatical categories and constructions among the SL the better we can investigate and describe the language we are already experts in. Perhaps, we find new things in our "own" language if we know more about the other SL. So, "comparative" in my view means primarily diversity (and uniformity(?)) among SL. This is of course close to what typologist do with the difference that our sample of languages is limited and that we can also start with certain grammatical categories and construction we already know that they are prominent in SL. This typologically biased view on "comparative" does not preclude the historical perspective. On the contrary, we are all interested in the question how the various categories and constructions historically emerged even if we can reconstruct this only on the basis of the contemporary SL. The ideal would be that we could combine both perspectives on "comparative" in our individual contributions. Since I am not a historical linguist, I would of course have difficulties to reconstruct forms in a deepness and quality as Bob, David, and others could do it. So, in my own contributions this perspective would remain somewhat weak. On the last point mentioned in Bob's mail, I can comment on pretty shortly. I have no interest in invisible underlying structures or superstructures or aim to proof certain rather abstract models of grammar with data from SL. I think, many of us share this view, so I do not see a problem here too. I regret, that I could not attend the conference in Joplin, but I am looking forward to the nest year's conference in Lincoln. Best Johannes Datum: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:27:23 -0500 Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Von: "Rankin, Robert L" An: Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > Dear Colleagues, > > Before we get too far along with this project, we might want to set > some goals and limits. "Comparative grammar" is a pretty flexible > topic and we might want to try to specify what we mean. Does this > mean "comparative and historical" in the traditional sense? Or are > people thinking more along the lines of synchronic grammars and some > sort of typological approach? Do we intend to limit ourselves to > surface grammar (that's certainly what the historical apporoach would > requirt solutions that appeal to > invisible/hypothetical superstructure? It seems to me that these > would be vastly different projects appealing to different kinds of > evidence and information. It's probably worth thinking about in > advance. > > Thanks to a lot of hard work by Jill and Catherine, the meeting in > Joplin was a lot of fun and very informative. I'm looking forward to > next year's meeting already. > > Bob > > ________________________________ > > In Billings, we had a planning session led by Linda Cumberland and > John Boyle. On the huge blackboard there we outlined and summarized > the topics to be included in the projected three volume opus of a CSG. > > > According to my notes and recollections, Vol. III contains sketches of > the individual Siouan languages following perhaps a common scheme > (which does not exist yet, of course) > > > Vol. I contains investigations to the following topics. I will mention > also the names as far as I can remember (I may be wrong, though). > > > Obliques/ Postpositions (Regina Pustet) > Applicatives (including the benefactive applicative) (Johannes > Helmbrecht) > Determiners (?) > Nominal Possession (?) > t-words (Bruce Ingham?) > Prefixes (morphological positions, etc.) (Bob Rankin) > Suffixes/ Enclitics (Bob Rankin) > Relative Clauses (?) > Switch references and clase chaining (John Boyle) > Pronominals and the stative/active split (Bob Rankin) > Deictic motion verbs (Linda Cumberland) > > > Vol II contains the following topics: > > > Plural marking > Compounding > Noun incorporation > Causatives (Helmbrecht) > External Possession > Coordination > Subordination > Instrumentals > Absolutive (wa-) > TAM > Negation > Serial verbs (David Rood ?) > > > That's what I have in my notes perhaps John or Linda have more in > their files. > > > The topics of the two volumes as given above are unordered and rather > a list of key words than a systematically developed structure of such > a project. But it was the point where we stopped further planning. It > might serve as the starting point for pushing the whole thing further. > > > As I indicated in my last mail, it would be of some importance for me > if I knew the precise date of the next conference in Lincoln. So, > perhaps, this could be decided on in Joplin in the coming days. > > > I wish everyone a wonderful and exciting conference in Joplin, > > > Best > Johannes > > > > > > > Datum: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:38:13 -0500 > Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Von: "Catherine Rudin" > An: > Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > I agree with Bob; it all sounds good. Language instructors' > session > > is a good idea, and we should DEFINITELY get the momentum back for > the > > comparative Siouan grammar project. These two ideas don't conflict > - > > we can do both and still have time for some regular papers at the > 2009 > > meeting. > > > > I think we should devote a whole day to comparative grammar, and > we > > should get organized well in advance. I wasn't able to get to > > Billings, and I've forgotten which topic I said I would look at (am > I > > the only sieve-brain?) but I do think this is important!!! If > Johannes > > is willing to be the organizer that would be great. Is there > someone > > who will be in Joplin who could bring the list of topics/chapters > that > > was compiled before? (And/or could someone circulate it > > electronically?) I suspect I'm not the only one who could use a > > reminder. > > > > I believe that Mark has not only offered, but we collectively have > > accepted Lincoln as the 2009 site. The date I have noted is "June > 5-7 > > or 12-14". Should we make a decision? > > > > Let's include a quick "business meeting" in the Joplin schedule, > with > > confirming at least next year's plans as item #1 on the agenda. > > Tenta> I > > tried to reply earlier to Mark's note, but it seems to have gone > only > > to him, not to the list -- at least I hope that's what happened to > it! > > > > Catherine > > > > >>> "Rankin, Robert L" 06/17/08 12:53 PM >>> > > This all sounds really great to me. Perhaps Johannes would like to > be > > the organizer of the comparative sessions (which might, in turn, > > provide an even stronger rationale for his getting travel funds), > and > > Mark could organize the language instructors' sessions. Hopefully > we > > could schedule them so that we could all attend both. > > > > Bob > > > > ________________________________ > > > > From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU on behalf of Mark J > > Awakuni-Swetland > > Sent: Tue 6/17/2008 9:06 AM > > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > Cc: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU; siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > Subject: Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > Aloha Johannes, > > Many thanks for your suggestions about future SACC agendas. > > I have offered to host the 2009 gathering here in Lincoln, > Nebraska > > (the center of it all...or the most distant from anywhere else sort > of > > place). > > > > The Dhegihanists have met here back in 2000 or so. > > > > I will be polling folks at Joplin about their interests regarding > the > > agenda for 2009. > > > > If there is sufficient interest in organizing a session or three > on > > the Comparative Siouan Grammar, Lincoln would be a good time to > > formalize it and push it forward a bit. > > > > There may be interest in organizing a session geared towards > language > > instructors from on- and off-rez institutions. I would suspect > that > > the Tribal Colleges in NE, SD, and OK might find this useful. > Omaha > > Nation Public School (K-12), Walthill Public School, and Winnebago > > Public School could find some value in this as well. > > > > Let's put on our thinking caps as we head to Joplin. > > > > iNcHoNxti woNgithe widoNbe ttamiNkHe. > > Uthixide > > > > Mark Awakuni-Swetland > > Assistant Professor of Anthropology > > and Native American Studies > > University of Nebraska > > Lincoln, NE 68588-0368 > > > > http://omahalanguage.unl.edu > > Phone 402-472-3455 > > FAX: 402-472-9642 > > > > "Ttenixa uxpathe egoN" a biama, winisi akHa. > > > > > > > > "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" > > > > Sent by: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > 06/17/2008 07:50 AM > > Please respond to > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > > > To > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > cc > > Subject > > Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Dear Siouanists, > > > > I regret very much that I won't be able to attend this year's SCLC > in > > Joplin,MO in particular because > > the program seems to be so interesting. Since I won't be > personally > > there, I would like to make > > some suggestions from the other end of the world for the future > > conferences, which may be > > discussed during the conference in Joplin. > > > > One of the exciting projeGrammar. > > Papers dealing with various aspects of Siouan grammar in a > typological > > and historical comparative > > perspective were presented there. We also compiled a list with > > additional topics filling all in all at > > least two volumes. Unfortunately, this project came to a halt > > afterwards and I would like to give it a > > new push. So, my suggestion would be to plan on a follow up > workshop > > on Siouan Comparative > > Grammar for the next year's conference, if this goal is still > > considered worthy among the participants > > to invest time and research. Could you discuss this question > during > > the coming days? > > > > For me personally, this implies that I will revise and expand my > paper > > on applicatives in Siouan. In > > addition, I volunteered for the causative constructions (if I > recall > > that correctly), so I will start I will be able to come next > only, > > if I can get funding for an > > overseas trip. This is not too difficult to obtain in particular > for > > such a fascinating project, but I need > > the conference details some months in advance in order to be able > to > > apply for money. Therefore, I > > would like to ask you to fix a date and location for the next and > if > > possible for the conference in two > > years so that people from abroad have a chance to get the > necessary > > funding. John Boyle > > mentioned to me that he is going to organize a conference in > Chicago > > in 2010? > > > > Anyway, I think the meeting in Joplin could provide a good > opportunity > > to talk about the state of the > > art with regard to the comparative Siouan Grammar project and to > plan > > on the next steps. > > Personally, I would like to participate in the planning, the > > organization, and the research as much as > > I can so that this project will come to a succesful end. > > > > So, I wish all of you a wonderful and interesting meeting in > Joplin, > > > > Best, > > Johannes > > > > > > -- > > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > > Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > > Universität Regensburg > > Philosophische Fakultät IV > > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > > Universitätsstr. 31 > > 93053 Regensburg > > Deutschland > > > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > Universität Regensburg > Philosophische Fakultät IV > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Universitätsstr. 31 > 93053 Regensburg > Deutschland > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > -- Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft Universität Regensburg Philosophische Fakultät IV Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft Universitätsstr. 31 93053 Regensburg Deutschland Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm From linguista at gmail.com Wed Jul 2 18:42:06 2008 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan James Gordon) Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 13:42:06 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: <486B7B1F0200008E0001010B@hermes.wsc.edu> Message-ID: After rereading Johannes' and Bob's posts, I can say I agree in general with the idea of building a principally typological comparative grammar that focusses on morphosyntactic features. Nonetheless, I would caution us against going too far with rooting out "invisible" things. Bob's original question was whether we should even admit solutions that appeal to "invisible" things, and I think the answer to that should be a resounding Yes, as long as the primary focus is morphosyntactic description and not theorising. Sometimes the "invisible" answer is much better than any other answer, and quite frankly, morphosyntactic descriptions often don't provide any answers at all, so at least a tentative first stab at one should be welcome, no matter how visible its structure is. That being said, like Catherine and Johannes, I think we should certainly make sure the primary focus of each piece is morphosyntactic description and anything else should be secondary. - Bryan 2008/7/2 Catherine Rudin : > Hi, all. > No one has responded to this, so I guess we must all be more or less in > agreement. (Or not reading e-mail.) > > I personally DO have a very deep (sorry) interest in what Bob and Johannes > call "invisible" structures. And I'd argue that it's pretty much impossible > to talk about grammar without invoking some degree of abstraction: "Noun > Phrase", for instance, is an abstract, "invisible" concept - even phonemes > are abstractions --- > > However, that said, I agree with Johannes that this project should focus on > (relatively surface-y) typological description. That will be hard enough!! > After the project is done, anyone who wants can take the results and > analyze them from a historical or theoretical syntactic or whatever other > view. > > Just my 2 cents - > Catherine > > >>> "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" < > johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de> 06/26/08 6:56 AM >>> > Dear Siouanists, > > Bob touches quite fundamental questions with regard to the Comparative > Siouan Grammar project and I > think it would be helpful for the entire project but also for each > individual contributor and contribution if we > find some answers to these questions in advance. > > My personal view on this is the following. First of all, I think the > overall goal is to describe the > morphosyntactic diversity among the Siouan languages. Most of us are > experts for just one or two of the > Siouan languages, but have only a cursory knowledge of the other SL. Or, we > perceive SL through the > glasses of the better documented SL like Lakhota. Such a project forces us > to look deeper into the other SL > at least with regard to a certain grammatical domain. My hope and > conviction is that the more we know > about the divers grammatical categories and constructions among the SL the > better we can investigate and > describe the language we are already experts in. Perhaps, we find new > things in our "own" language if we > know more about the other SL. So, "comparative" in my view means primarily > diversity (and uniformity(?)) > among SL. This is of course close to what typologist do with the difference > that our sample of languages is > limited and that we can also start with certain grammatical categories and > construction we already know that > they are prominent in SL. > > This typologically biased view on "comparative" does not preclude the > historical perspective. On the > contrary, we are all interested in the question how the various categories > and constructions historically > emerged even if we can reconstruct this only on the basis of the > contemporary SL. The ideal would be that > we could combine both perspectives on "comparative" in our individual > contributions. Since I am not a > historical linguist, I would of course have difficulties to reconstruct > forms in a deepness and quality as Bob, > David, and others could do it. So, in my own contributions this perspective > would remain somewhat weak. > > On the last point mentioned in Bob's mail, I can comment on pretty shortly. > I have no interest in invisible > underlying structures or superstructures or aim to proof certain rather > abstract models of grammar with data > from SL. I think, many of us share this view, so I do not see a problem > here too. > > I regret, that I could not attend the conference in Joplin, but I am > looking forward to the nest year's > conference in Lincoln. > > Best > Johannes > > > > Datum: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:27:23 -0500 > Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Von: "Rankin, Robert L" > An: > Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > Dear Colleagues, > > > > Before we get too far along with this project, we might want to set > > some goals and limits. "Comparative grammar" is a pretty flexible > > topic and we might want to try to specify what we mean. Does this > > mean "comparative and historical" in the traditional sense? Or are > > people thinking more along the lines of synchronic grammars and some > > sort of typological approach? Do we intend to limit ourselves to > > surface grammar (that's certainly what the historical apporoach would > > requirt solutions that appeal to > > invisible/hypothetical superstructure? It seems to me that these > > would be vastly different projects appealing to different kinds of > > evidence and information. It's probably worth thinking about in > > advance. > > > > Thanks to a lot of hard work by Jill and Catherine, the meeting in > > Joplin was a lot of fun and very informative. I'm looking forward to > > next year's meeting already. > > > > Bob > > > > ________________________________ > > > > In Billings, we had a planning session led by Linda Cumberland and > > John Boyle. On the huge blackboard there we outlined and summarized > > the topics to be included in the projected three volume opus of a CSG. > > > > > > According to my notes and recollections, Vol. III contains sketches of > > the individual Siouan languages following perhaps a common scheme > > (which does not exist yet, of course) > > > > > > Vol. I contains investigations to the following topics. I will mention > > also the names as far as I can remember (I may be wrong, though). > > > > > > Obliques/ Postpositions (Regina Pustet) > > Applicatives (including the benefactive applicative) (Johannes > > Helmbrecht) > > Determiners (?) > > Nominal Possession (?) > > t-words (Bruce Ingham?) > > Prefixes (morphological positions, etc.) (Bob Rankin) > > Suffixes/ Enclitics (Bob Rankin) > > Relative Clauses (?) > > Switch references and clase chaining (John Boyle) > > Pronominals and the stative/active split (Bob Rankin) > > Deictic motion verbs (Linda Cumberland) > > > > > > Vol II contains the following topics: > > > > > > Plural marking > > Compounding > > Noun incorporation > > Causatives (Helmbrecht) > > External Possession > > Coordination > > Subordination > > Instrumentals > > Absolutive (wa-) > > TAM > > Negation > > Serial verbs (David Rood ?) > > > > > > That's what I have in my notes perhaps John or Linda have more in > > their files. > > > > > > The topics of the two volumes as given above are unordered and rather > > a list of key words than a systematically developed structure of such > > a project. But it was the point where we stopped further planning. It > > might serve as the starting point for pushing the whole thing further. > > > > > > As I indicated in my last mail, it would be of some importance for me > > if I knew the precise date of the next conference in Lincoln. So, > > perhaps, this could be decided on in Joplin in the coming days. > > > > > > I wish everyone a wonderful and exciting conference in Joplin, > > > > > > Best > > Johannes > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Datum: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:38:13 -0500 > > Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > Von: "Catherine Rudin" > > An: > > Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > I agree with Bob; it all sounds good. Language instructors' > > session > > > is a good idea, and we should DEFINITELY get the momentum back for > > the > > > comparative Siouan grammar project. These two ideas don't conflict > > - > > > we can do both and still have time for some regular papers at the > > 2009 > > > meeting. > > > > > > I think we should devote a whole day to comparative grammar, and > > we > > > should get organized well in advance. I wasn't able to get to > > > Billings, and I've forgotten which topic I said I would look at (am > > I > > > the only sieve-brain?) but I do think this is important!!! If > > Johannes > > > is willing to be the organizer that would be great. Is there > > someone > > > who will be in Joplin who could bring the list of topics/chapters > > that > > > was compiled before? (And/or could someone circulate it > > > electronically?) I suspect I'm not the only one who could use a > > > reminder. > > > > > > I believe that Mark has not only offered, but we collectively have > > > accepted Lincoln as the 2009 site. The date I have noted is "June > > 5-7 > > > or 12-14". Should we make a decision? > > > > > > Let's include a quick "business meeting" in the Joplin schedule, > > with > > > confirming at least next year's plans as item #1 on the agenda. > > > Tenta> I > > > tried to reply earlier to Mark's note, but it seems to have gone > > only > > > to him, not to the list -- at least I hope that's what happened to > > it! > > > > > > Catherine > > > > > > >>> "Rankin, Robert L" 06/17/08 12:53 PM >>> > > > This all sounds really great to me. Perhaps Johannes would like to > > be > > > the organizer of the comparative sessions (which might, in turn, > > > provide an even stronger rationale for his getting travel funds), > > and > > > Mark could organize the language instructors' sessions. Hopefully > > we > > > could schedule them so that we could all attend both. > > > > > > Bob > > > > > > ________________________________ > > > > > > From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU on behalf of Mark J > > > Awakuni-Swetland > > > Sent: Tue 6/17/2008 9:06 AM > > > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > Cc: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU; siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > Subject: Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > > > > > Aloha Johannes, > > > Many thanks for your suggestions about future SACC agendas. > > > I have offered to host the 2009 gathering here in Lincoln, > > Nebraska > > > (the center of it all...or the most distant from anywhere else sort > > of > > > place). > > > > > > The Dhegihanists have met here back in 2000 or so. > > > > > > I will be polling folks at Joplin about their interests regarding > > the > > > agenda for 2009. > > > > > > If there is sufficient interest in organizing a session or three > > on > > > the Comparative Siouan Grammar, Lincoln would be a good time to > > > formalize it and push it forward a bit. > > > > > > There may be interest in organizing a session geared towards > > language > > > instructors from on- and off-rez institutions. I would suspect > > that > > > the Tribal Colleges in NE, SD, and OK might find this useful. > > Omaha > > > Nation Public School (K-12), Walthill Public School, and Winnebago > > > Public School could find some value in this as well. > > > > > > Let's put on our thinking caps as we head to Joplin. > > > > > > iNcHoNxti woNgithe widoNbe ttamiNkHe. > > > Uthixide > > > > > > Mark Awakuni-Swetland > > > Assistant Professor of Anthropology > > > and Native American Studies > > > University of Nebraska > > > Lincoln, NE 68588-0368 > > > > > > http://omahalanguage.unl.edu > > > Phone 402-472-3455 > > > FAX: 402-472-9642 > > > > > > "Ttenixa uxpathe egoN" a biama, winisi akHa. > > > > > > > > > > > > "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" > > > > > > Sent by: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > > > 06/17/2008 07:50 AM > > > Please respond to > > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > > > > > > To > > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > cc > > > Subject > > > Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Dear Siouanists, > > > > > > I regret very much that I won't be able to attend this year's SCLC > > in > > > Joplin,MO in particular because > > > the program seems to be so interesting. Since I won't be > > personally > > > there, I would like to make > > > some suggestions from the other end of the world for the future > > > conferences, which may be > > > discussed during the conference in Joplin. > > > > > > One of the exciting projeGrammar. > > > Papers dealing with various aspects of Siouan grammar in a > > typological > > > and historical comparative > > > perspective were presented there. We also compiled a list with > > > additional topics filling all in all at > > > least two volumes. Unfortunately, this project came to a halt > > > afterwards and I would like to give it a > > > new push. So, my suggestion would be to plan on a follow up > > workshop > > > on Siouan Comparative > > > Grammar for the next year's conference, if this goal is still > > > considered worthy among the participants > > > to invest time and research. Could you discuss this question > > during > > > the coming days? > > > > > > For me personally, this implies that I will revise and expand my > > paper > > > on applicatives in Siouan. In > > > addition, I volunteered for the causative constructions (if I > > recall > > > that correctly), so I will start I will be able to come next > > only, > > > if I can get funding for an > > > overseas trip. This is not too difficult to obtain in particular > > for > > > such a fascinating project, but I need > > > the conference details some months in advance in order to be able > > to > > > apply for money. Therefore, I > > > would like to ask you to fix a date and location for the next and > > if > > > possible for the conference in two > > > years so that people from abroad have a chance to get the > > necessary > > > funding. John Boyle > > > mentioned to me that he is going to organize a conference in > > Chicago > > > in 2010? > > > > > > Anyway, I think the meeting in Joplin could provide a good > > opportunity > > > to talk about the state of the > > > art with regard to the comparative Siouan Grammar project and to > > plan > > > on the next steps. > > > Personally, I would like to participate in the planning, the > > > organization, and the research as much as > > > I can so that this project will come to a succesful end. > > > > > > So, I wish all of you a wonderful and interesting meeting in > > Joplin, > > > > > > Best, > > > Johannes > > > > > > > > > -- > > > > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > > > Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > > > Universität Regensburg > > > Philosophische Fakultät IV > > > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > > > Universitätsstr. 31 > > > 93053 Regensburg > > > Deutschland > > > > > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > > > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > > > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > > > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > > > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > > > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > > Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > > Universität Regensburg > > Philosophische Fakultät IV > > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > > Universitätsstr. 31 > > 93053 Regensburg > > Deutschland > > > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > > > > > > -- > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > Universität Regensburg > Philosophische Fakultät IV > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Universitätsstr. 31 > 93053 Regensburg > Deutschland > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Wed Jul 2 19:04:36 2008 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 12:04:36 -0700 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: <486B7B1F0200008E0001010B@hermes.wsc.edu> Message-ID: Perhaps I missed something, and I probably did, but when were we planning to get this comparative grammar completed?  I ask because, as most of you already know, I will soon be spending a lot of time in the realm of Eastern Algonquian (I know, don't throw tomatoes!) and not so much time on Siouan, at least until I graduate, when and if that happens.  But I would certainly like to contribute something to this project, which, with enough forewarning and time, I might be able to do.    Dave --- On Wed, 7/2/08, Catherine Rudin wrote: From: Catherine Rudin Subject: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Wednesday, July 2, 2008, 10:57 AM Hi, all. No one has responded to this, so I guess we must all be more or less in agreement. (Or not reading e-mail.) I personally DO have a very deep (sorry) interest in what Bob and Johannes call "invisible" structures. And I'd argue that it's pretty much impossible to talk about grammar without invoking some degree of abstraction: "Noun Phrase", for instance, is an abstract, "invisible" concept - even phonemes are abstractions --- However, that said, I agree with Johannes that this project should focus on (relatively surface-y) typological description. That will be hard enough!! After the project is done, anyone who wants can take the results and analyze them from a historical or theoretical syntactic or whatever other view. Just my 2 cents - Catherine >>> "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" 06/26/08 6:56 AM >>> Dear Siouanists, Bob touches quite fundamental questions with regard to the Comparative Siouan Grammar project and I think it would be helpful for the entire project but also for each individual contributor and contribution if we find some answers to these questions in advance. My personal view on this is the following. First of all, I think the overall goal is to describe the morphosyntactic diversity among the Siouan languages. Most of us are experts for just one or two of the Siouan languages, but have only a cursory knowledge of the other SL. Or, we perceive SL through the glasses of the better documented SL like Lakhota. Such a project forces us to look deeper into the other SL at least with regard to a certain grammatical domain. My hope and conviction is that the more we know about the divers grammatical categories and constructions among the SL the better we can investigate and describe the language we are already experts in. Perhaps, we find new things in our "own" language if we know more about the other SL. So, "comparative" in my view means primarily diversity (and uniformity(?)) among SL. This is of course close to what typologist do with the difference that our sample of languages is limited and that we can also start with certain grammatical categories and construction we already know that they are prominent in SL. This typologically biased view on "comparative" does not preclude the historical perspective. On the contrary, we are all interested in the question how the various categories and constructions historically emerged even if we can reconstruct this only on the basis of the contemporary SL. The ideal would be that we could combine both perspectives on "comparative" in our individual contributions. Since I am not a historical linguist, I would of course have difficulties to reconstruct forms in a deepness and quality as Bob, David, and others could do it. So, in my own contributions this perspective would remain somewhat weak. On the last point mentioned in Bob's mail, I can comment on pretty shortly. I have no interest in invisible underlying structures or superstructures or aim to proof certain rather abstract models of grammar with data from SL. I think, many of us share this view, so I do not see a problem here too. I regret, that I could not attend the conference in Joplin, but I am looking forward to the nest year's conference in Lincoln. Best Johannes Datum: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:27:23 -0500 Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Von: "Rankin, Robert L" An: Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > Dear Colleagues, > > Before we get too far along with this project, we might want to set > some goals and limits. "Comparative grammar" is a pretty flexible > topic and we might want to try to specify what we mean. Does this > mean "comparative and historical" in the traditional sense? Or are > people thinking more along the lines of synchronic grammars and some > sort of typological approach? Do we intend to limit ourselves to > surface grammar (that's certainly what the historical apporoach would > requirt solutions that appeal to > invisible/hypothetical superstructure? It seems to me that these > would be vastly different projects appealing to different kinds of > evidence and information. It's probably worth thinking about in > advance. > > Thanks to a lot of hard work by Jill and Catherine, the meeting in > Joplin was a lot of fun and very informative. I'm looking forward to > next year's meeting already. > > Bob > > ________________________________ > > In Billings, we had a planning session led by Linda Cumberland and > John Boyle. On the huge blackboard there we outlined and summarized > the topics to be included in the projected three volume opus of a CSG. > > > According to my notes and recollections, Vol. III contains sketches of > the individual Siouan languages following perhaps a common scheme > (which does not exist yet, of course) > > > Vol. I contains investigations to the following topics. I will mention > also the names as far as I can remember (I may be wrong, though). > > > Obliques/ Postpositions (Regina Pustet) > Applicatives (including the benefactive applicative) (Johannes > Helmbrecht) > Determiners (?) > Nominal Possession (?) > t-words (Bruce Ingham?) > Prefixes (morphological positions, etc.) (Bob Rankin) > Suffixes/ Enclitics (Bob Rankin) > Relative Clauses (?) > Switch references and clase chaining (John Boyle) > Pronominals and the stative/active split (Bob Rankin) > Deictic motion verbs (Linda Cumberland) > > > Vol II contains the following topics: > > > Plural marking > Compounding > Noun incorporation > Causatives (Helmbrecht) > External Possession > Coordination > Subordination > Instrumentals > Absolutive (wa-) > TAM > Negation > Serial verbs (David Rood ?) > > > That's what I have in my notes perhaps John or Linda have more in > their files. > > > The topics of the two volumes as given above are unordered and rather > a list of key words than a systematically developed structure of such > a project. But it was the point where we stopped further planning. It > might serve as the starting point for pushing the whole thing further. > > > As I indicated in my last mail, it would be of some importance for me > if I knew the precise date of the next conference in Lincoln. So, > perhaps, this could be decided on in Joplin in the coming days. > > > I wish everyone a wonderful and exciting conference in Joplin, > > > Best > Johannes > > > > > > > Datum: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:38:13 -0500 > Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Von: "Catherine Rudin" > An: > Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > I agree with Bob; it all sounds good. Language instructors' > session > > is a good idea, and we should DEFINITELY get the momentum back for > the > > comparative Siouan grammar project. These two ideas don't conflict > - > > we can do both and still have time for some regular papers at the > 2009 > > meeting. > > > > I think we should devote a whole day to comparative grammar, and > we > > should get organized well in advance. I wasn't able to get to > > Billings, and I've forgotten which topic I said I would look at (am > I > > the only sieve-brain?) but I do think this is important!!! If > Johannes > > is willing to be the organizer that would be great. Is there > someone > > who will be in Joplin who could bring the list of topics/chapters > that > > was compiled before? (And/or could someone circulate it > > electronically?) I suspect I'm not the only one who could use a > > reminder. > > > > I believe that Mark has not only offered, but we collectively have > > accepted Lincoln as the 2009 site. The date I have noted is "June > 5-7 > > or 12-14". Should we make a decision? > > > > Let's include a quick "business meeting" in the Joplin schedule, > with > > confirming at least next year's plans as item #1 on the agenda. > > Tenta> I > > tried to reply earlier to Mark's note, but it seems to have gone > only > > to him, not to the list -- at least I hope that's what happened to > it! > > > > Catherine > > > > >>> "Rankin, Robert L" 06/17/08 12:53 PM >>> > > This all sounds really great to me. Perhaps Johannes would like to > be > > the organizer of the comparative sessions (which might, in turn, > > provide an even stronger rationale for his getting travel funds), > and > > Mark could organize the language instructors' sessions. Hopefully > we > > could schedule them so that we could all attend both. > > > > Bob > > > > ________________________________ > > > > From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU on behalf of Mark J > > Awakuni-Swetland > > Sent: Tue 6/17/2008 9:06 AM > > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > Cc: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU; siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > Subject: Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > Aloha Johannes, > > Many thanks for your suggestions about future SACC agendas. > > I have offered to host the 2009 gathering here in Lincoln, > Nebraska > > (the center of it all...or the most distant from anywhere else sort > of > > place). > > > > The Dhegihanists have met here back in 2000 or so. > > > > I will be polling folks at Joplin about their interests regarding > the > > agenda for 2009. > > > > If there is sufficient interest in organizing a session or three > on > > the Comparative Siouan Grammar, Lincoln would be a good time to > > formalize it and push it forward a bit. > > > > There may be interest in organizing a session geared towards > language > > instructors from on- and off-rez institutions. I would suspect > that > > the Tribal Colleges in NE, SD, and OK might find this useful. > Omaha > > Nation Public School (K-12), Walthill Public School, and Winnebago > > Public School could find some value in this as well. > > > > Let's put on our thinking caps as we head to Joplin. > > > > iNcHoNxti woNgithe widoNbe ttamiNkHe. > > Uthixide > > > > Mark Awakuni-Swetland > > Assistant Professor of Anthropology > > and Native American Studies > > University of Nebraska > > Lincoln, NE 68588-0368 > > > > http://omahalanguage.unl.edu > > Phone 402-472-3455 > > FAX: 402-472-9642 > > > > "Ttenixa uxpathe egoN" a biama, winisi akHa. > > > > > > > > "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" > > > > Sent by: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > 06/17/2008 07:50 AM > > Please respond to > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > > > To > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > cc > > Subject > > Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Dear Siouanists, > > > > I regret very much that I won't be able to attend this year's SCLC > in > > Joplin,MO in particular because > > the program seems to be so interesting. Since I won't be > personally > > there, I would like to make > > some suggestions from the other end of the world for the future > > conferences, which may be > > discussed during the conference in Joplin. > > > > One of the exciting projeGrammar. > > Papers dealing with various aspects of Siouan grammar in a > typological > > and historical comparative > > perspective were presented there. We also compiled a list with > > additional topics filling all in all at > > least two volumes. Unfortunately, this project came to a halt > > afterwards and I would like to give it a > > new push. So, my suggestion would be to plan on a follow up > workshop > > on Siouan Comparative > > Grammar for the next year's conference, if this goal is still > > considered worthy among the participants > > to invest time and research. Could you discuss this question > during > > the coming days? > > > > For me personally, this implies that I will revise and expand my > paper > > on applicatives in Siouan. In > > addition, I volunteered for the causative constructions (if I > recall > > that correctly), so I will start I will be able to come next > only, > > if I can get funding for an > > overseas trip. This is not too difficult to obtain in particular > for > > such a fascinating project, but I need > > the conference details some months in advance in order to be able > to > > apply for money. Therefore, I > > would like to ask you to fix a date and location for the next and > if > > possible for the conference in two > > years so that people from abroad have a chance to get the > necessary > > funding. John Boyle > > mentioned to me that he is going to organize a conference in > Chicago > > in 2010? > > > > Anyway, I think the meeting in Joplin could provide a good > opportunity > > to talk about the state of the > > art with regard to the comparative Siouan Grammar project and to > plan > > on the next steps. > > Personally, I would like to participate in the planning, the > > organization, and the research as much as > > I can so that this project will come to a succesful end. > > > > So, I wish all of you a wonderful and interesting meeting in > Joplin, > > > > Best, > > Johannes > > > > > > -- > > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > > Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > > Universität Regensburg > > Philosophische Fakultät IV > > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > > Universitätsstr. 31 > > 93053 Regensburg > > Deutschland > > > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > Universität Regensburg > Philosophische Fakultät IV > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Universitätsstr. 31 > 93053 Regensburg > Deutschland > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > -- Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft Universität Regensburg Philosophische Fakultät IV Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft Universitätsstr. 31 93053 Regensburg Deutschland Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jgoodtracks at gmail.com Thu Jul 3 14:39:08 2008 From: jgoodtracks at gmail.com (Jimm GoodTracks) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 09:39:08 -0500 Subject: Fw: [NDNAIM] Sign the Petition to Help Revitalize Native American Languages Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Pat Benabe To: Jimm Goodtracks Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 7:48 AM Subject: Fw: [NDNAIM] Sign the Petition to Help Revitalize Native American Languages ----- Original Message ----- Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 2:55 AM Subject: [NDNAIM] Sign the Petition to Help Revitalize Native American Languages From: Quanah Brightman qbrightman75 @ hotmail.com (take out spaces) Sign the Petition to Help Revitalize Native American Languages http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/help-revitalize-native-american-languages Your help is urgently needed to save and revitalize Native American languages. Among the more than 300 original languages once spoken in the U.S. only 155-175 are spoken today. Scholars estimate that only 20 of these remaining indigenous languages are being widely transmitted to today's Native children. Fully 70 languages could vanish within the next 10 years without immediate and significant funding for tribal language programs. The National Alliance to Save Native Languages, an intertribal leadership coalition says, 'Native languages are national treasures that have served this nation in time of war, with the legendary service of Native code talkers, and they remain vital part of Native American culture and identity today. Notably, Native students who are fluent in both English and their Native language perform substantially better academically, including on national assessment tests, than Native students who have not gone through such a program.' United Native Americans Inc. Fighting for Natives Since 1968. 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URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Jul 3 21:50:38 2008 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 16:50:38 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Bob wrote: > Do we intend to limit ourselves to surface grammar > (that's certainly what the historical apporoach would > require) or should we admit solutions that appeal to > invisible/hypothetical superstructure? Johannes wrote: > On the last point mentioned in Bob's mail, I can > comment on pretty shortly. I have no interest in > invisible underlying structures or superstructures or > aim to proof certain rather abstract models of grammar > with data from SL. I think, many of us share this > view [...] Catherine wrote: > I personally DO have a very deep (sorry) interest in > what Bob and Johannes call "invisible" structures. > And I'd argue that it's pretty much impossible to talk > about grammar without invoking some degree of abstraction: > "Noun Phrase", for instance, is an abstract, "invisible" > concept - even phonemes are abstractions --- Bryan wrote: > [...] I would caution us against going too far with rooting > out "invisible" things. Bob's original question was whether > we should even admit solutions that appeal to "invisible" > things, and I think the answer to that should be a > resounding Yes, as long as the primary focus is > morphosyntactic description and not theorising. Sometimes > the "invisible" answer is much better than any other answer, > and quite frankly, morphosyntactic descriptions often don't > provide any answers at all, so at least a tentative first > stab at one should be welcome, no matter how visible its > structure is. Gee, it's been so long since we had a good argument on the list! :-) I wonder if we aren't dancing around a difference in our fundamental conceptions of what language is about here. One pole might be a top-down approach that sees all human language as variants generated by a common universal grammar. In this view, the aim of a linguist is to work back from specific languages to discover the invisible universals that are at the heart of all grammar and ultimately control it. The opposite pole would be a bottom-up approach that sees human language as a practical communication system for a biological organism. In this conception, language would be variable, heuristic, and evolving; there would be no invisible grammatical universals to find. "Phonemes" might be used as an example of the difference. In the top-down conception, each language constructs its words as a sequence of discrete phonologically distinctive building blocks that are symbolically recognized as such in the brain of each native speaker. In this view, phonemes are universally real. In the bottom-up conception, perhaps, we track on fluctuating sound patterns composed of several concurrent lines of analog features, which tend toward standard momentary forms due to speaker articulatory habits and the need to distinguish one word from another when confusion might be possible. In this view, phonemes are merely useful abstractions conceived by linguists who are trying to fit the language into an alphabetical writing system. "Invisible" things may provide valid solutions to visible problems, but invisible things that relate only to other invisible things circularly within the same philosophical system are not helpful. I have nothing against "deep structure" models provided that their proponents make clear what their conception of language is and how their models improve our understanding of the linguistic real world. If the models are demonstrably realistic with respect to Siouan data, then I think they deserve inclusion. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ardisrachel at gmail.com Fri Jul 4 04:12:00 2008 From: ardisrachel at gmail.com (Ardis Eschenberg) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 23:12:00 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hmmm...I'm so not a fighter. Catherine and I are on relatively good social terms and relatively opposite terms of syntactic theorizing. Maybe we shouldn't even worry about this but let every chapter stand on its own (with some good editing). People will be interested in this for the language and not the theory, so it would behoove us all to be theory light. That said, sometimes you just can't help but love it when a plan comes together (Hannibal, the A-Team, 1987) and shows how great a theory is... I'd be interested in the section on determiners/articles. Respectfully, Ardis -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk Fri Jul 4 09:46:58 2008 From: shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk (shokooh Ingham) Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 09:46:58 +0000 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: <6e9927690807032112g4de2c1aai9c2b5862a6baf914@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Dear all, I hope my relative silence hasn't been taken to indicate lack of interest.  I am very happy to contribute.  I believe in an earlier email someone had put me down for something on T-words.  This is just to confirm that I would be happy to contribute to such a section either alone or with others. Yours Bruce --- On Fri, 4/7/08, Ardis Eschenberg wrote: From: Ardis Eschenberg Subject: Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Friday, 4 July, 2008, 5:12 AM Hmmm...I'm so not a fighter.  Catherine and I are on relatively good social terms and relatively opposite terms of syntactic theorizing.  Maybe we shouldn't even worry about this but let every chapter stand on its own (with some good editing).  People will be interested in this for the language and not the theory, so it would behoove us all to be theory light.  That said, sometimes you just can't help but love it when a plan comes together (Hannibal, the A-Team, 1987) and shows how great a theory is... I'd be interested in the section on determiners/articles. Respectfully, Ardis   __________________________________________________________ Not happy with your email address?. Get the one you really want - millions of new email addresses available now at Yahoo! http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/ymail/new.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Fri Jul 4 15:25:05 2008 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 10:25:05 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project Message-ID: Just spent the week in Kaw City, so I'm only now getting around to doing anything but a cursory reading of my mail. > Rory writes: I wonder if we aren't dancing around a difference in our fundamental conceptions of what language is about here. > Ardis writes: People will be interested in this for the language and not the theory, . . . I think what we're dancing around is our concept of what *this* projected volume is about. We all have deep interests in one or another aspect of linguistics as a science, be it underlying syntactic or semantic structure, reconstructive methodology, language teaching, phonological economy, language use and society, or what-have-you. That's well and good and nobody should apologize for it. My sole concern -- probably not expressed very well originally -- is in producing a treatment of specifically Siouan languages that will be easily intelligible to scholars 200 years from now. (This is what I've always tried to convey to students writing dissertations on particular languages or language families.) This places certain constraints on us all, and we need to concentrate on exposition using terms, concepts and abstractions that have stood, or will stand, the test of time. Since my crystal ball is a bit cloudy, and I've seen a lot of rapid turnover in synchronic theories, I tend to be a bit conservative in these matters. But if we all keep in mind the somewhat narrow goal of communicating to generations to come what Siouan languages are/were like, and recognize that not everything in current, cutting-edge linguistic theory is "built to last," we should do just fine without having to nanny each other. And for you younger folk (i.e., everybody except Hu Matthews), most schools give more credit toward promotion, etc. for theory articles published in refereed journals than for papers published in the sort of anthology we have in mind anyway. So where we address our truly theoretical concerns should be a pretty easy decision. _Linguistic Inquiry_ and _Language_ are probably at the top of the list. Bob From carudin1 at wsc.edu Fri Jul 4 18:00:54 2008 From: carudin1 at wsc.edu (Catherine Rudin) Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 13:00:54 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project Message-ID: Rory wrote: >Gee, it's been so long since we had a good argument on the list! :-) I really didn't mean to fight -- apparently I said something that sounded pugnacious, but it was entirely unintentional. I was actually AGREEING with Bob and others that this project should be basically descriptive and theory-neutral, even for those of us who do have strong theoretical leanings. Ah, communication!! Anyhow -- I'm still not sure what topic I signed up for. Was it coordination? Does anyone have the complete list compiled in Billings (John? Linda?) Peace, love, harmony, and best wishes to all - Catherine From voorhis at westman.wave.ca Fri Jul 4 22:55:18 2008 From: voorhis at westman.wave.ca (voorhis at westman.wave.ca) Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 17:55:18 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <7B0E9B4CED734EE4B84926977EFC17B3@JGHP> Message-ID: Jimm GoodTracks wrote: > *Subject:* Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn > How to Save Endangered Languages < snip > > ... to examine successful models of language preservation ... < snip > I guess I ought to attend the conference to learn the "successful models of language preservation," but aside from the obvious success that comes from having a million or more speakers in a politically and economically independent state, is there any other successful model? And how do you measure success, and how do you know when you've achieved it? Would the Celts have claimed success in preserving their language in 100 BC or the Goths in 300 AD? But the subject line speaks of "endangered languages." Success at preserving one of those must be measured by restoring the language to regular use in a community which has been mostly using some other language. Has that ever happened anywhere? Paul From rwd0002 at unt.edu Sat Jul 5 17:31:52 2008 From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu) Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2008 12:31:52 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <486EAA56.80109@westman.wave.ca> Message-ID: Hi Paul and all: I just came back from the first 9 days of the UCSB meet. The meeting was called InField, and it is basically to train people to be better fieldworkers for language documentation. It is an interesting mix of language activists (some of which were Native American) and beginning and accomplished fieldworkers. It is obviously clear that activists need not be fieldworkers, or vice versa, but everyone was extremely friendly and willing to learn from each other. Several Lakota/Dakota speakers were in attendance, including some Siouan List members, and one person who studies Mandan. This first week was very technology oriented. Teachers were very good. I went there in order to learn some of the ins and outs of SIL's Toolbox, and I learned everything I wanted to know. It makes sense of course that journalists would pick up on the newsworthy the "saving endangered languages" issue, but that is, as I understood it, not the primary purpose of InField. In the next week they will have three concurrent fieldwork classes with consultants, so the language activists who take these will see what fieldwork is all about. Finally, please note that I was just an informal visitor to InField, not a full participant, just sharing my informal impression with y'all, not representing official InField opinions in any way. Quoting voorhis at westman.wave.ca: > Jimm GoodTracks wrote: >> *Subject:* Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn >> How to Save Endangered Languages > > < snip > >> ... to examine successful models of language preservation ... > < snip > > > I guess I ought to attend the conference to learn the "successful models > of language preservation," but aside from the obvious success that comes > from having a million or more speakers in a politically and economically > independent state, is there any other successful model? And how do you > measure success, and how do you know when you've achieved it? Would the > Celts have claimed success in preserving their language in 100 BC or the > Goths in 300 AD? > > But the subject line speaks of "endangered languages." Success at > preserving one of those must be measured by restoring the language to > regular use in a community which has been mostly using some other > language. Has that ever happened anywhere? > To comment on Paul's question. Outside of Israeli Hebrew, the honest answer is no. However, there have been individual native speakers of English, who by brute force have taught themselves to be fluent in languages technically extinct, such as Cornish, Manx, or Karuk. They are not numerous enough to form genuine speech communities but they form some sort of community in the sense that speakers of Esperanto world-wide form some sort of community. Regardless of how pessimistic or optimistic we personally wanna be about such efforts, we all agree, I suppose, that as documentary/descriptive linguists (I use both terms together because I believe you cannot separate both, but that is another controversial issue), we should support individuals and communities involved in such efforts, unless requested otherwise. From David.Rood at Colorado.EDU Sun Jul 6 03:51:25 2008 From: David.Rood at Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2008 21:51:25 -0600 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <486EAA56.80109@westman.wave.ca> Message-ID: Paul, the classic "revival" success stories are Czech and Hebrew, and maybe Hawaiian, to the best of my knowledge -- so it does happen. But I think some of the larger Siouan languages are on the right track, e.g. Crow and Lakota. David David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Fri, 4 Jul 2008, voorhis at westman.wave.ca wrote: > Jimm GoodTracks wrote: >> *Subject:* Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn >> How to Save Endangered Languages > > < snip > >> ... to examine successful models of language preservation ... > < snip > > > I guess I ought to attend the conference to learn the "successful models > of language preservation," but aside from the obvious success that comes > from having a million or more speakers in a politically and economically > independent state, is there any other successful model? And how do you > measure success, and how do you know when you've achieved it? Would the > Celts have claimed success in preserving their language in 100 BC or the > Goths in 300 AD? > > But the subject line speaks of "endangered languages." Success at > preserving one of those must be measured by restoring the language to > regular use in a community which has been mostly using some other > language. Has that ever happened anywhere? > > Paul > From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Sun Jul 6 04:30:39 2008 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2008 21:30:39 -0700 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I believe we can also add Maori to that list of successes.  Hawaiian is doing quite well from what I understand - not a small accomplishment considering there were fewer than 200 speakers not that long ago.   Dave --- On Sat, 7/5/08, ROOD DAVID S wrote: From: ROOD DAVID S Subject: Re: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Saturday, July 5, 2008, 8:51 PM Paul, the classic "revival" success stories are Czech and Hebrew, and maybe Hawaiian, to the best of my knowledge -- so it does happen. But I think some of the larger Siouan languages are on the right track, e.g. Crow and Lakota. David David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Fri, 4 Jul 2008, voorhis at westman.wave.ca wrote: > Jimm GoodTracks wrote: >> *Subject:* Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn >> How to Save Endangered Languages > > < snip > >> ... to examine successful models of language preservation ... > < snip > > > I guess I ought to attend the conference to learn the "successful models > of language preservation," but aside from the obvious success that comes > from having a million or more speakers in a politically and economically > independent state, is there any other successful model? And how do you > measure success, and how do you know when you've achieved it? Would the > Celts have claimed success in preserving their language in 100 BC or the > Goths in 300 AD? > > But the subject line speaks of "endangered languages." Success at > preserving one of those must be measured by restoring the language to > regular use in a community which has been mostly using some other > language. Has that ever happened anywhere? > > Paul > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From voorhis at westman.wave.ca Sun Jul 6 14:21:55 2008 From: voorhis at westman.wave.ca (voorhis at westman.wave.ca) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 09:21:55 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <20080705123152.87olixk6s64gsc8c@eaglemail.unt.edu> Message-ID: I certainly agree that we should give all help possible to anyone struggling to preserve or revive an endangered language. But the efforts I have usually encountered involve second-language classes inserted into the school curriculum. And I believe in helping with these classes if that's what is wanted. But if asked about the prospects for the success of such projects, then I have to honestly admit that the chances of producing fluent speakers by this means are slim, and the chances that any fluent graduates would produce families with children that use the endangered language are slimmer still. The Hebrew revival differs from the situation faced by most endangered languages in two ways. First, most of the men and many of the women who immigrated to Israel had already studied Hebrew as a second language for religious purposes. Second, they weren't all speakers of any one other language; they arrived (and still arrive) using virtually every language from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, though maybe Yiddish was used more than any other language in early modern Israel. Paul rwd0002 at unt.edu wrote: > To comment on Paul's question. Outside of Israeli Hebrew, the honest > answer is no. However, there have been individual native speakers of > English, who by brute force have taught themselves to be fluent in > languages technically extinct, such as Cornish, Manx, or Karuk. They > are not numerous enough to form genuine speech communities but they > form some sort of community in the sense that speakers of Esperanto > world-wide form some sort of community. > > Regardless of how pessimistic or optimistic we personally wanna be > about such efforts, we all agree, I suppose, that as > documentary/descriptive linguists (I use both terms together because > I believe you cannot separate both, but that is another controversial > issue), we should support individuals and communities involved in > such efforts, unless requested otherwise. > From rankin at ku.edu Sun Jul 6 15:21:16 2008 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 10:21:16 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages Message-ID: I'd add a third way. Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some would say creolized. Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to call it a "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." His contention is that it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a lecture he gave at KU). It was relexified with German vocabulary to form Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". So eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in Israel -- just vocabulary. To the extent that this may be true, it pretty much erases the only really convincing case of revival. Wexler's website has the details if you're interested. It hadn't occurred to me that Czech fell into the category of formerly-endangered language, but I'll defer to David and Jan on that. The Polynesian cases are interesting and tend to confirm that any language can be successfully taught, but they don't confirm that the languages can be restored to *use*. This will depend on what happens to the graduates of the programs when they enter society. We won't know that for certain for a couple of generations yet. Suffice it to say that a language has to have a social function or it will fall out of use -- again. Bob ________________________________ > The Hebrew revival differs from the situation faced by most endangered languages in two ways. From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Sun Jul 6 15:44:40 2008 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 08:44:40 -0700 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --The Polynesian cases are interesting and tend to confirm that any language can be successfully taught, but they don't confirm that the languages can be restored to *use*.--    I agree with Bob here - we won't know for a while how "successful" these  languages will be in being restored to daily use.  But it is encouraging that even preschool-age children are going to "language nests" where nothing but Hawaiian or Maori are spoken.  I myself attended Hawaiian language classes taught at a private home in Sacramento when I lived there.  The teacher, who unfortunately only came about 3 times out of 12 from the Bay Area to teach, had parents who were from Ni'ihau, the only island (privately owned) where children are still taught in Hawaiian.  It is encouraging that classes are being taught not only in Hawai'i but also in CA and hopefully other states too where there are large Hawaiian communities.  --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: From: Rankin, Robert L Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM I'd add a third way. Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some would say creolized. Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to call it a "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." His contention is that it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a lecture he gave at KU). It was relexified with German vocabulary to form Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". So eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in Israel -- just vocabulary. To the extent that this may be true, it pretty much erases the only really convincing case of revival. Wexler's website has the details if you're interested. It hadn't occurred to me that Czech fell into the category of formerly-endangered language, but I'll defer to David and Jan on that. The Polynesian cases are interesting and tend to confirm that any language can be successfully taught, but they don't confirm that the languages can be restored to *use*. This will depend on what happens to the graduates of the programs when they enter society. We won't know that for certain for a couple of generations yet. Suffice it to say that a language has to have a social function or it will fall out of use -- again. Bob ________________________________ > The Hebrew revival differs from the situation faced by most endangered languages in two ways. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From linguista at gmail.com Sun Jul 6 18:26:01 2008 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan James Gordon) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 13:26:01 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I think the main reason linguists wax so negative about language revitalisation programmes is that the majority of the programmes we are asked to help out with - and willingly lend our assistance to - are programmes that rub against our very limited idea of what revitalisation is. Obviously, as Bob has pointed out, if we take this limited idea to its logical conclusion we can depress ourselves and others still further by even stripping Hebrew of its title as revived language. With regard to Hebrew, I would say that it is impressive that it was revived regardless of its status as relexified Eastern Semitic. Calquing and sound correspondences, as described at length principally by Ghil'ad Zuckermann, are extensive in the language he refuses to call Hebrew (his preferred descriptor being Israeli - perhaps a bit more politically sensitive than Wexler's Ukrainian, but still rather incendiary). But this is naturally the outcome of language shift in a community whose dominant speakers share linguistic features foreign to the target language. Unfortunately, linguists have yet to come up with a purposeful, thorough theory of the process of language change in communities with dominant second-language-acquiring speakers. This was originally my goal for my dissertation, before I realised that it would involve my magically procuring lots of Hawai'ian and Ma'ori friends out of mid-air, because there's really nowhere else to do that study right now. Nonetheless, we can see the signs in Siouan languages. I've noticed a lot of calques from English idioms in contemporary Omaha. "Frightfully many" "hégaazhi náNpewathé" is a frequent case that does not occur in Dorsey which I have heard from 3 speakers as well as seen in a text or two. Even in Dorsey there are some signs of things that may be calques. Really, there's nothing linguistically unsound or unnatural about this process. What linguists do when we are offended or bothered by this is assume a position of alliance with conservative speakers who oppose such processes. Really we ought to adopt a more value-neutral stance if you ask me. Hebrew had to contend largely with the notion that it as a sacred language and reinserting it into profane life and using it for profane and contemporary domains was sacrilegious. Siouan languages are dealing with this issue, too, and we are not helping by siding with a particular side of this debate, even inadvertently. Hebrew did not necessarily have to come out as Ukrainian, by the way. The reason it did was that the dominant speakers shared many Eastern Semitic linguistic features. If the dominant speakers had been Mizrachim (also not a "native" Semitic word but a calque of European "oriental" replete with the associated orientalism), Hebrew today would look a lot more Semitic. It would still be calqued, but the evidence would be a lot more subtle. Nobody doubts that. Mizrachim who "make aliyah" are in the odd position of having to acquire a "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past" because of their low social status (vigorously covered up and denied by the Israeli government and media as well as the mainstream academy, as described most colourfully by renegade Mizrachit anthropologist Smadar Levie). Yet acquire this odd language they do, albeit imperfectly, but in the same way that the white minority could acquire Semitic imperfectly under different power relations. In short, if we want to problematise something about calquing and superstrate influence, we need to be very cautious about how we go about doing this, lest we wind up contributing to factionalism and colonial discourses even more than we already do. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with superstrate influence. It depends on the goals and needs of the community members and subcommunities, just as does the definition of aspired-to revitalisation itself. The main things linguists would like to support in revitalisation programmes: 1) teaching infants 2) teaching parents 3) extending domains of use by producing easy-to-use lexemes in all relevant domains 4) preserving original semantics 5) preserving original morphosyntax 6) preserving original phonology Obviously, (3) and (4) are in direct conflict with one another, and tend to be a site of huge conflict in revitalising communities. Siding with (3) runs us the risk of alienating elders and traditional types, while siding with (4) is blatantly essentialist and a hugely colonial gesture, not to mention impractical given ongoing cultural shift. Language nests and master-apprentice programmes stand the greatest chance of success at everything except (3), which is more supported by overt language planning as well as typical slang generation and coinages among fluent or semi-fluent adolescents who tend to disregard (4-6) more or less. We can't have it all. We need to present (1-6) as possible outcomes favoured by our particular academic community and allow community members to decide which they can set as goals. We need to realise that some community members may have additional goals not among ours and recognise that some of these goals may have merit in a way we have not considered from our limited perspectives. We also need to drop the idea of a monolithic community will and recognise that different subcommunities idealise different of these goals, and we need to find ways to work with all of these subcommunities rather than just the one with the most power or prestige - especially considering that this power and prestige is often a genocidal tool of the United States, and not an indigenous construct. And yes, I know that these things are easier said than done. They at least need saying. ShaN ie tHe wawípaghui shéna! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rwd0002 at unt.edu Sun Jul 6 19:43:58 2008 From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 14:43:58 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <402358.52276.qm@web53807.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > > From: Rankin, Robert L > Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM > > I'd add a third way. Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some > would say creolized. Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to > call it a > "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." His contention is that > it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a > lecture he gave at KU). It was relexified with German vocabulary to form > Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". So > eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in > Israel -- just vocabulary. To the extent that this may be true, it > pretty much > erases the only really convincing case of revival. Wexler's website has the > details if you're interested. (...) > Bob The Hebrew revival is indeed very different, we all agree on that. Hebrew never died out as a religious language nor as a written language. However, I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that Modern Hebrew is a relexified Slavic language. At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification of a Slavic language. The Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were extremely conscious of the Semitic morphological features of Hebrew, (and heard Arabic, a related Semitic language, spoken around them), so they did all they could to make sure Hebrew retained, maybe not a fundamental, but at least an strong indexical, Semitic character. Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified with Germanic than Modern Hebrew is, retains some uncannily Semitic morphological features. To reconnect to Siouan, it is an interesting ideological issue, relevant to all people interested in reviving an extinct language. Suppose we wanted to revive an extinct Siouan language, in addition to Siouan lexicon, what sorts of morphological features would we wanna insist on to convince ourselves this is a genuine Siouan language? Split intransivity? instrumental prefixes?, locative prefixes? Willem From rankin at ku.edu Sun Jul 6 20:45:53 2008 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:45:53 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages Message-ID: > Willem writes: At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification of a Slavic language. The morphology is non-concatenative when viewed by a professional linguist who sees historical and derivational relationships in terms of processes. This isn't necessarily true of the learner though. S/he can just plug newly-memorized lexical items into the Slavic syntax and happily chatter away. I argued Willem's point with Wexler when he lectured here, since he made similar claims for Romanian (which retains its Romance morphology pretty much intact). So I agree his definition of Israeli Hebrew as a Creole may be extreme, but that doesn't alter the fact that what is taught/spoken there is very different from Hebrew when it was spoken as a natural language. I question whether we can call it "revival". But my point is that teaching English relexified with Siouan vocabulary would be a darned sight easier for both teacher and student than trying to teach genuine Siouan syntax and irregular verb morphology. But we cannot do that in most cases; elders would steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the result as a successful revival, and they'd be right to do so. So I feel that I have to accept the fact that teaching a language by substituting English syntax and idioms and plugging in native words just isn't the same as reviving the language itself. It would be hypocritical of me to define language one way in syntax, morphology and phonology class and then turn around and define it solely in terms of vocabulary for retention or revival purposes. > Bryan writes: I would say that it is impressive that it was revived regardless of its status as relexified Eastern Semitic. You say Eastern Semitic twice, but I think you mean E. Slavic. But one thing we're ignoring here is that people have many ideas of what constitutes success when they take language classes. Complete and utter fluency may be one of them, but we've all taken languages in school or college and know that goal is unrealistic most of the time. Our job is to serve those who have lesser goals as well as the more ambitious. Some wish only a small amount of contact with their language; others wish to learn specific tasks like how to pray or how to read. I agree with Paul that the most ambitious of the goals are probably quite unrealistic, considering earlier attempts, but lots of other uses of elements of language can be successfully taught and learned. Bob From linguista at gmail.com Sun Jul 6 20:55:10 2008 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan James Gordon) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 13:55:10 -0700 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <20080706144358.c6ny4tb2zwys8488@eaglemail.unt.edu> Message-ID: In defence of the thesis that contemporary Hebrew is more Slavic than Semitic, I would submit the following: * The extensive calquing and evidence on new word formation patterns reflect European, not Semitic, models. Taxonit, as described by Rosen, comes from an inherited root meaning "camp for the night", and was originally absorbed into Israeli Hebrew to translate French "se stationer". Since then it has become a basic unit for translating any European cognate of "station" including "radio station", "train station", etc. Compare the words for these same concepts in the Arabic languages and Neo-Aramaic, and you will see that there is nothing Semitic about Hebrew word formation. * The sound structure of the standard variety has been thoroughly Europeanised (although I have noted some initial examples of a Semitic-like but not necessarily specifically Semitic lowering of vowels before khaf where traditionally this is only supposed to happen before chet). The loss of gemination has profoundly affected the morphosyntax in various areas. * Even morphosyntax has been Europeanised where necessary to reproduce European semantic paradigms. The three-tense system is an obvious example of this - the present tense, derived from historical gerunds, no longer looks morphosyntactically like a gerund construction, but is a fully functional tense alongside past and future (which were historically something more akin to concrete/potential). The promulgation of copulas in the spoken standard variety where they are not allowed in the written standard variety (as Willem notes, the written standard is more consciously Semitic) is another example of Europeanised morphosyntax. Getting away from linguistics and back to real life for a second, Bob is absolutely right that there are many ideas of what constitutes success in revival, and these ideas almost always differ from those of linguists (except in the rare instances when a programme is being led by a Western-trained indigenous linguist - problematic in its own right). - Bryan 2008/7/6 : > --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: >> >> From: Rankin, Robert L >> Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages >> To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU >> Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM >> >> I'd add a third way. Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some >> would say creolized. Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to call >> it a >> "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." His contention is that >> it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a >> lecture he gave at KU). It was relexified with German vocabulary to form >> Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". So >> eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in >> Israel -- just vocabulary. To the extent that this may be true, it pretty >> much >> erases the only really convincing case of revival. Wexler's website has >> the >> details if you're interested. >> > (...) > >> Bob >> > > The Hebrew revival is indeed very different, we all agree on that. Hebrew > never died out as a religious language nor as a written language. However, > I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that Modern Hebrew is a > relexified Slavic language. At least one morphological feature of Modern > Hebrew, its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and > is still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification of a > Slavic language. > > The Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were extremely conscious of the > Semitic morphological features of Hebrew, (and heard Arabic, a related > Semitic language, spoken around them), so they did all they could to make > sure Hebrew retained, maybe not a fundamental, but at least an strong > indexical, Semitic character. Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic > language relexified with Germanic than Modern Hebrew is, retains some > uncannily Semitic morphological features. > > To reconnect to Siouan, it is an interesting ideological issue, relevant to > all people interested in reviving an extinct language. Suppose we wanted to > revive an extinct Siouan language, in addition to Siouan lexicon, what sorts > of morphological features would we wanna insist on to convince ourselves > this is a genuine Siouan language? Split intransivity? instrumental > prefixes?, locative prefixes? > > Willem > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Sun Jul 6 21:22:54 2008 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 14:22:54 -0700 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In response to Paul's earlier question about references, a good book on the subject of linguistic revitalization is Hinton and Hale's "The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice."  We used this book in one of my classes.  This book contains articles written by indigenous peoples, including Hawaiian and Maori, and what they've had to grapple with, in their own words, in the course of language revitalization.    The Hawaiians are concerned with English influence on the "modern" Hawaiian language, and I had this discussion while taking the Hawaiian class with modern Hawaiians who were questioning this very issue: Is what we're learning "real" Hawaiian or something else?  Their concensus seemed to be that of course the "modern" language would be different than the "old" language, but they reasoned that languages change anyway and younger people don't necessarily speak the same way their elders did in any language.  There are examples of Hawaiian "smoothing out around the edges" as "modern" speakers tend not to use more complicated or lesser understood grammatical features.  I'm sure this issue will be as relevant to revitalized Siouan languages as any other.  I guess the important thing is how conservative these new language learners feel their revitalized language should be. --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Bryan James Gordon wrote: From: Bryan James Gordon Subject: Re: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 1:55 PM In defence of the thesis that contemporary Hebrew is more Slavic than Semitic, I would submit the following: * The extensive calquing and evidence on new word formation patterns reflect European, not Semitic, models. Taxonit, as described by Rosen, comes from an inherited root meaning "camp for the night", and was originally absorbed into Israeli Hebrew to translate French "se stationer". Since then it has become a basic unit for translating any European cognate of "station" including "radio station", "train station", etc. Compare the words for these same concepts in the Arabic languages and Neo-Aramaic, and you will see that there is nothing Semitic about Hebrew word formation. * The sound structure of the standard variety has been thoroughly Europeanised (although I have noted some initial examples of a Semitic-like but not necessarily specifically Semitic lowering of vowels before khaf where traditionally this is only supposed to happen before chet). The loss of gemination has profoundly affected the morphosyntax in various areas. * Even morphosyntax has been Europeanised where necessary to reproduce European semantic paradigms. The three-tense system is an obvious example of this - the present tense, derived from historical gerunds, no longer looks morphosyntactically like a gerund construction, but is a fully functional tense alongside past and future (which were historically something more akin to concrete/potential). The promulgation of copulas in the spoken standard variety where they are not allowed in the written standard variety (as Willem notes, the written standard is more consciously Semitic) is another example of Europeanised morphosyntax. Getting away from linguistics and back to real life for a second, Bob is absolutely right that there are many ideas of what constitutes success in revival, and these ideas almost always differ from those of linguists (except in the rare instances when a programme is being led by a Western-trained indigenous linguist - problematic in its own right). - Bryan 2008/7/6 : --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: From: Rankin, Robert L Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM I'd add a third way.  Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some would say creolized.  Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to call it a "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past."  His contention is that it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a lecture he gave at KU).  It was relexified with German vocabulary to form Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew".  So eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in Israel -- just vocabulary.  To the extent that this may be true, it pretty much erases the only really convincing case of revival.  Wexler's website has the details if you're interested. (...) Bob The Hebrew revival is indeed very different, we all agree on that. Hebrew never died out as a religious language nor as a written language.  However, I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that Modern Hebrew is a relexified Slavic language.  At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is still productive.  That cannot be explained through relexification of a Slavic language. The Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were extremely conscious of the Semitic morphological features of Hebrew, (and heard Arabic, a related Semitic language, spoken around them), so they did all they could to make sure Hebrew retained, maybe not a fundamental, but at least an strong indexical, Semitic character.  Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified with Germanic than Modern Hebrew is, retains some uncannily Semitic morphological features. To reconnect to Siouan, it is an interesting ideological issue, relevant to all people interested in reviving an extinct language.  Suppose we wanted to revive an extinct Siouan language, in addition to Siouan lexicon, what sorts of morphological features would we wanna insist on to convince ourselves this is a genuine Siouan language?  Split intransivity? instrumental prefixes?, locative prefixes? Willem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de Mon Jul 7 08:47:35 2008 From: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de (Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 10:47:35 +0200 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: <486E1F060200008E00010300@hermes.wsc.edu> Message-ID: Dear Cathrine, dear Siouanists, I would like to add a few remarks that may clarify my own position with regard to the invisible things we are discussing right now. It is a popular misconception to think that typologists don't like abstract structures or ignore them largely. This is not the case. All depends on the evidence for them. If there is distributional evidence for a certain structure of a noun phrase then this is a fact of a specific language and no longer invisible. What typologists do not believe is that these abstract syntactic structures can be presupposed as the universal framework of the grammar of a specific language. On the contrary, it is one of the goals (in my view) of such a project to find out for instance the structure of the noun phrase in the individual SLs and perhaps the variationof these structures among them. The same holds for the relative clause and all the other parts of syntax. I would hence strongly agree with Cathrine to aim at a basically descriptive and theory-neutral (as much as this is possible) treatment of SL in this project. This is of course a bottom-up approach, but not blind for abstract structures and categories. All the best, Johannes Datum: Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:00:54 -0500 Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Von: "Catherine Rudin" An: Betreff: Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > Rory wrote: > >Gee, it's been so long since we had a good argument on the list! > :-) > > I really didn't mean to fight -- apparently I said something that > sounded pugnacious, > but it was entirely unintentional. I was actually AGREEING with Bob > and others that > this project should be basically descriptive and theory-neutral, even > for those of us > who do have strong theoretical leanings. Ah, communication!! > > Anyhow -- > I'm still not sure what topic I signed up for. Was it coordination? > Does anyone have > the complete list compiled in Billings (John? Linda?) > > Peace, love, harmony, and best wishes to all - Catherine > -- Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft Universität Regensburg Philosophische Fakultät IV Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft Universitätsstr. 31 93053 Regensburg Deutschland Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de Mon Jul 7 09:54:24 2008 From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W._T=FCting=22?=) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 11:54:24 +0200 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <20080706144358.c6ny4tb2zwys8488@eaglemail.unt.edu> Message-ID: "Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified with Germanic..." Whereas I agree with that statement ref. to Hebrew, below, I'd rather claim that Yiddish is a mediaeval German relexified with Biblical Hebrew and - of course - Slavic words of different derivations! (Just one side note: both Yiddish and Transylvanian Saxon, a mediaeval German dialect, i.e. Mosel-Frankish, use the same everyday-word "keyn/ kein" for German "nach/gegen" - to/toward.) Of course, characterizations of this kind seem to be quite futile, and depending on where one puts the point of reference in time (modern Hebrew is a relexified English... ;-) ). This here, BTW, is a nice read about stuff like this: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003065.php Alfred Am 06.07.2008 um 21:43 schrieb rwd0002 at unt.edu: >> --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: >> >> From: Rankin, Robert L >> Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages >> To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU >> Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM >> >> I'd add a third way. Modern Hebrew has been seriously >> reconfigured, some >> would say creolized. Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as >> to call it a >> "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." His contention is >> that >> it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a >> lecture he gave at KU). It was relexified with German vocabulary >> to form >> Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". So >> eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language >> in >> Israel -- just vocabulary. To the extent that this may be true, it >> pretty much >> erases the only really convincing case of revival. Wexler's >> website has the >> details if you're interested. > (...) >> Bob > > The Hebrew revival is indeed very different, we all agree on that. > Hebrew never died out as a religious language nor as a written > language. However, I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say > that Modern Hebrew is a relexified Slavic language. At least one > morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its typically Semitic > nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is still productive. > That cannot be explained through relexification of a Slavic language. > > The Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were extremely conscious of > the Semitic morphological features of Hebrew, (and heard Arabic, a > related Semitic language, spoken around them), so they did all they > could to make sure Hebrew retained, maybe not a fundamental, but at > least an strong indexical, Semitic character. Even Yiddish, > certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified with Germanic > than Modern Hebrew is, retains some uncannily Semitic morphological > features. > > To reconnect to Siouan, it is an interesting ideological issue, > relevant to all people interested in reviving an extinct language. > Suppose we wanted to revive an extinct Siouan language, in addition > to Siouan lexicon, what sorts of morphological features would we > wanna insist on to convince ourselves this is a genuine Siouan > language? Split intransivity? instrumental prefixes?, locative > prefixes? > > Willem > > _______________ Alfred W. Tüting ti at fa-kuan.muc.de From David.Rood at Colorado.EDU Mon Jul 7 14:15:44 2008 From: David.Rood at Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 08:15:44 -0600 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <360451.24473.qm@web53802.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I am pleased to see all this discussion of what constitutes language revival; it is indeed a terribly complex question (like almost any linguistic question), and there will be many answers depending on many different factors. I have no illusions about a revitalized language being different from the one(s) from which it is derived. Relexification and grammatical "simplification" (which usually means becoming more like the dominant language) are unavoidable. Look at what happened to English after 1066. The historical gender system is all gone, along with the complex adjective declensions. The case system would probably have gone anyway, as well as the person agreement on the verbs, but certainly the lexicon of modern English has far more Romance elements than that of any other Germanic language. But it's still a Germanic, not a Romance, language. Whether modern Hebrew is Semitic or Slavic is outside my ability to figure out. What I see happening with modern Lakota is not terribly different from the history of English under French influence, however. My students greet me every morning with "HihaNni washte", literally 'it's a good morning' or 'morning is good'. The expression makes no sense grammatically or socially from the perspective of two generations ago, but it's proper "Lakota" as spoken today. The inflected possessive forms of nouns are gone; in fact, the whole inalienable/alienable system has simply evaporated. But the most frequent irregular verbs are still there, the word order is still very Siouan, the use of articles and postpositions and derivational morphology is still there, etc. If we produced a new generation of children who used this as their daily language, I would say we had "revived" the language. David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Sun, 6 Jul 2008, David Kaufman wrote: > In response to Paul's earlier question about references, a good book on the subject of linguistic revitalization is Hinton and Hale's "The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice."� We used this book in one of my classes.� This book contains articles written by indigenous peoples, including Hawaiian and Maori, and what they've had to grapple with, in their own words, in the course of language revitalization.� > � > The Hawaiians are concerned with English influence on the "modern" Hawaiian language, and I had this discussion while taking the Hawaiian class with modern Hawaiians who were questioning this very issue: Is what we're learning "real" Hawaiian or something else?� Their concensus seemed to be that of course the "modern" language would be different than the "old" language, but they reasoned that languages change anyway and younger people don't necessarily speak the same way their elders did in any language.� There are examples of Hawaiian "smoothing out around the edges" as "modern" speakers tend not to use more complicated or lesser understood grammatical features.� I'm sure this issue will be as relevant to revitalized Siouan languages as any other.� I guess the important thing is how�conservative these new language learners feel their revitalized language should be. > > --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Bryan James Gordon wrote: > > From: Bryan James Gordon > Subject: Re: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 1:55 PM > > > In defence of the thesis that contemporary Hebrew is more Slavic than Semitic, I would submit the following: > > * The extensive calquing and evidence on new word formation patterns reflect European, not Semitic, models. Taxonit, as described by Rosen, comes from an inherited root meaning "camp for the night", and was originally absorbed into Israeli Hebrew to translate French "se stationer". Since then it has become a basic unit for translating any European cognate of "station" including "radio station", "train station", etc. Compare the words for these same concepts in the Arabic languages and Neo-Aramaic, and you will see that there is nothing Semitic about Hebrew word formation. > * The sound structure of the standard variety has been thoroughly Europeanised (although I have noted some initial examples of a Semitic-like but not necessarily specifically Semitic lowering of vowels before khaf where traditionally this is only supposed to happen before chet). The loss of gemination has profoundly affected the morphosyntax in various areas. > * Even morphosyntax has been Europeanised where necessary to reproduce European semantic paradigms. The three-tense system is an obvious example of this - the present tense, derived from historical gerunds, no longer looks morphosyntactically like a gerund construction, but is a fully functional tense alongside past and future (which were historically something more akin to concrete/potential). The promulgation of copulas in the spoken standard variety where they are not allowed in the written standard variety (as Willem notes, the written standard is more consciously Semitic) is another example of Europeanised morphosyntax. > > Getting away from linguistics and back to real life for a second, Bob is absolutely right that there are many ideas of what constitutes success in revival, and these ideas almost always differ from those of linguists (except in the rare instances when a programme is being led by a Western-trained indigenous linguist - problematic in its own right). > > - Bryan > > > 2008/7/6 : > > > > --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > > From: Rankin, Robert L > Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM > > I'd add a third way. �Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some > would say creolized. �Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to call it a > "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." �His contention is that > it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a > lecture he gave at KU). �It was relexified with German vocabulary to form > Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". �So > eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in > Israel -- just vocabulary. �To the extent that this may be true, it pretty much > erases the only really convincing case of revival. �Wexler's website has the > details if you're interested. > (...) > > Bob > > The Hebrew revival is indeed very different, we all agree on that. Hebrew never died out as a religious language nor as a written language. �However, I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that Modern Hebrew is a relexified Slavic language. �At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is still productive. �That cannot be explained through relexification of a Slavic language. > > The Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were extremely conscious of the Semitic morphological features of Hebrew, (and heard Arabic, a related Semitic language, spoken around them), so they did all they could to make sure Hebrew retained, maybe not a fundamental, but at least an strong indexical, Semitic character. �Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified with Germanic than Modern Hebrew is, retains some uncannily Semitic morphological features. > > To reconnect to Siouan, it is an interesting ideological issue, relevant to all people interested in reviving an extinct language. �Suppose we wanted to revive an extinct Siouan language, in addition to Siouan lexicon, what sorts of morphological features would we wanna insist on to convince ourselves this is a genuine Siouan language? �Split intransivity? instrumental prefixes?, locative prefixes? > > Willem > > > > From rwd0002 at unt.edu Mon Jul 7 16:37:19 2008 From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 11:37:19 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Quoting "Alfred W. Tüting" : > "Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified > with Germanic..." > > Whereas I agree with that statement ref. to Hebrew, below, I'd rather > claim that Yiddish is a mediaeval German relexified with Biblical > Hebrew and - of course - Slavic words of different derivations! (Just > one side note: both Yiddish and Transylvanian Saxon, a mediaeval > German dialect, i.e. Mosel-Frankish, use the same everyday-word > "keyn/ kein" for German "nach/gegen" - to/toward.) > Of course, characterizations of this kind seem to be quite futile, > and depending on where one puts the point of reference in time > (modern Hebrew is a relexified English... ;-) ). > Alfred, thanks for the correction. Historically it is certainly true that Yiddish started as German, and in Germany, and not as Slavic; however it is a German that has lived for so long on Slavic territory, that it now LOOKS more like a Slavic with Germanic and some Hebrew plugged in! Willem From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de Mon Jul 7 18:24:37 2008 From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W._T=FCting=22?=) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 20:24:37 +0200 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <20080707113719.d52vmmma9rggwsc4@eaglemail.unt.edu> Message-ID: Willem, yes, from this perspective, e.g. modern American LOOKS as if being a relexified Chinese dialect ;-) BTW, did you ever stumble upon this nice page? http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html It's been created by John Woldemar Cowen, one of the fathers of the conlang Lojban. Enjoy! Alfred Am 07.07.2008 um 18:37 schrieb rwd0002 at unt.edu: > Quoting "Alfred W. Tüting" : > >> "Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified >> with Germanic..." >> >> Whereas I agree with that statement ref. to Hebrew, below, I'd rather >> claim that Yiddish is a mediaeval German relexified with Biblical >> Hebrew and - of course - Slavic words of different derivations! (Just >> one side note: both Yiddish and Transylvanian Saxon, a mediaeval >> German dialect, i.e. Mosel-Frankish, use the same everyday-word >> "keyn/ kein" for German "nach/gegen" - to/toward.) >> Of course, characterizations of this kind seem to be quite futile, >> and depending on where one puts the point of reference in time >> (modern Hebrew is a relexified English... ;-) ). >> > Alfred, thanks for the correction. Historically it is certainly true > that Yiddish started as German, and in Germany, and not as Slavic; > however it is a German that has lived for so long on Slavic territory, > that it now LOOKS more like a Slavic with Germanic and some Hebrew > plugged in! > > Willem _______________ Alfred W. Tüting ti at fa-kuan.muc.de From rwd0002 at unt.edu Tue Jul 8 22:18:52 2008 From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu) Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 17:18:52 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Quoting "Rankin, Robert L" : >> Willem writes: At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, >> its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and >> is still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification >> of a Slavic language. > > The morphology is non-concatenative when viewed by a professional > linguist who sees historical and derivational relationships in terms > of processes. This isn't necessarily true of the learner though. > S/he can just plug newly-memorized lexical items into the Slavic > syntax and happily chatter away. I argued Willem's point with Wexler > when he lectured here, since he made similar claims for Romanian > (which retains its Romance morphology pretty much intact). So I > agree his definition of Israeli Hebrew as a Creole may be extreme, > but that doesn't alter the fact that what is taught/spoken there is > very different from Hebrew when it was spoken as a natural language. > I question whether we can call it "revival". > To get back a bit about what Modern Hebrew is. The reason I would question that it is a revival would rather be that it has never died in all its spheres of usage. It died as a first language acquired after birth, but it never died as a language of prayer and as a written language. The Jewish tradition of Hebrew education was such that there were always people who could write very fluent Hebrew. All this made the transition to revived spoken language much easier, and less artificial. There is no situation comparable with Indigenous Languages because (with the exception of Maya) there was no Indigenous tradition of writing. It is also interesting to think of Latin. We think of Latin as a dead language, deader than Hebrew, but Latin has had an extremely slow death. Like Hebrew, Latin ceased as a spoken language long ago, but as a written and even spoken language of science, religion and scholarship it continued well into the 19th century. The literature written by second language speakers or writers of Latin is massive compared to what was written by the Romans themselves. And Latin is still not dead: there are still individuals, mostly living within the confines of the Vatican, who are able to write and speak quite fluently in Latin. So, if we needed to revive Latin as an everyday language (I am sure this will never happen), it would be an easy thing to do. But would it be the same language as what Cesar and Cicero spoke? In pronunciation, Cesar and Cicero would probably not recognize what they hear as Latin, but in writing they would probably understand it fairly well, and certain usages of modern Latinists, comparable to the Lakota "good morning" example given by Dave Rood, would be very puzzling to them. To summarize, the case of Modern Hebrew and (potentially revivable) Latin, are probably not helpful models for activists reviving languages. But on the other hand, the standards of Modern Hebrew and Modern Latin are quite high. When little is documented about the language to be revived, the concern of linguists (not necessarily shared by Indigenous Activists) is that the language looks like some sort of Esperanto relexified with native words. It is interesting that one of the specialists in the extinct Mutsun language (a Costanoan language from California, well documented by Spanish missionaries and by J. P. Harrington) is Marc Okrand, also the creator of the artificial language Klingon. But despite efforts of Mutsun activists, there are now more speakers of Klingon than there are of Mutsun. (Of course, Okrand could be the judge of what is good Klingon, but he wisely does not comment on such speakers, and he does not consider himself a speaker either.) I asked a Mutsun activist about that, and the answer was: "Oh, well, what is happening to Klingon is an inspiration to us." We don't all feel this way about it. So our goals for a revived language should approach these of Hebrew and Latin as far as authenticity is concerned, and we should be cautious about the temptation to "Klingonize" or "Esperantoize", i.e. simplify the morphology because the existing documentation of the extinct language does not tell us what it should be. So, what is a "sufficiently authentic" revived language, will, to be sure, be a matter of debate for quite some time. Willem From jgoodtracks at gmail.com Wed Jul 9 00:54:49 2008 From: jgoodtracks at gmail.com (Jimm GoodTracks) Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 19:54:49 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <20080708171852.n017kugcawessgsw@eaglemail.unt.edu> Message-ID: While the situation of revived Hawaiian has been touched upon, does anyone know where the revitalized Welch language figures into this discussion. I am aware that it is not the old Welch of the legendary barbs. Some fluent speakers in the conclaves of traditional Wales have remarked on the current robust Cymraeg as having strayed from their on-going fluent speaker usage. Perhaps someone out there who really knows could comment. jgt ----- Original Message ----- From: To: ; "Rankin, Robert L" Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 5:18 PM Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages > Quoting "Rankin, Robert L" : > >>> Willem writes: At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its >>> typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is >>> still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification of a >>> Slavic language. >> >> The morphology is non-concatenative when viewed by a professional >> linguist who sees historical and derivational relationships in terms of >> processes. This isn't necessarily true of the learner though. S/he can >> just plug newly-memorized lexical items into the Slavic syntax and >> happily chatter away. I argued Willem's point with Wexler when he >> lectured here, since he made similar claims for Romanian (which retains >> its Romance morphology pretty much intact). So I agree his definition of >> Israeli Hebrew as a Creole may be extreme, but that doesn't alter the >> fact that what is taught/spoken there is very different from Hebrew when >> it was spoken as a natural language. I question whether we can call it >> "revival". >> > To get back a bit about what Modern Hebrew is. The reason I would > question that it is a revival would rather be that it has never died in > all its spheres of usage. It died as a first language acquired after > birth, but it never died as a language of prayer and as a written > language. The Jewish tradition of Hebrew education was such that there > were always people who could write very fluent Hebrew. All this made the > transition to revived spoken language much easier, and less artificial. > There is no situation comparable with Indigenous Languages because (with > the exception of Maya) there was no Indigenous tradition of writing. > > It is also interesting to think of Latin. We think of Latin as a dead > language, deader than Hebrew, but Latin has had an extremely slow death. > Like Hebrew, Latin ceased as a spoken language long ago, but as a written > and even spoken language of science, religion and scholarship it continued > well into the 19th century. The literature written by second language > speakers or writers of Latin is massive compared to what was written by > the Romans themselves. And Latin is still not dead: there are still > individuals, mostly living within the confines of the Vatican, who are > able to write and speak quite fluently in Latin. So, if we needed to > revive Latin as an everyday language (I am sure this will never happen), > it would be an easy thing to do. But would it be the same language as > what Cesar and Cicero spoke? In pronunciation, Cesar and Cicero would > probably not recognize what they hear as Latin, but in writing they would > probably understand it fairly well, and certain usages of modern > Latinists, comparable to the Lakota "good morning" example given by Dave > Rood, would be very puzzling to them. > > To summarize, the case of Modern Hebrew and (potentially revivable) Latin, > are probably not helpful models for activists reviving languages. But on > the other hand, the standards of Modern Hebrew and Modern Latin are quite > high. > > When little is documented about the language to be revived, the concern of > linguists (not necessarily shared by Indigenous Activists) is that the > language looks like some sort of Esperanto relexified with native words. > > It is interesting that one of the specialists in the extinct Mutsun > language (a Costanoan language from California, well documented by Spanish > missionaries and by J. P. Harrington) is Marc Okrand, also the creator of > the artificial language Klingon. But despite efforts of Mutsun activists, > there are now more speakers of Klingon than there are of Mutsun. (Of > course, Okrand could be the judge of what is good Klingon, but he wisely > does not comment on such speakers, and he does not consider himself a > speaker either.) I asked a Mutsun activist about that, and the answer > was: "Oh, well, what is happening to Klingon is an inspiration to us." > We don't all feel this way about it. > > So our goals for a revived language should approach these of Hebrew and > Latin as far as authenticity is concerned, and we should be cautious about > the temptation to "Klingonize" or "Esperantoize", i.e. simplify the > morphology because the existing documentation of the extinct language does > not tell us what it should be. > > So, what is a "sufficiently authentic" revived language, will, to be sure, > be a matter of debate for quite some time. > > Willem From mwmosaka at gmail.com Thu Jul 10 16:11:29 2008 From: mwmosaka at gmail.com (Mike Morgan) Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:41:29 +0530 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <060855723F944EFF95BA99B3AE877827@JGHP> Message-ID: Hi! I don't often comment, but ... does anyone know where the revitalized Welch language figures into this > discussion. Just a word of caution: the spelling "Welch" is considered offensive by some (though in fact the high school in West Virginia where my father graduated from is in the town of Welch with exactly this spelling, and exactly this etymology). But then the term "Welsh" (< Anglo Saxon for "foreigner"!) is also considered offensive for the pre-Anglo=Saxon natives of Britain ... The language is Cymraeg (or cymreig or cymrag depending on dialect), and the "country" Cymru. > Some fluent speakers in the conclaves of traditional Wales have remarked > on the current robust Cymraeg as having strayed from their on-going fluent > speaker usage. > Yes, without a doubt the language being taught in Welsh second language (and language revitalization) classrooms in Wales is a bit "foreign". BUT, it is MUCH less foreign NOW than it was 25 years ago when such language vitalization programs were starting to gain momentum and a form of Welsh called Cymaeg Buw "Living Welsh" was introduced; "easy to learn" and being a compromise between the rather divergent modern North and South Welsh dialects -- and also from the literary Welsh established by the Bible. (Ironically of course, because "Living" Welsh was spoken natively by no living being! at the time) Fortunately though for Welsh, there are not only many speakers of a "real" Welsh, but also some excellent writers -- my favorite being the North Welsh writer Kate Roberts (who though i will need to google, as by NOW she probably is either extremely old or dead ... but hopefully "replaced" by a new generation of dialect writers). PS Some years ago, the last time I visited my grad-school mentor CH van Schooneveld in his retirement in Haute Savoie before he passed away, I brought with me a copy of the Dutch Volkskrant to remind him of "home", and he made a comment about it being more English than Dutch ... referring not only to the content but more to the lexicosemantics and syntax. So, at least that one rather leftward leaning newspaper was, in the eyes of one old fashioned Dutch expatriot, relexified English. MWM || マイク || Мика || माईक || માઈક || ਮਾਈਕ ================ Dr Michael W Morgan Managing Director Ishara Foundation Mumbai (Bombay), India ++++++++++++++++ माईकल मोर्गन (पी.एच.डी.) मेनेजिंग डॉयरेक्टर ईशारा फॉउंडेशन (मुंबई ) ++++++++++++++++ 茂流岸マイク(言語学博士) イシャラ基金の専務理事・事務局長 ムンバイ(ボンベイ)、インド -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ahartley at d.umn.edu Tue Jul 15 16:19:05 2008 From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley) Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:19:05 -0500 Subject: [Fwd: Chicago Tribune "On Language" 7/15/08: Gadget helps save ancient tongues] Message-ID: Gadget helps save ancient tongues -------------- By Nathan Bierma July 15, 2008 When Don Thornton meets an elder of an American Indian tribe, he takes out a hand-held electronic device that looks like a giant cell phone. It's called the Phraselator--short for "phrase translator"--a hand-held computer that can record and play phrases in different languages. It's not the fictional Universal Translator from "Star Trek," but Thornton says the Phraselator is becoming a key tool in the fight to save dying American Indian languages. "The first step in learning a language is that you have to hear it correctly, especially for sounds that aren't used in your own native tongue," Thornton said in a telephone interview. "To speak the language, you just have to start using this [device]." The Phraselator doesn't translate words and sentences from scratch. Instead, when you type or speak an English phrase into the Phraselator, it retrieves an audio clip of the translation of that phrase. Thornton got the idea from the U.S. military, which has been using Phraselators in Afghanistan and Iraq, where interpreters are in short supply. He arranged with Voxtec (voxtec.com), the developer and manufacturer of the Phraselator, to adapt it for preserving dying American Indian languages. He founded Thornton Media (ndnlanguage.com) to sell the product and accompanying software to tribes and help train them how to use it. Tribes record their speakers saying phrases from their languages and then have young people listen to the recordings to help them learn the language. Thornton says while the technology is aimed at young people learning a language, and doesn't depend on getting a tribal elder to learn the technology, sometimes tribal elders get hooked on the gadget too. "I've seen elders sit there and play with the Phraselator like a little kid playing with a video game," he says. Thornton estimates that nearly half of the 300 American Indian languages once spoken in the U.S. are now extinct, and most of the rest will die out within a generation unless they are learned and used by younger speakers. He says his Phraselator has been used to record almost 50 languages--including Cherokee, Dakota Sioux and several smaller languages, many with fewer than 10 speakers left. But other language preservationists question whether the Phraselator is a magic bullet for saving dying languages. Leanne Hinton, linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and author of "How to Keep Your Language Alive: A Commonsense Approach to One-On-One Language Learning" (Heyday Books, $15.95), prefers a different approach to promoting dying languages among younger speakers. She developed a method for young speakers to learn their tribal language through pure immersion, or extended exposure in conversations with older speakers, avoiding grammar or vocabulary books. "The Phraselator is a good oral dictionary, and there's nothing wrong with that," Hinton said by telephone. "But you learn a language by using it in real life with other people." Hinton also wonders if the Phraselator is worth the cost to tribes. Phraselators cost more than $3,000 each (but Thornton says he can waive or cut the cost if tribes agree to let him use their recordings as sample audio files). Hinton says if American Indian tribes do turn to technology, they should develop free Web sites with audio files that can be downloaded onto iPods, rather than buy a separate expensive gadget. Thornton says Phraselators have better sound quality and more storage space than other hand-held devices, and he asserts that they promote more interaction among speakers. While modern technology perhaps cannot keep a language alive by itself, Thornton says, it can be a way to help speakers save their native tribal tongues. "We like to look at Phraselators not as language preservation tools, but language revitalization tools," he says. "We hope that somebody in a tribe will put the work in and become a speaker of the tribal language. We're working against the tendency to just record the language and put it up on a shelf like a museum piece." --- Contact Nathan Bierma at onlanguage at gmail.com Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-language-0715jul15,0,3495516.story Nathan Bierma writes the "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune. He is also contributing editor to Books & Culture magazine, and teaches English and communications at Calvin College, where he works as communications and research coordinator for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. His website is www.nbierma.com. From linguista at gmail.com Tue Jul 15 17:56:13 2008 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan James Gordon) Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:56:13 -0500 Subject: [Fwd: Chicago Tribune "On Language" 7/15/08: Gadget helps save ancient tongues] In-Reply-To: <487CCDF9.9090402@d.umn.edu> Message-ID: Thank heavens Bierma interviewed Hinton for this piece. I question his motives based on both the title of the piece and his giving Thornton the last word - a disingenuous last word if you ask me, for two reasons: 1) Does Thornton mean to imply that Hinton is part of the tendency to put of linguistic fossils on museum shelves? She is most certainly not. If Thornton doesn't mean that, then Bierma is implying it by his quote placement. 2) The phraselator itself, regardless of Thornton's words to the contrary, is just a fancy (and expensive) museum fossil. It has nothing to do with revitalisation as opposed to documentation. It's going to sit on people's mantles like a linguistic Christmas ornament after there are no speakers left, and to the extent that its money and effort are diverted from more productive efforts like the ones Hinton suggests (thanks Bierma for quoting them), it is complicit in the death of our languages and the languages of others, and in the false hopes of our communities and the communities we work with. The phraselator COULD be put to good use, but it will never produce fluent speakers without the aid of other speakers or at least of language courses (which are pretty measly at producing fluent speakers, too). I think my parents' word for this kind of gadget is "snake oil". - Bryan James Gordon 2008/7/15 Alan H. Hartley : > Gadget helps save ancient tongues > > -------------- > > By Nathan Bierma > July 15, 2008 > > When Don Thornton meets an elder of an American Indian tribe, he takes out > a hand-held electronic device that looks like a giant cell phone. > > It's called the Phraselator--short for "phrase translator"--a hand-held > computer that can record and play phrases in different languages. It's not > the fictional Universal Translator from "Star Trek," but Thornton says the > Phraselator is becoming a key tool in the fight to save dying American > Indian languages. > > "The first step in learning a language is that you have to hear it > correctly, especially for sounds that aren't used in your own native > tongue," Thornton said in a telephone interview. "To speak the language, you > just have to start using this [device]." > > The Phraselator doesn't translate words and sentences from scratch. > Instead, when you type or speak an English phrase into the Phraselator, it > retrieves an audio clip of the translation of that phrase. > > Thornton got the idea from the U.S. military, which has been using > Phraselators in Afghanistan and Iraq, where interpreters are in short > supply. > > He arranged with Voxtec (voxtec.com), the developer and manufacturer of > the Phraselator, to adapt it for preserving dying American Indian languages. > He founded Thornton Media (ndnlanguage.com) to sell the product and > accompanying software to tribes and help train them how to use it. Tribes > record their speakers saying phrases from their languages and then have > young people listen to the recordings to help them learn the language. > > Thornton says while the technology is aimed at young people learning a > language, and doesn't depend on getting a tribal elder to learn the > technology, sometimes tribal elders get hooked on the gadget too. > > "I've seen elders sit there and play with the Phraselator like a little kid > playing with a video game," he says. > > Thornton estimates that nearly half of the 300 American Indian languages > once spoken in the U.S. are now extinct, and most of the rest will die out > within a generation unless they are learned and used by younger speakers. He > says his Phraselator has been used to record almost 50 languages--including > Cherokee, Dakota Sioux and several smaller languages, many with fewer than > 10 speakers left. > > But other language preservationists question whether the Phraselator is a > magic bullet for saving dying languages. Leanne Hinton, linguist at the > University of California at Berkeley and author of "How to Keep Your > Language Alive: A Commonsense Approach to One-On-One Language Learning" > (Heyday Books, $15.95), prefers a different approach to promoting dying > languages among younger speakers. She developed a method for young speakers > to learn their tribal language through pure immersion, or extended exposure > in conversations with older speakers, avoiding grammar or vocabulary books. > > "The Phraselator is a good oral dictionary, and there's nothing wrong with > that," Hinton said by telephone. "But you learn a language by using it in > real life with other people." > > Hinton also wonders if the Phraselator is worth the cost to tribes. > > Phraselators cost more than $3,000 each (but Thornton says he can waive or > cut the cost if tribes agree to let him use their recordings as sample audio > files). Hinton says if American Indian tribes do turn to technology, they > should develop free Web sites with audio files that can be downloaded onto > iPods, rather than buy a separate expensive gadget. > > Thornton says Phraselators have better sound quality and more storage space > than other hand-held devices, and he asserts that they promote more > interaction among speakers. > > While modern technology perhaps cannot keep a language alive by itself, > Thornton says, it can be a way to help speakers save their native tribal > tongues. > > "We like to look at Phraselators not as language preservation tools, but > language revitalization tools," he says. "We hope that somebody in a tribe > will put the work in and become a speaker of the tribal language. We're > working against the tendency to just record the language and put it up on a > shelf like a museum piece." > > --- > Contact Nathan Bierma at onlanguage at gmail.com > > Copyright (c) 2008, Chicago Tribune > > > http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-language-0715jul15,0,3495516.story > > > Nathan Bierma writes the "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune. He is > also contributing editor to Books & Culture magazine, and teaches English > and communications at Calvin College, where he works as communications and > research coordinator for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. His > website is www.nbierma.com. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jgoodtracks at gmail.com Tue Jul 1 23:52:52 2008 From: jgoodtracks at gmail.com (Jimm GoodTracks) Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 18:52:52 -0500 Subject: Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Pat Benabe To: Jimm Goodtracks Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 4:46 PM Subject: Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages ----- Original Message ----- Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 4:40 PM Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages Press Release: June 30, 2008 (Santa Barbara, CA, June 18, 2008) - Ekegusi - a language spoken by 1.8 million people in Western Kenya - and Mandan - a language spoken by Sacajawea, which has just one remaining fluent speaker - are both in danger of dying out. They are only two of the thousands of the world's languages that are predicted to disappear before the end of this century. And along with these languages entire cultures and ways of life may also be lost. Fighting this trend are linguists, academics who study languages scientifically, and members of communities who are actively working to stop their own languages from losing ground to more dominant national or regional tongues. Over 120 of these linguists and activists will meet at the University of California, Santa Barbara for two weeks beginning June 23 for "Infield" - the Institute on Field Linguistics and Language Documentation - to examine successful models of language preservation and to train participants in techniques for working in endangered language communities. At Infield, language activists from Native American communities across North America will work with linguists and activists from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Pacific Rim, including Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. They will examine successful examples of language revitalization and share current techniques for documenting languages. And in a change from past practice, they will collaborate as partners in this training. "Infield offers a new way for language activists and linguists to come together," said Dr. Carol Genetti, Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara and organizer of InField. "This institute offers both groups the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the perspectives, resources, and goals of the other. This will allow us to develop more effective partnerships as we work together to preserve this important human heritage." Some InField participants are members of the language communities who are also trained linguists and are working with their elders to preserve not only their languages, but their customs and traditions. Jenny Davis, a Ph.D. student in linguistics at the University of Colorado, is a member of the Chickasaw Nation, which was originally based in the southeastern United States but was removed to Oklahoma during the early 19th century. Today only 70 Chickasaws, out of some 40,000 members of the tribe, are fluent speakers of their language. Davis, one of the only linguists working with the Chickasaws and the only member of the tribe with linguistics training, is active in efforts to revitalize the Chickasaw language. Her community has recently begun a "Master/Apprentice" program, which pairs native speakers with younger members of the tribe, who agree to speak Chickasaw for a minimum of 10 hours per week. "The Chickasaw nation now employs two fluent speakers as 'Masters' who are resources for our community," said Davis. "The 'Masters' receive a subsidy from the tribe in recognition of their service to the Nation, and they mentor neighbors, members of their own families or work colleagues." The program complements efforts to teach young children Chickasaw in pre-schools and Head Start, and the tribe is working to open an immersion school as well. The Master/Apprentice approach was developed by Leanne Hinton, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. At InField, Hinton will discuss this approach as well as the "Breath of Life" workshop which took place earlier this month and focused on California's native languages. The experience of revitalizing Samala, one of six languages spoken by the Chumash, the native people of Central and Southern California, will be shared at InField by Dr. Richard Applegate. Earlier this year Dr. Applegate completed a 4,000 word dictionary of Samala, which is spoken by the Santa Ynez branch of the Chumash. Dr. Applegate has been working with the Santa Ynez Chumash for the past five years to develop a language program, and has appointed five "apprentices" who teach Samala words to their own children and other members of the tribe. Professor Larry Kimura of the University of Hawaii will present the story of how Hawaiian was brought back from near extinction. In a state where until 1987, it was against state law to teach Hawaiian in the public schools, except as a foreign language, students may now pursue Hawaiian-medium studies up to the level of a Master's degree. Other models being presented at InField will show how modern technology can be used to document and revitalize languages. In addition to techniques in audio and video recording, and data management, participants will learn how to use the Internet and "wikis" (websites that can be edited collectively) as tools. Professor Shobhana Chelliah of the University of North Texas, who documents minority and endangered languages of Northeast India, said that ". the internet is going to be the safest and most efficient way for me to keep in touch with . the politically troubled Northeast Indian region." Dr. Te Taka Keegan, a Maori from New Zealand who was trained as a computer scientist, will present his work in developing Maori language software. Jeanne LaVerne, who is a Hopi Indian and has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wants to develop a Hopi database that can be more easily accessed and updated. The coordinators of the Ekegusi Encyclopedic Project, from Kenya, are working to document their language before it is eroded by migration and the younger generation's preference for English or Kiswahili, which are taught in the school system. Kennedy Bosire and Gladys Machogu are researching an encyclopedic Ekegusii- English dictionary, which currently has 30,000 words translated into English, and includes pictures of plants, animals, birds, insects, and physical features. Along with the language, says Machogu, the project is researching and compiling data on the traditions of the Ekegusi community - including the naming and raising of children, marriage, health and medicine, and religion and socio-economic activities. This is increasingly difficult since the older generation is aging and dying. The Ekegusi activists are working to preserve their language while there are still large numbers of speakers, although they are ageing. On the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, Edwin Benson, age 75, is the last remaining fluent speaker of Mandan, the language spoken by Sacajawea, Lewis and Clark's young Indian guide. Alyce Spotted Bear, an educator, activist and leader of the Mandan tribe who will be attending InField, reports that children learn vocabulary from "Uncle Edwin" in the Twin Buttes Elementary School, and a few people meet weekly to try and learn the language. There is great urgency to learn and document the language while the last speaker is still alive. Another group of activists attending InField are members of the Lakota and Dakota tribes of North and South Dakota who are also linguistics students. The members of this group, students of Professor David Rood of at the University of Colorado at Boulder, are enrolled in a Master's degree program in which they are studying linguistics and ethnographic videography. They will be able to serve as language resources for their own tribes. The program is supported by the National Science Foundation as part of its Documenting Endangered Languages project. For two weeks, from June 23 to July 3, InField will present a course of workshops on language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization. . This will be followed by a four-week session of field training from July 7 to August 1. This intensive course is similar to a doctoral course on linguistic field methods, where students will utilize the skills taught in the workshops. In addition to technical work, participants may learn about moral, ethical, and practical issues of working within foreign speech communities. Other participants from North America include activists from diverse communities: White Mountain Apache (Arizona); Kwak'wala (Northern Vancouver Island); Seneca (New York State and Canada); Cheyenne (Montana); Karuk (Northern California; Central Pomo (Mendocino County, California); and Algonquin (Western Quebec and Eastern Ontario) Also taking part will be speakers and scholars of Ese Eja (Bolivia and Peru); Baram and Bhujel (Nepal); Lamkang and Haroti (India); Banda, Krim and Bom' (West and Central Africa); Kiong and Ibani (Nigeria); and Jambi and Papuan Malay (Indonesia). InField is funded in part by the Documenting Endangered Languages program, co-funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Further information is available at http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/infield/index.html. Note: The workshops for InField will take place June 23-July 3 at various locations on the UC Santa Barbara campus. Each day there will be a plenary session focusing on specific language models: Hawaiian language revitalization, Australian Language Centres, Seneca, Chumash, Manx Gaelic, Indonesian, Maori, and the "Breath of Life" workshop on Californian native languages. These will take place in the McCune Conference Room of the Humanities and Social Sciences Building. http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1808 Material appearing here is distributed without profit or monitory gain to those who have expressed an interest in receiving the material for research and educational purposes. This is in accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. section 107. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] __._,_.___ Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic Messages | Members MARKETPLACE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups users, take advantage of a free trial offer from Blockbuster! Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch format to Traditional Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe Visit Your Group Yahoo! Groups Dog Zone Connect w/others who love dogs. Popular Y! Groups Is your group one? Check it out and see. Women of Curves on Yahoo! Groups see how women are changing their lives. . __,_._,___ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From carudin1 at wsc.edu Wed Jul 2 17:57:03 2008 From: carudin1 at wsc.edu (Catherine Rudin) Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 12:57:03 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project Message-ID: Hi, all. No one has responded to this, so I guess we must all be more or less in agreement. (Or not reading e-mail.) I personally DO have a very deep (sorry) interest in what Bob and Johannes call "invisible" structures. And I'd argue that it's pretty much impossible to talk about grammar without invoking some degree of abstraction: "Noun Phrase", for instance, is an abstract, "invisible" concept - even phonemes are abstractions --- However, that said, I agree with Johannes that this project should focus on (relatively surface-y) typological description. That will be hard enough!! After the project is done, anyone who wants can take the results and analyze them from a historical or theoretical syntactic or whatever other view. Just my 2 cents - Catherine >>> "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" 06/26/08 6:56 AM >>> Dear Siouanists, Bob touches quite fundamental questions with regard to the Comparative Siouan Grammar project and I think it would be helpful for the entire project but also for each individual contributor and contribution if we find some answers to these questions in advance. My personal view on this is the following. First of all, I think the overall goal is to describe the morphosyntactic diversity among the Siouan languages. Most of us are experts for just one or two of the Siouan languages, but have only a cursory knowledge of the other SL. Or, we perceive SL through the glasses of the better documented SL like Lakhota. Such a project forces us to look deeper into the other SL at least with regard to a certain grammatical domain. My hope and conviction is that the more we know about the divers grammatical categories and constructions among the SL the better we can investigate and describe the language we are already experts in. Perhaps, we find new things in our "own" language if we know more about the other SL. So, "comparative" in my view means primarily diversity (and uniformity(?)) among SL. This is of course close to what typologist do with the difference that our sample of languages is limited and that we can also start with certain grammatical categories and construction we already know that they are prominent in SL. This typologically biased view on "comparative" does not preclude the historical perspective. On the contrary, we are all interested in the question how the various categories and constructions historically emerged even if we can reconstruct this only on the basis of the contemporary SL. The ideal would be that we could combine both perspectives on "comparative" in our individual contributions. Since I am not a historical linguist, I would of course have difficulties to reconstruct forms in a deepness and quality as Bob, David, and others could do it. So, in my own contributions this perspective would remain somewhat weak. On the last point mentioned in Bob's mail, I can comment on pretty shortly. I have no interest in invisible underlying structures or superstructures or aim to proof certain rather abstract models of grammar with data from SL. I think, many of us share this view, so I do not see a problem here too. I regret, that I could not attend the conference in Joplin, but I am looking forward to the nest year's conference in Lincoln. Best Johannes Datum: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:27:23 -0500 Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Von: "Rankin, Robert L" An: Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > Dear Colleagues, > > Before we get too far along with this project, we might want to set > some goals and limits. "Comparative grammar" is a pretty flexible > topic and we might want to try to specify what we mean. Does this > mean "comparative and historical" in the traditional sense? Or are > people thinking more along the lines of synchronic grammars and some > sort of typological approach? Do we intend to limit ourselves to > surface grammar (that's certainly what the historical apporoach would > requirt solutions that appeal to > invisible/hypothetical superstructure? It seems to me that these > would be vastly different projects appealing to different kinds of > evidence and information. It's probably worth thinking about in > advance. > > Thanks to a lot of hard work by Jill and Catherine, the meeting in > Joplin was a lot of fun and very informative. I'm looking forward to > next year's meeting already. > > Bob > > ________________________________ > > In Billings, we had a planning session led by Linda Cumberland and > John Boyle. On the huge blackboard there we outlined and summarized > the topics to be included in the projected three volume opus of a CSG. > > > According to my notes and recollections, Vol. III contains sketches of > the individual Siouan languages following perhaps a common scheme > (which does not exist yet, of course) > > > Vol. I contains investigations to the following topics. I will mention > also the names as far as I can remember (I may be wrong, though). > > > Obliques/ Postpositions (Regina Pustet) > Applicatives (including the benefactive applicative) (Johannes > Helmbrecht) > Determiners (?) > Nominal Possession (?) > t-words (Bruce Ingham?) > Prefixes (morphological positions, etc.) (Bob Rankin) > Suffixes/ Enclitics (Bob Rankin) > Relative Clauses (?) > Switch references and clase chaining (John Boyle) > Pronominals and the stative/active split (Bob Rankin) > Deictic motion verbs (Linda Cumberland) > > > Vol II contains the following topics: > > > Plural marking > Compounding > Noun incorporation > Causatives (Helmbrecht) > External Possession > Coordination > Subordination > Instrumentals > Absolutive (wa-) > TAM > Negation > Serial verbs (David Rood ?) > > > That's what I have in my notes perhaps John or Linda have more in > their files. > > > The topics of the two volumes as given above are unordered and rather > a list of key words than a systematically developed structure of such > a project. But it was the point where we stopped further planning. It > might serve as the starting point for pushing the whole thing further. > > > As I indicated in my last mail, it would be of some importance for me > if I knew the precise date of the next conference in Lincoln. So, > perhaps, this could be decided on in Joplin in the coming days. > > > I wish everyone a wonderful and exciting conference in Joplin, > > > Best > Johannes > > > > > > > Datum: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:38:13 -0500 > Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Von: "Catherine Rudin" > An: > Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > I agree with Bob; it all sounds good. Language instructors' > session > > is a good idea, and we should DEFINITELY get the momentum back for > the > > comparative Siouan grammar project. These two ideas don't conflict > - > > we can do both and still have time for some regular papers at the > 2009 > > meeting. > > > > I think we should devote a whole day to comparative grammar, and > we > > should get organized well in advance. I wasn't able to get to > > Billings, and I've forgotten which topic I said I would look at (am > I > > the only sieve-brain?) but I do think this is important!!! If > Johannes > > is willing to be the organizer that would be great. Is there > someone > > who will be in Joplin who could bring the list of topics/chapters > that > > was compiled before? (And/or could someone circulate it > > electronically?) I suspect I'm not the only one who could use a > > reminder. > > > > I believe that Mark has not only offered, but we collectively have > > accepted Lincoln as the 2009 site. The date I have noted is "June > 5-7 > > or 12-14". Should we make a decision? > > > > Let's include a quick "business meeting" in the Joplin schedule, > with > > confirming at least next year's plans as item #1 on the agenda. > > Tenta> I > > tried to reply earlier to Mark's note, but it seems to have gone > only > > to him, not to the list -- at least I hope that's what happened to > it! > > > > Catherine > > > > >>> "Rankin, Robert L" 06/17/08 12:53 PM >>> > > This all sounds really great to me. Perhaps Johannes would like to > be > > the organizer of the comparative sessions (which might, in turn, > > provide an even stronger rationale for his getting travel funds), > and > > Mark could organize the language instructors' sessions. Hopefully > we > > could schedule them so that we could all attend both. > > > > Bob > > > > ________________________________ > > > > From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU on behalf of Mark J > > Awakuni-Swetland > > Sent: Tue 6/17/2008 9:06 AM > > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > Cc: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU; siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > Subject: Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > Aloha Johannes, > > Many thanks for your suggestions about future SACC agendas. > > I have offered to host the 2009 gathering here in Lincoln, > Nebraska > > (the center of it all...or the most distant from anywhere else sort > of > > place). > > > > The Dhegihanists have met here back in 2000 or so. > > > > I will be polling folks at Joplin about their interests regarding > the > > agenda for 2009. > > > > If there is sufficient interest in organizing a session or three > on > > the Comparative Siouan Grammar, Lincoln would be a good time to > > formalize it and push it forward a bit. > > > > There may be interest in organizing a session geared towards > language > > instructors from on- and off-rez institutions. I would suspect > that > > the Tribal Colleges in NE, SD, and OK might find this useful. > Omaha > > Nation Public School (K-12), Walthill Public School, and Winnebago > > Public School could find some value in this as well. > > > > Let's put on our thinking caps as we head to Joplin. > > > > iNcHoNxti woNgithe widoNbe ttamiNkHe. > > Uthixide > > > > Mark Awakuni-Swetland > > Assistant Professor of Anthropology > > and Native American Studies > > University of Nebraska > > Lincoln, NE 68588-0368 > > > > http://omahalanguage.unl.edu > > Phone 402-472-3455 > > FAX: 402-472-9642 > > > > "Ttenixa uxpathe egoN" a biama, winisi akHa. > > > > > > > > "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" > > > > Sent by: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > 06/17/2008 07:50 AM > > Please respond to > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > > > To > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > cc > > Subject > > Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Dear Siouanists, > > > > I regret very much that I won't be able to attend this year's SCLC > in > > Joplin,MO in particular because > > the program seems to be so interesting. Since I won't be > personally > > there, I would like to make > > some suggestions from the other end of the world for the future > > conferences, which may be > > discussed during the conference in Joplin. > > > > One of the exciting projeGrammar. > > Papers dealing with various aspects of Siouan grammar in a > typological > > and historical comparative > > perspective were presented there. We also compiled a list with > > additional topics filling all in all at > > least two volumes. Unfortunately, this project came to a halt > > afterwards and I would like to give it a > > new push. So, my suggestion would be to plan on a follow up > workshop > > on Siouan Comparative > > Grammar for the next year's conference, if this goal is still > > considered worthy among the participants > > to invest time and research. Could you discuss this question > during > > the coming days? > > > > For me personally, this implies that I will revise and expand my > paper > > on applicatives in Siouan. In > > addition, I volunteered for the causative constructions (if I > recall > > that correctly), so I will start I will be able to come next > only, > > if I can get funding for an > > overseas trip. This is not too difficult to obtain in particular > for > > such a fascinating project, but I need > > the conference details some months in advance in order to be able > to > > apply for money. Therefore, I > > would like to ask you to fix a date and location for the next and > if > > possible for the conference in two > > years so that people from abroad have a chance to get the > necessary > > funding. John Boyle > > mentioned to me that he is going to organize a conference in > Chicago > > in 2010? > > > > Anyway, I think the meeting in Joplin could provide a good > opportunity > > to talk about the state of the > > art with regard to the comparative Siouan Grammar project and to > plan > > on the next steps. > > Personally, I would like to participate in the planning, the > > organization, and the research as much as > > I can so that this project will come to a succesful end. > > > > So, I wish all of you a wonderful and interesting meeting in > Joplin, > > > > Best, > > Johannes > > > > > > -- > > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > > Lehrstuhl f?r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > > Universit?t Regensburg > > Philosophische Fakult?t IV > > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > > Universit?tsstr. 31 > > 93053 Regensburg > > Deutschland > > > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > Lehrstuhl f?r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > Universit?t Regensburg > Philosophische Fakult?t IV > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Universit?tsstr. 31 > 93053 Regensburg > Deutschland > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > -- Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht Lehrstuhl f?r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft Universit?t Regensburg Philosophische Fakult?t IV Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft Universit?tsstr. 31 93053 Regensburg Deutschland Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm From linguista at gmail.com Wed Jul 2 18:42:06 2008 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan James Gordon) Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 13:42:06 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: <486B7B1F0200008E0001010B@hermes.wsc.edu> Message-ID: After rereading Johannes' and Bob's posts, I can say I agree in general with the idea of building a principally typological comparative grammar that focusses on morphosyntactic features. Nonetheless, I would caution us against going too far with rooting out "invisible" things. Bob's original question was whether we should even admit solutions that appeal to "invisible" things, and I think the answer to that should be a resounding Yes, as long as the primary focus is morphosyntactic description and not theorising. Sometimes the "invisible" answer is much better than any other answer, and quite frankly, morphosyntactic descriptions often don't provide any answers at all, so at least a tentative first stab at one should be welcome, no matter how visible its structure is. That being said, like Catherine and Johannes, I think we should certainly make sure the primary focus of each piece is morphosyntactic description and anything else should be secondary. - Bryan 2008/7/2 Catherine Rudin : > Hi, all. > No one has responded to this, so I guess we must all be more or less in > agreement. (Or not reading e-mail.) > > I personally DO have a very deep (sorry) interest in what Bob and Johannes > call "invisible" structures. And I'd argue that it's pretty much impossible > to talk about grammar without invoking some degree of abstraction: "Noun > Phrase", for instance, is an abstract, "invisible" concept - even phonemes > are abstractions --- > > However, that said, I agree with Johannes that this project should focus on > (relatively surface-y) typological description. That will be hard enough!! > After the project is done, anyone who wants can take the results and > analyze them from a historical or theoretical syntactic or whatever other > view. > > Just my 2 cents - > Catherine > > >>> "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" < > johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de> 06/26/08 6:56 AM >>> > Dear Siouanists, > > Bob touches quite fundamental questions with regard to the Comparative > Siouan Grammar project and I > think it would be helpful for the entire project but also for each > individual contributor and contribution if we > find some answers to these questions in advance. > > My personal view on this is the following. First of all, I think the > overall goal is to describe the > morphosyntactic diversity among the Siouan languages. Most of us are > experts for just one or two of the > Siouan languages, but have only a cursory knowledge of the other SL. Or, we > perceive SL through the > glasses of the better documented SL like Lakhota. Such a project forces us > to look deeper into the other SL > at least with regard to a certain grammatical domain. My hope and > conviction is that the more we know > about the divers grammatical categories and constructions among the SL the > better we can investigate and > describe the language we are already experts in. Perhaps, we find new > things in our "own" language if we > know more about the other SL. So, "comparative" in my view means primarily > diversity (and uniformity(?)) > among SL. This is of course close to what typologist do with the difference > that our sample of languages is > limited and that we can also start with certain grammatical categories and > construction we already know that > they are prominent in SL. > > This typologically biased view on "comparative" does not preclude the > historical perspective. On the > contrary, we are all interested in the question how the various categories > and constructions historically > emerged even if we can reconstruct this only on the basis of the > contemporary SL. The ideal would be that > we could combine both perspectives on "comparative" in our individual > contributions. Since I am not a > historical linguist, I would of course have difficulties to reconstruct > forms in a deepness and quality as Bob, > David, and others could do it. So, in my own contributions this perspective > would remain somewhat weak. > > On the last point mentioned in Bob's mail, I can comment on pretty shortly. > I have no interest in invisible > underlying structures or superstructures or aim to proof certain rather > abstract models of grammar with data > from SL. I think, many of us share this view, so I do not see a problem > here too. > > I regret, that I could not attend the conference in Joplin, but I am > looking forward to the nest year's > conference in Lincoln. > > Best > Johannes > > > > Datum: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:27:23 -0500 > Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Von: "Rankin, Robert L" > An: > Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > Dear Colleagues, > > > > Before we get too far along with this project, we might want to set > > some goals and limits. "Comparative grammar" is a pretty flexible > > topic and we might want to try to specify what we mean. Does this > > mean "comparative and historical" in the traditional sense? Or are > > people thinking more along the lines of synchronic grammars and some > > sort of typological approach? Do we intend to limit ourselves to > > surface grammar (that's certainly what the historical apporoach would > > requirt solutions that appeal to > > invisible/hypothetical superstructure? It seems to me that these > > would be vastly different projects appealing to different kinds of > > evidence and information. It's probably worth thinking about in > > advance. > > > > Thanks to a lot of hard work by Jill and Catherine, the meeting in > > Joplin was a lot of fun and very informative. I'm looking forward to > > next year's meeting already. > > > > Bob > > > > ________________________________ > > > > In Billings, we had a planning session led by Linda Cumberland and > > John Boyle. On the huge blackboard there we outlined and summarized > > the topics to be included in the projected three volume opus of a CSG. > > > > > > According to my notes and recollections, Vol. III contains sketches of > > the individual Siouan languages following perhaps a common scheme > > (which does not exist yet, of course) > > > > > > Vol. I contains investigations to the following topics. I will mention > > also the names as far as I can remember (I may be wrong, though). > > > > > > Obliques/ Postpositions (Regina Pustet) > > Applicatives (including the benefactive applicative) (Johannes > > Helmbrecht) > > Determiners (?) > > Nominal Possession (?) > > t-words (Bruce Ingham?) > > Prefixes (morphological positions, etc.) (Bob Rankin) > > Suffixes/ Enclitics (Bob Rankin) > > Relative Clauses (?) > > Switch references and clase chaining (John Boyle) > > Pronominals and the stative/active split (Bob Rankin) > > Deictic motion verbs (Linda Cumberland) > > > > > > Vol II contains the following topics: > > > > > > Plural marking > > Compounding > > Noun incorporation > > Causatives (Helmbrecht) > > External Possession > > Coordination > > Subordination > > Instrumentals > > Absolutive (wa-) > > TAM > > Negation > > Serial verbs (David Rood ?) > > > > > > That's what I have in my notes perhaps John or Linda have more in > > their files. > > > > > > The topics of the two volumes as given above are unordered and rather > > a list of key words than a systematically developed structure of such > > a project. But it was the point where we stopped further planning. It > > might serve as the starting point for pushing the whole thing further. > > > > > > As I indicated in my last mail, it would be of some importance for me > > if I knew the precise date of the next conference in Lincoln. So, > > perhaps, this could be decided on in Joplin in the coming days. > > > > > > I wish everyone a wonderful and exciting conference in Joplin, > > > > > > Best > > Johannes > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Datum: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:38:13 -0500 > > Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > Von: "Catherine Rudin" > > An: > > Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > I agree with Bob; it all sounds good. Language instructors' > > session > > > is a good idea, and we should DEFINITELY get the momentum back for > > the > > > comparative Siouan grammar project. These two ideas don't conflict > > - > > > we can do both and still have time for some regular papers at the > > 2009 > > > meeting. > > > > > > I think we should devote a whole day to comparative grammar, and > > we > > > should get organized well in advance. I wasn't able to get to > > > Billings, and I've forgotten which topic I said I would look at (am > > I > > > the only sieve-brain?) but I do think this is important!!! If > > Johannes > > > is willing to be the organizer that would be great. Is there > > someone > > > who will be in Joplin who could bring the list of topics/chapters > > that > > > was compiled before? (And/or could someone circulate it > > > electronically?) I suspect I'm not the only one who could use a > > > reminder. > > > > > > I believe that Mark has not only offered, but we collectively have > > > accepted Lincoln as the 2009 site. The date I have noted is "June > > 5-7 > > > or 12-14". Should we make a decision? > > > > > > Let's include a quick "business meeting" in the Joplin schedule, > > with > > > confirming at least next year's plans as item #1 on the agenda. > > > Tenta> I > > > tried to reply earlier to Mark's note, but it seems to have gone > > only > > > to him, not to the list -- at least I hope that's what happened to > > it! > > > > > > Catherine > > > > > > >>> "Rankin, Robert L" 06/17/08 12:53 PM >>> > > > This all sounds really great to me. Perhaps Johannes would like to > > be > > > the organizer of the comparative sessions (which might, in turn, > > > provide an even stronger rationale for his getting travel funds), > > and > > > Mark could organize the language instructors' sessions. Hopefully > > we > > > could schedule them so that we could all attend both. > > > > > > Bob > > > > > > ________________________________ > > > > > > From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU on behalf of Mark J > > > Awakuni-Swetland > > > Sent: Tue 6/17/2008 9:06 AM > > > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > Cc: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU; siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > Subject: Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > > > > > Aloha Johannes, > > > Many thanks for your suggestions about future SACC agendas. > > > I have offered to host the 2009 gathering here in Lincoln, > > Nebraska > > > (the center of it all...or the most distant from anywhere else sort > > of > > > place). > > > > > > The Dhegihanists have met here back in 2000 or so. > > > > > > I will be polling folks at Joplin about their interests regarding > > the > > > agenda for 2009. > > > > > > If there is sufficient interest in organizing a session or three > > on > > > the Comparative Siouan Grammar, Lincoln would be a good time to > > > formalize it and push it forward a bit. > > > > > > There may be interest in organizing a session geared towards > > language > > > instructors from on- and off-rez institutions. I would suspect > > that > > > the Tribal Colleges in NE, SD, and OK might find this useful. > > Omaha > > > Nation Public School (K-12), Walthill Public School, and Winnebago > > > Public School could find some value in this as well. > > > > > > Let's put on our thinking caps as we head to Joplin. > > > > > > iNcHoNxti woNgithe widoNbe ttamiNkHe. > > > Uthixide > > > > > > Mark Awakuni-Swetland > > > Assistant Professor of Anthropology > > > and Native American Studies > > > University of Nebraska > > > Lincoln, NE 68588-0368 > > > > > > http://omahalanguage.unl.edu > > > Phone 402-472-3455 > > > FAX: 402-472-9642 > > > > > > "Ttenixa uxpathe egoN" a biama, winisi akHa. > > > > > > > > > > > > "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" > > > > > > Sent by: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > > > 06/17/2008 07:50 AM > > > Please respond to > > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > > > > > > To > > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > cc > > > Subject > > > Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Dear Siouanists, > > > > > > I regret very much that I won't be able to attend this year's SCLC > > in > > > Joplin,MO in particular because > > > the program seems to be so interesting. Since I won't be > > personally > > > there, I would like to make > > > some suggestions from the other end of the world for the future > > > conferences, which may be > > > discussed during the conference in Joplin. > > > > > > One of the exciting projeGrammar. > > > Papers dealing with various aspects of Siouan grammar in a > > typological > > > and historical comparative > > > perspective were presented there. We also compiled a list with > > > additional topics filling all in all at > > > least two volumes. Unfortunately, this project came to a halt > > > afterwards and I would like to give it a > > > new push. So, my suggestion would be to plan on a follow up > > workshop > > > on Siouan Comparative > > > Grammar for the next year's conference, if this goal is still > > > considered worthy among the participants > > > to invest time and research. Could you discuss this question > > during > > > the coming days? > > > > > > For me personally, this implies that I will revise and expand my > > paper > > > on applicatives in Siouan. In > > > addition, I volunteered for the causative constructions (if I > > recall > > > that correctly), so I will start I will be able to come next > > only, > > > if I can get funding for an > > > overseas trip. This is not too difficult to obtain in particular > > for > > > such a fascinating project, but I need > > > the conference details some months in advance in order to be able > > to > > > apply for money. Therefore, I > > > would like to ask you to fix a date and location for the next and > > if > > > possible for the conference in two > > > years so that people from abroad have a chance to get the > > necessary > > > funding. John Boyle > > > mentioned to me that he is going to organize a conference in > > Chicago > > > in 2010? > > > > > > Anyway, I think the meeting in Joplin could provide a good > > opportunity > > > to talk about the state of the > > > art with regard to the comparative Siouan Grammar project and to > > plan > > > on the next steps. > > > Personally, I would like to participate in the planning, the > > > organization, and the research as much as > > > I can so that this project will come to a succesful end. > > > > > > So, I wish all of you a wonderful and interesting meeting in > > Joplin, > > > > > > Best, > > > Johannes > > > > > > > > > -- > > > > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > > > Lehrstuhl f?r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > > > Universit?t Regensburg > > > Philosophische Fakult?t IV > > > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > > > Universit?tsstr. 31 > > > 93053 Regensburg > > > Deutschland > > > > > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > > > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > > > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > > > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > > > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > > > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > > Lehrstuhl f?r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > > Universit?t Regensburg > > Philosophische Fakult?t IV > > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > > Universit?tsstr. 31 > > 93053 Regensburg > > Deutschland > > > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > > > > > > -- > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > Lehrstuhl f?r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > Universit?t Regensburg > Philosophische Fakult?t IV > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Universit?tsstr. 31 > 93053 Regensburg > Deutschland > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Wed Jul 2 19:04:36 2008 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 12:04:36 -0700 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: <486B7B1F0200008E0001010B@hermes.wsc.edu> Message-ID: Perhaps I missed something, and I probably did, but when were we planning to get this comparative grammar completed?? I ask because, as most of you already know, I will soon be spending a lot of time in the realm of Eastern Algonquian (I know, don't throw tomatoes!) and not so much time on Siouan, at least until I graduate, when and if that happens.? But I would certainly like to contribute something to this project, which, with enough forewarning and time, I might be able to do.? ? Dave --- On Wed, 7/2/08, Catherine Rudin wrote: From: Catherine Rudin Subject: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Wednesday, July 2, 2008, 10:57 AM Hi, all. No one has responded to this, so I guess we must all be more or less in agreement. (Or not reading e-mail.) I personally DO have a very deep (sorry) interest in what Bob and Johannes call "invisible" structures. And I'd argue that it's pretty much impossible to talk about grammar without invoking some degree of abstraction: "Noun Phrase", for instance, is an abstract, "invisible" concept - even phonemes are abstractions --- However, that said, I agree with Johannes that this project should focus on (relatively surface-y) typological description. That will be hard enough!! After the project is done, anyone who wants can take the results and analyze them from a historical or theoretical syntactic or whatever other view. Just my 2 cents - Catherine >>> "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" 06/26/08 6:56 AM >>> Dear Siouanists, Bob touches quite fundamental questions with regard to the Comparative Siouan Grammar project and I think it would be helpful for the entire project but also for each individual contributor and contribution if we find some answers to these questions in advance. My personal view on this is the following. First of all, I think the overall goal is to describe the morphosyntactic diversity among the Siouan languages. Most of us are experts for just one or two of the Siouan languages, but have only a cursory knowledge of the other SL. Or, we perceive SL through the glasses of the better documented SL like Lakhota. Such a project forces us to look deeper into the other SL at least with regard to a certain grammatical domain. My hope and conviction is that the more we know about the divers grammatical categories and constructions among the SL the better we can investigate and describe the language we are already experts in. Perhaps, we find new things in our "own" language if we know more about the other SL. So, "comparative" in my view means primarily diversity (and uniformity(?)) among SL. This is of course close to what typologist do with the difference that our sample of languages is limited and that we can also start with certain grammatical categories and construction we already know that they are prominent in SL. This typologically biased view on "comparative" does not preclude the historical perspective. On the contrary, we are all interested in the question how the various categories and constructions historically emerged even if we can reconstruct this only on the basis of the contemporary SL. The ideal would be that we could combine both perspectives on "comparative" in our individual contributions. Since I am not a historical linguist, I would of course have difficulties to reconstruct forms in a deepness and quality as Bob, David, and others could do it. So, in my own contributions this perspective would remain somewhat weak. On the last point mentioned in Bob's mail, I can comment on pretty shortly. I have no interest in invisible underlying structures or superstructures or aim to proof certain rather abstract models of grammar with data from SL. I think, many of us share this view, so I do not see a problem here too. I regret, that I could not attend the conference in Joplin, but I am looking forward to the nest year's conference in Lincoln. Best Johannes Datum: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:27:23 -0500 Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Von: "Rankin, Robert L" An: Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > Dear Colleagues, > > Before we get too far along with this project, we might want to set > some goals and limits. "Comparative grammar" is a pretty flexible > topic and we might want to try to specify what we mean. Does this > mean "comparative and historical" in the traditional sense? Or are > people thinking more along the lines of synchronic grammars and some > sort of typological approach? Do we intend to limit ourselves to > surface grammar (that's certainly what the historical apporoach would > requirt solutions that appeal to > invisible/hypothetical superstructure? It seems to me that these > would be vastly different projects appealing to different kinds of > evidence and information. It's probably worth thinking about in > advance. > > Thanks to a lot of hard work by Jill and Catherine, the meeting in > Joplin was a lot of fun and very informative. I'm looking forward to > next year's meeting already. > > Bob > > ________________________________ > > In Billings, we had a planning session led by Linda Cumberland and > John Boyle. On the huge blackboard there we outlined and summarized > the topics to be included in the projected three volume opus of a CSG. > > > According to my notes and recollections, Vol. III contains sketches of > the individual Siouan languages following perhaps a common scheme > (which does not exist yet, of course) > > > Vol. I contains investigations to the following topics. I will mention > also the names as far as I can remember (I may be wrong, though). > > > Obliques/ Postpositions (Regina Pustet) > Applicatives (including the benefactive applicative) (Johannes > Helmbrecht) > Determiners (?) > Nominal Possession (?) > t-words (Bruce Ingham?) > Prefixes (morphological positions, etc.) (Bob Rankin) > Suffixes/ Enclitics (Bob Rankin) > Relative Clauses (?) > Switch references and clase chaining (John Boyle) > Pronominals and the stative/active split (Bob Rankin) > Deictic motion verbs (Linda Cumberland) > > > Vol II contains the following topics: > > > Plural marking > Compounding > Noun incorporation > Causatives (Helmbrecht) > External Possession > Coordination > Subordination > Instrumentals > Absolutive (wa-) > TAM > Negation > Serial verbs (David Rood ?) > > > That's what I have in my notes perhaps John or Linda have more in > their files. > > > The topics of the two volumes as given above are unordered and rather > a list of key words than a systematically developed structure of such > a project. But it was the point where we stopped further planning. It > might serve as the starting point for pushing the whole thing further. > > > As I indicated in my last mail, it would be of some importance for me > if I knew the precise date of the next conference in Lincoln. So, > perhaps, this could be decided on in Joplin in the coming days. > > > I wish everyone a wonderful and exciting conference in Joplin, > > > Best > Johannes > > > > > > > Datum: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:38:13 -0500 > Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Von: "Catherine Rudin" > An: > Betreff: RE: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > I agree with Bob; it all sounds good. Language instructors' > session > > is a good idea, and we should DEFINITELY get the momentum back for > the > > comparative Siouan grammar project. These two ideas don't conflict > - > > we can do both and still have time for some regular papers at the > 2009 > > meeting. > > > > I think we should devote a whole day to comparative grammar, and > we > > should get organized well in advance. I wasn't able to get to > > Billings, and I've forgotten which topic I said I would look at (am > I > > the only sieve-brain?) but I do think this is important!!! If > Johannes > > is willing to be the organizer that would be great. Is there > someone > > who will be in Joplin who could bring the list of topics/chapters > that > > was compiled before? (And/or could someone circulate it > > electronically?) I suspect I'm not the only one who could use a > > reminder. > > > > I believe that Mark has not only offered, but we collectively have > > accepted Lincoln as the 2009 site. The date I have noted is "June > 5-7 > > or 12-14". Should we make a decision? > > > > Let's include a quick "business meeting" in the Joplin schedule, > with > > confirming at least next year's plans as item #1 on the agenda. > > Tenta> I > > tried to reply earlier to Mark's note, but it seems to have gone > only > > to him, not to the list -- at least I hope that's what happened to > it! > > > > Catherine > > > > >>> "Rankin, Robert L" 06/17/08 12:53 PM >>> > > This all sounds really great to me. Perhaps Johannes would like to > be > > the organizer of the comparative sessions (which might, in turn, > > provide an even stronger rationale for his getting travel funds), > and > > Mark could organize the language instructors' sessions. Hopefully > we > > could schedule them so that we could all attend both. > > > > Bob > > > > ________________________________ > > > > From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU on behalf of Mark J > > Awakuni-Swetland > > Sent: Tue 6/17/2008 9:06 AM > > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > Cc: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU; siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > Subject: Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > Aloha Johannes, > > Many thanks for your suggestions about future SACC agendas. > > I have offered to host the 2009 gathering here in Lincoln, > Nebraska > > (the center of it all...or the most distant from anywhere else sort > of > > place). > > > > The Dhegihanists have met here back in 2000 or so. > > > > I will be polling folks at Joplin about their interests regarding > the > > agenda for 2009. > > > > If there is sufficient interest in organizing a session or three > on > > the Comparative Siouan Grammar, Lincoln would be a good time to > > formalize it and push it forward a bit. > > > > There may be interest in organizing a session geared towards > language > > instructors from on- and off-rez institutions. I would suspect > that > > the Tribal Colleges in NE, SD, and OK might find this useful. > Omaha > > Nation Public School (K-12), Walthill Public School, and Winnebago > > Public School could find some value in this as well. > > > > Let's put on our thinking caps as we head to Joplin. > > > > iNcHoNxti woNgithe widoNbe ttamiNkHe. > > Uthixide > > > > Mark Awakuni-Swetland > > Assistant Professor of Anthropology > > and Native American Studies > > University of Nebraska > > Lincoln, NE 68588-0368 > > > > http://omahalanguage.unl.edu > > Phone 402-472-3455 > > FAX: 402-472-9642 > > > > "Ttenixa uxpathe egoN" a biama, winisi akHa. > > > > > > > > "Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht" > > > > Sent by: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > 06/17/2008 07:50 AM > > Please respond to > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > > > > > To > > siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > > cc > > Subject > > Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Dear Siouanists, > > > > I regret very much that I won't be able to attend this year's SCLC > in > > Joplin,MO in particular because > > the program seems to be so interesting. Since I won't be > personally > > there, I would like to make > > some suggestions from the other end of the world for the future > > conferences, which may be > > discussed during the conference in Joplin. > > > > One of the exciting projeGrammar. > > Papers dealing with various aspects of Siouan grammar in a > typological > > and historical comparative > > perspective were presented there. We also compiled a list with > > additional topics filling all in all at > > least two volumes. Unfortunately, this project came to a halt > > afterwards and I would like to give it a > > new push. So, my suggestion would be to plan on a follow up > workshop > > on Siouan Comparative > > Grammar for the next year's conference, if this goal is still > > considered worthy among the participants > > to invest time and research. Could you discuss this question > during > > the coming days? > > > > For me personally, this implies that I will revise and expand my > paper > > on applicatives in Siouan. In > > addition, I volunteered for the causative constructions (if I > recall > > that correctly), so I will start I will be able to come next > only, > > if I can get funding for an > > overseas trip. This is not too difficult to obtain in particular > for > > such a fascinating project, but I need > > the conference details some months in advance in order to be able > to > > apply for money. Therefore, I > > would like to ask you to fix a date and location for the next and > if > > possible for the conference in two > > years so that people from abroad have a chance to get the > necessary > > funding. John Boyle > > mentioned to me that he is going to organize a conference in > Chicago > > in 2010? > > > > Anyway, I think the meeting in Joplin could provide a good > opportunity > > to talk about the state of the > > art with regard to the comparative Siouan Grammar project and to > plan > > on the next steps. > > Personally, I would like to participate in the planning, the > > organization, and the research as much as > > I can so that this project will come to a succesful end. > > > > So, I wish all of you a wonderful and interesting meeting in > Joplin, > > > > Best, > > Johannes > > > > > > -- > > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > > Lehrstuhl f?r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > > Universit?t Regensburg > > Philosophische Fakult?t IV > > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > > Universit?tsstr. 31 > > 93053 Regensburg > > Deutschland > > > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > > Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht > Lehrstuhl f?r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft > Universit?t Regensburg > Philosophische Fakult?t IV > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Universit?tsstr. 31 > 93053 Regensburg > Deutschland > > Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 > ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) > Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 > E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de > Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm > > -- Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht Lehrstuhl f?r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft Universit?t Regensburg Philosophische Fakult?t IV Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft Universit?tsstr. 31 93053 Regensburg Deutschland Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jgoodtracks at gmail.com Thu Jul 3 14:39:08 2008 From: jgoodtracks at gmail.com (Jimm GoodTracks) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 09:39:08 -0500 Subject: Fw: [NDNAIM] Sign the Petition to Help Revitalize Native American Languages Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Pat Benabe To: Jimm Goodtracks Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 7:48 AM Subject: Fw: [NDNAIM] Sign the Petition to Help Revitalize Native American Languages ----- Original Message ----- Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 2:55 AM Subject: [NDNAIM] Sign the Petition to Help Revitalize Native American Languages From: Quanah Brightman qbrightman75 @ hotmail.com (take out spaces) Sign the Petition to Help Revitalize Native American Languages http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/help-revitalize-native-american-languages Your help is urgently needed to save and revitalize Native American languages. Among the more than 300 original languages once spoken in the U.S. only 155-175 are spoken today. Scholars estimate that only 20 of these remaining indigenous languages are being widely transmitted to today's Native children. Fully 70 languages could vanish within the next 10 years without immediate and significant funding for tribal language programs. The National Alliance to Save Native Languages, an intertribal leadership coalition says, 'Native languages are national treasures that have served this nation in time of war, with the legendary service of Native code talkers, and they remain vital part of Native American culture and identity today. Notably, Native students who are fluent in both English and their Native language perform substantially better academically, including on national assessment tests, than Native students who have not gone through such a program.' United Native Americans Inc. Fighting for Natives Since 1968. 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URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Jul 3 21:50:38 2008 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 16:50:38 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Bob wrote: > Do we intend to limit ourselves to surface grammar > (that's certainly what the historical apporoach would > require) or should we admit solutions that appeal to > invisible/hypothetical superstructure? Johannes wrote: > On the last point mentioned in Bob's mail, I can > comment on pretty shortly. I have no interest in > invisible underlying structures or superstructures or > aim to proof certain rather abstract models of grammar > with data from SL. I think, many of us share this > view [...] Catherine wrote: > I personally DO have a very deep (sorry) interest in > what Bob and Johannes call "invisible" structures. > And I'd argue that it's pretty much impossible to talk > about grammar without invoking some degree of abstraction: > "Noun Phrase", for instance, is an abstract, "invisible" > concept - even phonemes are abstractions --- Bryan wrote: > [...] I would caution us against going too far with rooting > out "invisible" things. Bob's original question was whether > we should even admit solutions that appeal to "invisible" > things, and I think the answer to that should be a > resounding Yes, as long as the primary focus is > morphosyntactic description and not theorising. Sometimes > the "invisible" answer is much better than any other answer, > and quite frankly, morphosyntactic descriptions often don't > provide any answers at all, so at least a tentative first > stab at one should be welcome, no matter how visible its > structure is. Gee, it's been so long since we had a good argument on the list! :-) I wonder if we aren't dancing around a difference in our fundamental conceptions of what language is about here. One pole might be a top-down approach that sees all human language as variants generated by a common universal grammar. In this view, the aim of a linguist is to work back from specific languages to discover the invisible universals that are at the heart of all grammar and ultimately control it. The opposite pole would be a bottom-up approach that sees human language as a practical communication system for a biological organism. In this conception, language would be variable, heuristic, and evolving; there would be no invisible grammatical universals to find. "Phonemes" might be used as an example of the difference. In the top-down conception, each language constructs its words as a sequence of discrete phonologically distinctive building blocks that are symbolically recognized as such in the brain of each native speaker. In this view, phonemes are universally real. In the bottom-up conception, perhaps, we track on fluctuating sound patterns composed of several concurrent lines of analog features, which tend toward standard momentary forms due to speaker articulatory habits and the need to distinguish one word from another when confusion might be possible. In this view, phonemes are merely useful abstractions conceived by linguists who are trying to fit the language into an alphabetical writing system. "Invisible" things may provide valid solutions to visible problems, but invisible things that relate only to other invisible things circularly within the same philosophical system are not helpful. I have nothing against "deep structure" models provided that their proponents make clear what their conception of language is and how their models improve our understanding of the linguistic real world. If the models are demonstrably realistic with respect to Siouan data, then I think they deserve inclusion. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ardisrachel at gmail.com Fri Jul 4 04:12:00 2008 From: ardisrachel at gmail.com (Ardis Eschenberg) Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 23:12:00 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hmmm...I'm so not a fighter. Catherine and I are on relatively good social terms and relatively opposite terms of syntactic theorizing. Maybe we shouldn't even worry about this but let every chapter stand on its own (with some good editing). People will be interested in this for the language and not the theory, so it would behoove us all to be theory light. That said, sometimes you just can't help but love it when a plan comes together (Hannibal, the A-Team, 1987) and shows how great a theory is... I'd be interested in the section on determiners/articles. Respectfully, Ardis -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk Fri Jul 4 09:46:58 2008 From: shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk (shokooh Ingham) Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 09:46:58 +0000 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: <6e9927690807032112g4de2c1aai9c2b5862a6baf914@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Dear all, I hope my relative silence hasn't been taken to indicate lack of interest.? I am very happy to contribute.? I believe in an earlier email someone had put me down for something on T-words.? This is just to confirm that I would be happy to contribute to such a section either alone or with others. Yours Bruce --- On Fri, 4/7/08, Ardis Eschenberg wrote: From: Ardis Eschenberg Subject: Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Friday, 4 July, 2008, 5:12 AM Hmmm...I'm so not a fighter.? Catherine and I are on relatively good social terms and relatively opposite terms of syntactic theorizing.? Maybe we shouldn't even worry about this but let every chapter stand on its own (with some good editing).? People will be interested in this for the language and not the theory, so it would behoove us all to be theory light.? That said, sometimes you just can't help but love?it when a plan comes together (Hannibal, the A-Team, 1987) and shows how great a theory is... I'd be interested in the section on determiners/articles. Respectfully, Ardis ? __________________________________________________________ Not happy with your email address?. Get the one you really want - millions of new email addresses available now at Yahoo! http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/ymail/new.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Fri Jul 4 15:25:05 2008 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 10:25:05 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project Message-ID: Just spent the week in Kaw City, so I'm only now getting around to doing anything but a cursory reading of my mail. > Rory writes: I wonder if we aren't dancing around a difference in our fundamental conceptions of what language is about here. > Ardis writes: People will be interested in this for the language and not the theory, . . . I think what we're dancing around is our concept of what *this* projected volume is about. We all have deep interests in one or another aspect of linguistics as a science, be it underlying syntactic or semantic structure, reconstructive methodology, language teaching, phonological economy, language use and society, or what-have-you. That's well and good and nobody should apologize for it. My sole concern -- probably not expressed very well originally -- is in producing a treatment of specifically Siouan languages that will be easily intelligible to scholars 200 years from now. (This is what I've always tried to convey to students writing dissertations on particular languages or language families.) This places certain constraints on us all, and we need to concentrate on exposition using terms, concepts and abstractions that have stood, or will stand, the test of time. Since my crystal ball is a bit cloudy, and I've seen a lot of rapid turnover in synchronic theories, I tend to be a bit conservative in these matters. But if we all keep in mind the somewhat narrow goal of communicating to generations to come what Siouan languages are/were like, and recognize that not everything in current, cutting-edge linguistic theory is "built to last," we should do just fine without having to nanny each other. And for you younger folk (i.e., everybody except Hu Matthews), most schools give more credit toward promotion, etc. for theory articles published in refereed journals than for papers published in the sort of anthology we have in mind anyway. So where we address our truly theoretical concerns should be a pretty easy decision. _Linguistic Inquiry_ and _Language_ are probably at the top of the list. Bob From carudin1 at wsc.edu Fri Jul 4 18:00:54 2008 From: carudin1 at wsc.edu (Catherine Rudin) Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 13:00:54 -0500 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project Message-ID: Rory wrote: >Gee, it's been so long since we had a good argument on the list! :-) I really didn't mean to fight -- apparently I said something that sounded pugnacious, but it was entirely unintentional. I was actually AGREEING with Bob and others that this project should be basically descriptive and theory-neutral, even for those of us who do have strong theoretical leanings. Ah, communication!! Anyhow -- I'm still not sure what topic I signed up for. Was it coordination? Does anyone have the complete list compiled in Billings (John? Linda?) Peace, love, harmony, and best wishes to all - Catherine From voorhis at westman.wave.ca Fri Jul 4 22:55:18 2008 From: voorhis at westman.wave.ca (voorhis at westman.wave.ca) Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 17:55:18 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <7B0E9B4CED734EE4B84926977EFC17B3@JGHP> Message-ID: Jimm GoodTracks wrote: > *Subject:* Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn > How to Save Endangered Languages < snip > > ... to examine successful models of language preservation ... < snip > I guess I ought to attend the conference to learn the "successful models of language preservation," but aside from the obvious success that comes from having a million or more speakers in a politically and economically independent state, is there any other successful model? And how do you measure success, and how do you know when you've achieved it? Would the Celts have claimed success in preserving their language in 100 BC or the Goths in 300 AD? But the subject line speaks of "endangered languages." Success at preserving one of those must be measured by restoring the language to regular use in a community which has been mostly using some other language. Has that ever happened anywhere? Paul From rwd0002 at unt.edu Sat Jul 5 17:31:52 2008 From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu) Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2008 12:31:52 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <486EAA56.80109@westman.wave.ca> Message-ID: Hi Paul and all: I just came back from the first 9 days of the UCSB meet. The meeting was called InField, and it is basically to train people to be better fieldworkers for language documentation. It is an interesting mix of language activists (some of which were Native American) and beginning and accomplished fieldworkers. It is obviously clear that activists need not be fieldworkers, or vice versa, but everyone was extremely friendly and willing to learn from each other. Several Lakota/Dakota speakers were in attendance, including some Siouan List members, and one person who studies Mandan. This first week was very technology oriented. Teachers were very good. I went there in order to learn some of the ins and outs of SIL's Toolbox, and I learned everything I wanted to know. It makes sense of course that journalists would pick up on the newsworthy the "saving endangered languages" issue, but that is, as I understood it, not the primary purpose of InField. In the next week they will have three concurrent fieldwork classes with consultants, so the language activists who take these will see what fieldwork is all about. Finally, please note that I was just an informal visitor to InField, not a full participant, just sharing my informal impression with y'all, not representing official InField opinions in any way. Quoting voorhis at westman.wave.ca: > Jimm GoodTracks wrote: >> *Subject:* Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn >> How to Save Endangered Languages > > < snip > >> ... to examine successful models of language preservation ... > < snip > > > I guess I ought to attend the conference to learn the "successful models > of language preservation," but aside from the obvious success that comes > from having a million or more speakers in a politically and economically > independent state, is there any other successful model? And how do you > measure success, and how do you know when you've achieved it? Would the > Celts have claimed success in preserving their language in 100 BC or the > Goths in 300 AD? > > But the subject line speaks of "endangered languages." Success at > preserving one of those must be measured by restoring the language to > regular use in a community which has been mostly using some other > language. Has that ever happened anywhere? > To comment on Paul's question. Outside of Israeli Hebrew, the honest answer is no. However, there have been individual native speakers of English, who by brute force have taught themselves to be fluent in languages technically extinct, such as Cornish, Manx, or Karuk. They are not numerous enough to form genuine speech communities but they form some sort of community in the sense that speakers of Esperanto world-wide form some sort of community. Regardless of how pessimistic or optimistic we personally wanna be about such efforts, we all agree, I suppose, that as documentary/descriptive linguists (I use both terms together because I believe you cannot separate both, but that is another controversial issue), we should support individuals and communities involved in such efforts, unless requested otherwise. From David.Rood at Colorado.EDU Sun Jul 6 03:51:25 2008 From: David.Rood at Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2008 21:51:25 -0600 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <486EAA56.80109@westman.wave.ca> Message-ID: Paul, the classic "revival" success stories are Czech and Hebrew, and maybe Hawaiian, to the best of my knowledge -- so it does happen. But I think some of the larger Siouan languages are on the right track, e.g. Crow and Lakota. David David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Fri, 4 Jul 2008, voorhis at westman.wave.ca wrote: > Jimm GoodTracks wrote: >> *Subject:* Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn >> How to Save Endangered Languages > > < snip > >> ... to examine successful models of language preservation ... > < snip > > > I guess I ought to attend the conference to learn the "successful models > of language preservation," but aside from the obvious success that comes > from having a million or more speakers in a politically and economically > independent state, is there any other successful model? And how do you > measure success, and how do you know when you've achieved it? Would the > Celts have claimed success in preserving their language in 100 BC or the > Goths in 300 AD? > > But the subject line speaks of "endangered languages." Success at > preserving one of those must be measured by restoring the language to > regular use in a community which has been mostly using some other > language. Has that ever happened anywhere? > > Paul > From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Sun Jul 6 04:30:39 2008 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2008 21:30:39 -0700 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I believe we can also add Maori to that list of successes.? Hawaiian is doing quite well from what I understand - not a small accomplishment considering there were fewer than 200 speakers not that long ago. ? Dave --- On Sat, 7/5/08, ROOD DAVID S wrote: From: ROOD DAVID S Subject: Re: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Saturday, July 5, 2008, 8:51 PM Paul, the classic "revival" success stories are Czech and Hebrew, and maybe Hawaiian, to the best of my knowledge -- so it does happen. But I think some of the larger Siouan languages are on the right track, e.g. Crow and Lakota. David David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Fri, 4 Jul 2008, voorhis at westman.wave.ca wrote: > Jimm GoodTracks wrote: >> *Subject:* Fw: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn >> How to Save Endangered Languages > > < snip > >> ... to examine successful models of language preservation ... > < snip > > > I guess I ought to attend the conference to learn the "successful models > of language preservation," but aside from the obvious success that comes > from having a million or more speakers in a politically and economically > independent state, is there any other successful model? And how do you > measure success, and how do you know when you've achieved it? Would the > Celts have claimed success in preserving their language in 100 BC or the > Goths in 300 AD? > > But the subject line speaks of "endangered languages." Success at > preserving one of those must be measured by restoring the language to > regular use in a community which has been mostly using some other > language. Has that ever happened anywhere? > > Paul > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From voorhis at westman.wave.ca Sun Jul 6 14:21:55 2008 From: voorhis at westman.wave.ca (voorhis at westman.wave.ca) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 09:21:55 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists and Scholars Meet at UCSB to Learn How to Save Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <20080705123152.87olixk6s64gsc8c@eaglemail.unt.edu> Message-ID: I certainly agree that we should give all help possible to anyone struggling to preserve or revive an endangered language. But the efforts I have usually encountered involve second-language classes inserted into the school curriculum. And I believe in helping with these classes if that's what is wanted. But if asked about the prospects for the success of such projects, then I have to honestly admit that the chances of producing fluent speakers by this means are slim, and the chances that any fluent graduates would produce families with children that use the endangered language are slimmer still. The Hebrew revival differs from the situation faced by most endangered languages in two ways. First, most of the men and many of the women who immigrated to Israel had already studied Hebrew as a second language for religious purposes. Second, they weren't all speakers of any one other language; they arrived (and still arrive) using virtually every language from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, though maybe Yiddish was used more than any other language in early modern Israel. Paul rwd0002 at unt.edu wrote: > To comment on Paul's question. Outside of Israeli Hebrew, the honest > answer is no. However, there have been individual native speakers of > English, who by brute force have taught themselves to be fluent in > languages technically extinct, such as Cornish, Manx, or Karuk. They > are not numerous enough to form genuine speech communities but they > form some sort of community in the sense that speakers of Esperanto > world-wide form some sort of community. > > Regardless of how pessimistic or optimistic we personally wanna be > about such efforts, we all agree, I suppose, that as > documentary/descriptive linguists (I use both terms together because > I believe you cannot separate both, but that is another controversial > issue), we should support individuals and communities involved in > such efforts, unless requested otherwise. > From rankin at ku.edu Sun Jul 6 15:21:16 2008 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 10:21:16 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages Message-ID: I'd add a third way. Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some would say creolized. Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to call it a "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." His contention is that it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a lecture he gave at KU). It was relexified with German vocabulary to form Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". So eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in Israel -- just vocabulary. To the extent that this may be true, it pretty much erases the only really convincing case of revival. Wexler's website has the details if you're interested. It hadn't occurred to me that Czech fell into the category of formerly-endangered language, but I'll defer to David and Jan on that. The Polynesian cases are interesting and tend to confirm that any language can be successfully taught, but they don't confirm that the languages can be restored to *use*. This will depend on what happens to the graduates of the programs when they enter society. We won't know that for certain for a couple of generations yet. Suffice it to say that a language has to have a social function or it will fall out of use -- again. Bob ________________________________ > The Hebrew revival differs from the situation faced by most endangered languages in two ways. From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Sun Jul 6 15:44:40 2008 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 08:44:40 -0700 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --The Polynesian cases are interesting and tend to confirm that any language can be successfully taught, but they don't confirm that the languages can be restored to *use*.--? ? I agree with Bob here - we won't know for a while how "successful" these? languages will be in being restored to daily use.? But it is encouraging that even preschool-age?children are going to "language nests" where nothing but Hawaiian or Maori are spoken.? I myself attended Hawaiian language classes taught at a private home in Sacramento when I lived there.? The teacher, who unfortunately only came?about 3 times out of 12 from the Bay Area to teach, had parents who were from Ni'ihau, the only?island (privately owned)?where children are still taught in Hawaiian.??It is encouraging that classes are being taught not only in Hawai'i but also in CA and hopefully other?states too where there are large Hawaiian communities.? --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: From: Rankin, Robert L Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM I'd add a third way. Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some would say creolized. Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to call it a "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." His contention is that it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a lecture he gave at KU). It was relexified with German vocabulary to form Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". So eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in Israel -- just vocabulary. To the extent that this may be true, it pretty much erases the only really convincing case of revival. Wexler's website has the details if you're interested. It hadn't occurred to me that Czech fell into the category of formerly-endangered language, but I'll defer to David and Jan on that. The Polynesian cases are interesting and tend to confirm that any language can be successfully taught, but they don't confirm that the languages can be restored to *use*. This will depend on what happens to the graduates of the programs when they enter society. We won't know that for certain for a couple of generations yet. Suffice it to say that a language has to have a social function or it will fall out of use -- again. Bob ________________________________ > The Hebrew revival differs from the situation faced by most endangered languages in two ways. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From linguista at gmail.com Sun Jul 6 18:26:01 2008 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan James Gordon) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 13:26:01 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I think the main reason linguists wax so negative about language revitalisation programmes is that the majority of the programmes we are asked to help out with - and willingly lend our assistance to - are programmes that rub against our very limited idea of what revitalisation is. Obviously, as Bob has pointed out, if we take this limited idea to its logical conclusion we can depress ourselves and others still further by even stripping Hebrew of its title as revived language. With regard to Hebrew, I would say that it is impressive that it was revived regardless of its status as relexified Eastern Semitic. Calquing and sound correspondences, as described at length principally by Ghil'ad Zuckermann, are extensive in the language he refuses to call Hebrew (his preferred descriptor being Israeli - perhaps a bit more politically sensitive than Wexler's Ukrainian, but still rather incendiary). But this is naturally the outcome of language shift in a community whose dominant speakers share linguistic features foreign to the target language. Unfortunately, linguists have yet to come up with a purposeful, thorough theory of the process of language change in communities with dominant second-language-acquiring speakers. This was originally my goal for my dissertation, before I realised that it would involve my magically procuring lots of Hawai'ian and Ma'ori friends out of mid-air, because there's really nowhere else to do that study right now. Nonetheless, we can see the signs in Siouan languages. I've noticed a lot of calques from English idioms in contemporary Omaha. "Frightfully many" "h?gaazhi n?Npewath?" is a frequent case that does not occur in Dorsey which I have heard from 3 speakers as well as seen in a text or two. Even in Dorsey there are some signs of things that may be calques. Really, there's nothing linguistically unsound or unnatural about this process. What linguists do when we are offended or bothered by this is assume a position of alliance with conservative speakers who oppose such processes. Really we ought to adopt a more value-neutral stance if you ask me. Hebrew had to contend largely with the notion that it as a sacred language and reinserting it into profane life and using it for profane and contemporary domains was sacrilegious. Siouan languages are dealing with this issue, too, and we are not helping by siding with a particular side of this debate, even inadvertently. Hebrew did not necessarily have to come out as Ukrainian, by the way. The reason it did was that the dominant speakers shared many Eastern Semitic linguistic features. If the dominant speakers had been Mizrachim (also not a "native" Semitic word but a calque of European "oriental" replete with the associated orientalism), Hebrew today would look a lot more Semitic. It would still be calqued, but the evidence would be a lot more subtle. Nobody doubts that. Mizrachim who "make aliyah" are in the odd position of having to acquire a "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past" because of their low social status (vigorously covered up and denied by the Israeli government and media as well as the mainstream academy, as described most colourfully by renegade Mizrachit anthropologist Smadar Levie). Yet acquire this odd language they do, albeit imperfectly, but in the same way that the white minority could acquire Semitic imperfectly under different power relations. In short, if we want to problematise something about calquing and superstrate influence, we need to be very cautious about how we go about doing this, lest we wind up contributing to factionalism and colonial discourses even more than we already do. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with superstrate influence. It depends on the goals and needs of the community members and subcommunities, just as does the definition of aspired-to revitalisation itself. The main things linguists would like to support in revitalisation programmes: 1) teaching infants 2) teaching parents 3) extending domains of use by producing easy-to-use lexemes in all relevant domains 4) preserving original semantics 5) preserving original morphosyntax 6) preserving original phonology Obviously, (3) and (4) are in direct conflict with one another, and tend to be a site of huge conflict in revitalising communities. Siding with (3) runs us the risk of alienating elders and traditional types, while siding with (4) is blatantly essentialist and a hugely colonial gesture, not to mention impractical given ongoing cultural shift. Language nests and master-apprentice programmes stand the greatest chance of success at everything except (3), which is more supported by overt language planning as well as typical slang generation and coinages among fluent or semi-fluent adolescents who tend to disregard (4-6) more or less. We can't have it all. We need to present (1-6) as possible outcomes favoured by our particular academic community and allow community members to decide which they can set as goals. We need to realise that some community members may have additional goals not among ours and recognise that some of these goals may have merit in a way we have not considered from our limited perspectives. We also need to drop the idea of a monolithic community will and recognise that different subcommunities idealise different of these goals, and we need to find ways to work with all of these subcommunities rather than just the one with the most power or prestige - especially considering that this power and prestige is often a genocidal tool of the United States, and not an indigenous construct. And yes, I know that these things are easier said than done. They at least need saying. ShaN ie tHe waw?paghui sh?na! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rwd0002 at unt.edu Sun Jul 6 19:43:58 2008 From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 14:43:58 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <402358.52276.qm@web53807.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > > From: Rankin, Robert L > Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM > > I'd add a third way. Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some > would say creolized. Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to > call it a > "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." His contention is that > it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a > lecture he gave at KU). It was relexified with German vocabulary to form > Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". So > eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in > Israel -- just vocabulary. To the extent that this may be true, it > pretty much > erases the only really convincing case of revival. Wexler's website has the > details if you're interested. (...) > Bob The Hebrew revival is indeed very different, we all agree on that. Hebrew never died out as a religious language nor as a written language. However, I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that Modern Hebrew is a relexified Slavic language. At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification of a Slavic language. The Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were extremely conscious of the Semitic morphological features of Hebrew, (and heard Arabic, a related Semitic language, spoken around them), so they did all they could to make sure Hebrew retained, maybe not a fundamental, but at least an strong indexical, Semitic character. Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified with Germanic than Modern Hebrew is, retains some uncannily Semitic morphological features. To reconnect to Siouan, it is an interesting ideological issue, relevant to all people interested in reviving an extinct language. Suppose we wanted to revive an extinct Siouan language, in addition to Siouan lexicon, what sorts of morphological features would we wanna insist on to convince ourselves this is a genuine Siouan language? Split intransivity? instrumental prefixes?, locative prefixes? Willem From rankin at ku.edu Sun Jul 6 20:45:53 2008 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:45:53 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages Message-ID: > Willem writes: At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification of a Slavic language. The morphology is non-concatenative when viewed by a professional linguist who sees historical and derivational relationships in terms of processes. This isn't necessarily true of the learner though. S/he can just plug newly-memorized lexical items into the Slavic syntax and happily chatter away. I argued Willem's point with Wexler when he lectured here, since he made similar claims for Romanian (which retains its Romance morphology pretty much intact). So I agree his definition of Israeli Hebrew as a Creole may be extreme, but that doesn't alter the fact that what is taught/spoken there is very different from Hebrew when it was spoken as a natural language. I question whether we can call it "revival". But my point is that teaching English relexified with Siouan vocabulary would be a darned sight easier for both teacher and student than trying to teach genuine Siouan syntax and irregular verb morphology. But we cannot do that in most cases; elders would steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the result as a successful revival, and they'd be right to do so. So I feel that I have to accept the fact that teaching a language by substituting English syntax and idioms and plugging in native words just isn't the same as reviving the language itself. It would be hypocritical of me to define language one way in syntax, morphology and phonology class and then turn around and define it solely in terms of vocabulary for retention or revival purposes. > Bryan writes: I would say that it is impressive that it was revived regardless of its status as relexified Eastern Semitic. You say Eastern Semitic twice, but I think you mean E. Slavic. But one thing we're ignoring here is that people have many ideas of what constitutes success when they take language classes. Complete and utter fluency may be one of them, but we've all taken languages in school or college and know that goal is unrealistic most of the time. Our job is to serve those who have lesser goals as well as the more ambitious. Some wish only a small amount of contact with their language; others wish to learn specific tasks like how to pray or how to read. I agree with Paul that the most ambitious of the goals are probably quite unrealistic, considering earlier attempts, but lots of other uses of elements of language can be successfully taught and learned. Bob From linguista at gmail.com Sun Jul 6 20:55:10 2008 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan James Gordon) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 13:55:10 -0700 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <20080706144358.c6ny4tb2zwys8488@eaglemail.unt.edu> Message-ID: In defence of the thesis that contemporary Hebrew is more Slavic than Semitic, I would submit the following: * The extensive calquing and evidence on new word formation patterns reflect European, not Semitic, models. Taxonit, as described by Rosen, comes from an inherited root meaning "camp for the night", and was originally absorbed into Israeli Hebrew to translate French "se stationer". Since then it has become a basic unit for translating any European cognate of "station" including "radio station", "train station", etc. Compare the words for these same concepts in the Arabic languages and Neo-Aramaic, and you will see that there is nothing Semitic about Hebrew word formation. * The sound structure of the standard variety has been thoroughly Europeanised (although I have noted some initial examples of a Semitic-like but not necessarily specifically Semitic lowering of vowels before khaf where traditionally this is only supposed to happen before chet). The loss of gemination has profoundly affected the morphosyntax in various areas. * Even morphosyntax has been Europeanised where necessary to reproduce European semantic paradigms. The three-tense system is an obvious example of this - the present tense, derived from historical gerunds, no longer looks morphosyntactically like a gerund construction, but is a fully functional tense alongside past and future (which were historically something more akin to concrete/potential). The promulgation of copulas in the spoken standard variety where they are not allowed in the written standard variety (as Willem notes, the written standard is more consciously Semitic) is another example of Europeanised morphosyntax. Getting away from linguistics and back to real life for a second, Bob is absolutely right that there are many ideas of what constitutes success in revival, and these ideas almost always differ from those of linguists (except in the rare instances when a programme is being led by a Western-trained indigenous linguist - problematic in its own right). - Bryan 2008/7/6 : > --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: >> >> From: Rankin, Robert L >> Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages >> To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU >> Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM >> >> I'd add a third way. Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some >> would say creolized. Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to call >> it a >> "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." His contention is that >> it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a >> lecture he gave at KU). It was relexified with German vocabulary to form >> Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". So >> eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in >> Israel -- just vocabulary. To the extent that this may be true, it pretty >> much >> erases the only really convincing case of revival. Wexler's website has >> the >> details if you're interested. >> > (...) > >> Bob >> > > The Hebrew revival is indeed very different, we all agree on that. Hebrew > never died out as a religious language nor as a written language. However, > I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that Modern Hebrew is a > relexified Slavic language. At least one morphological feature of Modern > Hebrew, its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and > is still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification of a > Slavic language. > > The Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were extremely conscious of the > Semitic morphological features of Hebrew, (and heard Arabic, a related > Semitic language, spoken around them), so they did all they could to make > sure Hebrew retained, maybe not a fundamental, but at least an strong > indexical, Semitic character. Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic > language relexified with Germanic than Modern Hebrew is, retains some > uncannily Semitic morphological features. > > To reconnect to Siouan, it is an interesting ideological issue, relevant to > all people interested in reviving an extinct language. Suppose we wanted to > revive an extinct Siouan language, in addition to Siouan lexicon, what sorts > of morphological features would we wanna insist on to convince ourselves > this is a genuine Siouan language? Split intransivity? instrumental > prefixes?, locative prefixes? > > Willem > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Sun Jul 6 21:22:54 2008 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 14:22:54 -0700 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In response to Paul's earlier question about references, a good book on the subject of linguistic revitalization is Hinton and Hale's "The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice."? We used this book in one of my classes.? This book contains articles written by indigenous peoples, including Hawaiian and Maori, and what they've had to grapple with, in their own words, in the course of language revitalization.? ? The Hawaiians are concerned with English influence on the "modern" Hawaiian language, and I had this discussion while taking the Hawaiian class with modern Hawaiians who were questioning this very issue: Is what we're learning "real" Hawaiian or something else?? Their concensus seemed to be that of course the "modern" language would be different than the "old" language, but they reasoned that languages change anyway and younger people don't necessarily speak the same way their elders did in any language.? There are examples of Hawaiian "smoothing out around the edges" as "modern" speakers tend not to use more complicated or lesser understood grammatical features.? I'm sure this issue will be as relevant to revitalized Siouan languages as any other.? I guess the important thing is how?conservative these new language learners feel their revitalized language should be. --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Bryan James Gordon wrote: From: Bryan James Gordon Subject: Re: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 1:55 PM In defence of the thesis that contemporary Hebrew is more Slavic than Semitic, I would submit the following: * The extensive calquing and evidence on new word formation patterns reflect European, not Semitic, models. Taxonit, as described by Rosen, comes from an inherited root meaning "camp for the night", and was originally absorbed into Israeli Hebrew to translate French "se stationer". Since then it has become a basic unit for translating any European cognate of "station" including "radio station", "train station", etc. Compare the words for these same concepts in the Arabic languages and Neo-Aramaic, and you will see that there is nothing Semitic about Hebrew word formation. * The sound structure of the standard variety has been thoroughly Europeanised (although I have noted some initial examples of a Semitic-like but not necessarily specifically Semitic lowering of vowels before khaf where traditionally this is only supposed to happen before chet). The loss of gemination has profoundly affected the morphosyntax in various areas. * Even morphosyntax has been Europeanised where necessary to reproduce European semantic paradigms. The three-tense system is an obvious example of this - the present tense, derived from historical gerunds, no longer looks morphosyntactically like a gerund construction, but is a fully functional tense alongside past and future (which were historically something more akin to concrete/potential). The promulgation of copulas in the spoken standard variety where they are not allowed in the written standard variety (as Willem notes, the written standard is more consciously Semitic) is another example of Europeanised morphosyntax. Getting away from linguistics and back to real life for a second, Bob is absolutely right that there are many ideas of what constitutes success in revival, and these ideas almost always differ from those of linguists (except in the rare instances when a programme is being led by a Western-trained indigenous linguist - problematic in its own right). - Bryan 2008/7/6 : --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: From: Rankin, Robert L Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM I'd add a third way. ?Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some would say creolized. ?Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to call it a "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." ?His contention is that it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a lecture he gave at KU). ?It was relexified with German vocabulary to form Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". ?So eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in Israel -- just vocabulary. ?To the extent that this may be true, it pretty much erases the only really convincing case of revival. ?Wexler's website has the details if you're interested. (...) Bob The Hebrew revival is indeed very different, we all agree on that. Hebrew never died out as a religious language nor as a written language. ?However, I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that Modern Hebrew is a relexified Slavic language. ?At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is still productive. ?That cannot be explained through relexification of a Slavic language. The Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were extremely conscious of the Semitic morphological features of Hebrew, (and heard Arabic, a related Semitic language, spoken around them), so they did all they could to make sure Hebrew retained, maybe not a fundamental, but at least an strong indexical, Semitic character. ?Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified with Germanic than Modern Hebrew is, retains some uncannily Semitic morphological features. To reconnect to Siouan, it is an interesting ideological issue, relevant to all people interested in reviving an extinct language. ?Suppose we wanted to revive an extinct Siouan language, in addition to Siouan lexicon, what sorts of morphological features would we wanna insist on to convince ourselves this is a genuine Siouan language? ?Split intransivity? instrumental prefixes?, locative prefixes? Willem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de Mon Jul 7 08:47:35 2008 From: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regensburg.de (Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 10:47:35 +0200 Subject: Comparative Siouan Grammar project In-Reply-To: <486E1F060200008E00010300@hermes.wsc.edu> Message-ID: Dear Cathrine, dear Siouanists, I would like to add a few remarks that may clarify my own position with regard to the invisible things we are discussing right now. It is a popular misconception to think that typologists don't like abstract structures or ignore them largely. This is not the case. All depends on the evidence for them. If there is distributional evidence for a certain structure of a noun phrase then this is a fact of a specific language and no longer invisible. What typologists do not believe is that these abstract syntactic structures can be presupposed as the universal framework of the grammar of a specific language. On the contrary, it is one of the goals (in my view) of such a project to find out for instance the structure of the noun phrase in the individual SLs and perhaps the variationof these structures among them. The same holds for the relative clause and all the other parts of syntax. I would hence strongly agree with Cathrine to aim at a basically descriptive and theory-neutral (as much as this is possible) treatment of SL in this project. This is of course a bottom-up approach, but not blind for abstract structures and categories. All the best, Johannes Datum: Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:00:54 -0500 Antwort an: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU Von: "Catherine Rudin" An: Betreff: Re: Comparative Siouan Grammar project > Rory wrote: > >Gee, it's been so long since we had a good argument on the list! > :-) > > I really didn't mean to fight -- apparently I said something that > sounded pugnacious, > but it was entirely unintentional. I was actually AGREEING with Bob > and others that > this project should be basically descriptive and theory-neutral, even > for those of us > who do have strong theoretical leanings. Ah, communication!! > > Anyhow -- > I'm still not sure what topic I signed up for. Was it coordination? > Does anyone have > the complete list compiled in Billings (John? Linda?) > > Peace, love, harmony, and best wishes to all - Catherine > -- Prof. Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht Lehrstuhl f?r Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft Universit?t Regensburg Philosophische Fakult?t IV Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft Universit?tsstr. 31 93053 Regensburg Deutschland Tel: ++49(0)941 943-3388 ++49(0)941 943-3387 (Sekretariat) Fax: ++49(0)941 943-2429 E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at sprachlit.uni-regenburg.de Webseite: http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/index.htm From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de Mon Jul 7 09:54:24 2008 From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W._T=FCting=22?=) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 11:54:24 +0200 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <20080706144358.c6ny4tb2zwys8488@eaglemail.unt.edu> Message-ID: "Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified with Germanic..." Whereas I agree with that statement ref. to Hebrew, below, I'd rather claim that Yiddish is a mediaeval German relexified with Biblical Hebrew and - of course - Slavic words of different derivations! (Just one side note: both Yiddish and Transylvanian Saxon, a mediaeval German dialect, i.e. Mosel-Frankish, use the same everyday-word "keyn/ kein" for German "nach/gegen" - to/toward.) Of course, characterizations of this kind seem to be quite futile, and depending on where one puts the point of reference in time (modern Hebrew is a relexified English... ;-) ). This here, BTW, is a nice read about stuff like this: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003065.php Alfred Am 06.07.2008 um 21:43 schrieb rwd0002 at unt.edu: >> --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: >> >> From: Rankin, Robert L >> Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages >> To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU >> Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM >> >> I'd add a third way. Modern Hebrew has been seriously >> reconfigured, some >> would say creolized. Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as >> to call it a >> "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." His contention is >> that >> it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a >> lecture he gave at KU). It was relexified with German vocabulary >> to form >> Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". So >> eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language >> in >> Israel -- just vocabulary. To the extent that this may be true, it >> pretty much >> erases the only really convincing case of revival. Wexler's >> website has the >> details if you're interested. > (...) >> Bob > > The Hebrew revival is indeed very different, we all agree on that. > Hebrew never died out as a religious language nor as a written > language. However, I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say > that Modern Hebrew is a relexified Slavic language. At least one > morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its typically Semitic > nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is still productive. > That cannot be explained through relexification of a Slavic language. > > The Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were extremely conscious of > the Semitic morphological features of Hebrew, (and heard Arabic, a > related Semitic language, spoken around them), so they did all they > could to make sure Hebrew retained, maybe not a fundamental, but at > least an strong indexical, Semitic character. Even Yiddish, > certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified with Germanic > than Modern Hebrew is, retains some uncannily Semitic morphological > features. > > To reconnect to Siouan, it is an interesting ideological issue, > relevant to all people interested in reviving an extinct language. > Suppose we wanted to revive an extinct Siouan language, in addition > to Siouan lexicon, what sorts of morphological features would we > wanna insist on to convince ourselves this is a genuine Siouan > language? Split intransivity? instrumental prefixes?, locative > prefixes? > > Willem > > _______________ Alfred W. T?ting ti at fa-kuan.muc.de From David.Rood at Colorado.EDU Mon Jul 7 14:15:44 2008 From: David.Rood at Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 08:15:44 -0600 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <360451.24473.qm@web53802.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I am pleased to see all this discussion of what constitutes language revival; it is indeed a terribly complex question (like almost any linguistic question), and there will be many answers depending on many different factors. I have no illusions about a revitalized language being different from the one(s) from which it is derived. Relexification and grammatical "simplification" (which usually means becoming more like the dominant language) are unavoidable. Look at what happened to English after 1066. The historical gender system is all gone, along with the complex adjective declensions. The case system would probably have gone anyway, as well as the person agreement on the verbs, but certainly the lexicon of modern English has far more Romance elements than that of any other Germanic language. But it's still a Germanic, not a Romance, language. Whether modern Hebrew is Semitic or Slavic is outside my ability to figure out. What I see happening with modern Lakota is not terribly different from the history of English under French influence, however. My students greet me every morning with "HihaNni washte", literally 'it's a good morning' or 'morning is good'. The expression makes no sense grammatically or socially from the perspective of two generations ago, but it's proper "Lakota" as spoken today. The inflected possessive forms of nouns are gone; in fact, the whole inalienable/alienable system has simply evaporated. But the most frequent irregular verbs are still there, the word order is still very Siouan, the use of articles and postpositions and derivational morphology is still there, etc. If we produced a new generation of children who used this as their daily language, I would say we had "revived" the language. David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu On Sun, 6 Jul 2008, David Kaufman wrote: > In response to Paul's earlier question about references, a good book on the subject of linguistic revitalization is Hinton and Hale's "The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice."? We used this book in one of my classes.? This book contains articles written by indigenous peoples, including Hawaiian and Maori, and what they've had to grapple with, in their own words, in the course of language revitalization.? > ? > The Hawaiians are concerned with English influence on the "modern" Hawaiian language, and I had this discussion while taking the Hawaiian class with modern Hawaiians who were questioning this very issue: Is what we're learning "real" Hawaiian or something else?? Their concensus seemed to be that of course the "modern" language would be different than the "old" language, but they reasoned that languages change anyway and younger people don't necessarily speak the same way their elders did in any language.? There are examples of Hawaiian "smoothing out around the edges" as "modern" speakers tend not to use more complicated or lesser understood grammatical features.? I'm sure this issue will be as relevant to revitalized Siouan languages as any other.? I guess the important thing is how?conservative these new language learners feel their revitalized language should be. > > --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Bryan James Gordon wrote: > > From: Bryan James Gordon > Subject: Re: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 1:55 PM > > > In defence of the thesis that contemporary Hebrew is more Slavic than Semitic, I would submit the following: > > * The extensive calquing and evidence on new word formation patterns reflect European, not Semitic, models. Taxonit, as described by Rosen, comes from an inherited root meaning "camp for the night", and was originally absorbed into Israeli Hebrew to translate French "se stationer". Since then it has become a basic unit for translating any European cognate of "station" including "radio station", "train station", etc. Compare the words for these same concepts in the Arabic languages and Neo-Aramaic, and you will see that there is nothing Semitic about Hebrew word formation. > * The sound structure of the standard variety has been thoroughly Europeanised (although I have noted some initial examples of a Semitic-like but not necessarily specifically Semitic lowering of vowels before khaf where traditionally this is only supposed to happen before chet). The loss of gemination has profoundly affected the morphosyntax in various areas. > * Even morphosyntax has been Europeanised where necessary to reproduce European semantic paradigms. The three-tense system is an obvious example of this - the present tense, derived from historical gerunds, no longer looks morphosyntactically like a gerund construction, but is a fully functional tense alongside past and future (which were historically something more akin to concrete/potential). The promulgation of copulas in the spoken standard variety where they are not allowed in the written standard variety (as Willem notes, the written standard is more consciously Semitic) is another example of Europeanised morphosyntax. > > Getting away from linguistics and back to real life for a second, Bob is absolutely right that there are many ideas of what constitutes success in revival, and these ideas almost always differ from those of linguists (except in the rare instances when a programme is being led by a Western-trained indigenous linguist - problematic in its own right). > > - Bryan > > > 2008/7/6 : > > > > --- On Sun, 7/6/08, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > > From: Rankin, Robert L > Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages > To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU > Date: Sunday, July 6, 2008, 8:21 AM > > I'd add a third way. ?Modern Hebrew has been seriously reconfigured, some > would say creolized. ?Paul Wexler at Tel Aviv Univ. goes so far as to call it a > "Slavic language in search of a Semitic past." ?His contention is that > it is relexified E. Slavic (he simply called it "Ukrainian" in a > lecture he gave at KU). ?It was relexified with German vocabulary to form > Yiddish and with Hebrew vocabulary to form modern "Hebrew". ?So > eastern European immigrants don't actually learn a Semitic language in > Israel -- just vocabulary. ?To the extent that this may be true, it pretty much > erases the only really convincing case of revival. ?Wexler's website has the > details if you're interested. > (...) > > Bob > > The Hebrew revival is indeed very different, we all agree on that. Hebrew never died out as a religious language nor as a written language. ?However, I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that Modern Hebrew is a relexified Slavic language. ?At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is still productive. ?That cannot be explained through relexification of a Slavic language. > > The Jewish activists who revived Hebrew were extremely conscious of the Semitic morphological features of Hebrew, (and heard Arabic, a related Semitic language, spoken around them), so they did all they could to make sure Hebrew retained, maybe not a fundamental, but at least an strong indexical, Semitic character. ?Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified with Germanic than Modern Hebrew is, retains some uncannily Semitic morphological features. > > To reconnect to Siouan, it is an interesting ideological issue, relevant to all people interested in reviving an extinct language. ?Suppose we wanted to revive an extinct Siouan language, in addition to Siouan lexicon, what sorts of morphological features would we wanna insist on to convince ourselves this is a genuine Siouan language? ?Split intransivity? instrumental prefixes?, locative prefixes? > > Willem > > > > From rwd0002 at unt.edu Mon Jul 7 16:37:19 2008 From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 11:37:19 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Quoting "Alfred W. T?ting" : > "Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified > with Germanic..." > > Whereas I agree with that statement ref. to Hebrew, below, I'd rather > claim that Yiddish is a mediaeval German relexified with Biblical > Hebrew and - of course - Slavic words of different derivations! (Just > one side note: both Yiddish and Transylvanian Saxon, a mediaeval > German dialect, i.e. Mosel-Frankish, use the same everyday-word > "keyn/ kein" for German "nach/gegen" - to/toward.) > Of course, characterizations of this kind seem to be quite futile, > and depending on where one puts the point of reference in time > (modern Hebrew is a relexified English... ;-) ). > Alfred, thanks for the correction. Historically it is certainly true that Yiddish started as German, and in Germany, and not as Slavic; however it is a German that has lived for so long on Slavic territory, that it now LOOKS more like a Slavic with Germanic and some Hebrew plugged in! Willem From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de Mon Jul 7 18:24:37 2008 From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W._T=FCting=22?=) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 20:24:37 +0200 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <20080707113719.d52vmmma9rggwsc4@eaglemail.unt.edu> Message-ID: Willem, yes, from this perspective, e.g. modern American LOOKS as if being a relexified Chinese dialect ;-) BTW, did you ever stumble upon this nice page? http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html It's been created by John Woldemar Cowen, one of the fathers of the conlang Lojban. Enjoy! Alfred Am 07.07.2008 um 18:37 schrieb rwd0002 at unt.edu: > Quoting "Alfred W. T?ting" : > >> "Even Yiddish, certainly more clearly a Slavic language relexified >> with Germanic..." >> >> Whereas I agree with that statement ref. to Hebrew, below, I'd rather >> claim that Yiddish is a mediaeval German relexified with Biblical >> Hebrew and - of course - Slavic words of different derivations! (Just >> one side note: both Yiddish and Transylvanian Saxon, a mediaeval >> German dialect, i.e. Mosel-Frankish, use the same everyday-word >> "keyn/ kein" for German "nach/gegen" - to/toward.) >> Of course, characterizations of this kind seem to be quite futile, >> and depending on where one puts the point of reference in time >> (modern Hebrew is a relexified English... ;-) ). >> > Alfred, thanks for the correction. Historically it is certainly true > that Yiddish started as German, and in Germany, and not as Slavic; > however it is a German that has lived for so long on Slavic territory, > that it now LOOKS more like a Slavic with Germanic and some Hebrew > plugged in! > > Willem _______________ Alfred W. T?ting ti at fa-kuan.muc.de From rwd0002 at unt.edu Tue Jul 8 22:18:52 2008 From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu) Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 17:18:52 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Quoting "Rankin, Robert L" : >> Willem writes: At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, >> its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and >> is still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification >> of a Slavic language. > > The morphology is non-concatenative when viewed by a professional > linguist who sees historical and derivational relationships in terms > of processes. This isn't necessarily true of the learner though. > S/he can just plug newly-memorized lexical items into the Slavic > syntax and happily chatter away. I argued Willem's point with Wexler > when he lectured here, since he made similar claims for Romanian > (which retains its Romance morphology pretty much intact). So I > agree his definition of Israeli Hebrew as a Creole may be extreme, > but that doesn't alter the fact that what is taught/spoken there is > very different from Hebrew when it was spoken as a natural language. > I question whether we can call it "revival". > To get back a bit about what Modern Hebrew is. The reason I would question that it is a revival would rather be that it has never died in all its spheres of usage. It died as a first language acquired after birth, but it never died as a language of prayer and as a written language. The Jewish tradition of Hebrew education was such that there were always people who could write very fluent Hebrew. All this made the transition to revived spoken language much easier, and less artificial. There is no situation comparable with Indigenous Languages because (with the exception of Maya) there was no Indigenous tradition of writing. It is also interesting to think of Latin. We think of Latin as a dead language, deader than Hebrew, but Latin has had an extremely slow death. Like Hebrew, Latin ceased as a spoken language long ago, but as a written and even spoken language of science, religion and scholarship it continued well into the 19th century. The literature written by second language speakers or writers of Latin is massive compared to what was written by the Romans themselves. And Latin is still not dead: there are still individuals, mostly living within the confines of the Vatican, who are able to write and speak quite fluently in Latin. So, if we needed to revive Latin as an everyday language (I am sure this will never happen), it would be an easy thing to do. But would it be the same language as what Cesar and Cicero spoke? In pronunciation, Cesar and Cicero would probably not recognize what they hear as Latin, but in writing they would probably understand it fairly well, and certain usages of modern Latinists, comparable to the Lakota "good morning" example given by Dave Rood, would be very puzzling to them. To summarize, the case of Modern Hebrew and (potentially revivable) Latin, are probably not helpful models for activists reviving languages. But on the other hand, the standards of Modern Hebrew and Modern Latin are quite high. When little is documented about the language to be revived, the concern of linguists (not necessarily shared by Indigenous Activists) is that the language looks like some sort of Esperanto relexified with native words. It is interesting that one of the specialists in the extinct Mutsun language (a Costanoan language from California, well documented by Spanish missionaries and by J. P. Harrington) is Marc Okrand, also the creator of the artificial language Klingon. But despite efforts of Mutsun activists, there are now more speakers of Klingon than there are of Mutsun. (Of course, Okrand could be the judge of what is good Klingon, but he wisely does not comment on such speakers, and he does not consider himself a speaker either.) I asked a Mutsun activist about that, and the answer was: "Oh, well, what is happening to Klingon is an inspiration to us." We don't all feel this way about it. So our goals for a revived language should approach these of Hebrew and Latin as far as authenticity is concerned, and we should be cautious about the temptation to "Klingonize" or "Esperantoize", i.e. simplify the morphology because the existing documentation of the extinct language does not tell us what it should be. So, what is a "sufficiently authentic" revived language, will, to be sure, be a matter of debate for quite some time. Willem From jgoodtracks at gmail.com Wed Jul 9 00:54:49 2008 From: jgoodtracks at gmail.com (Jimm GoodTracks) Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 19:54:49 -0500 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <20080708171852.n017kugcawessgsw@eaglemail.unt.edu> Message-ID: While the situation of revived Hawaiian has been touched upon, does anyone know where the revitalized Welch language figures into this discussion. I am aware that it is not the old Welch of the legendary barbs. Some fluent speakers in the conclaves of traditional Wales have remarked on the current robust Cymraeg as having strayed from their on-going fluent speaker usage. Perhaps someone out there who really knows could comment. jgt ----- Original Message ----- From: To: ; "Rankin, Robert L" Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 5:18 PM Subject: RE: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages > Quoting "Rankin, Robert L" : > >>> Willem writes: At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew, its >>> typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and is >>> still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification of a >>> Slavic language. >> >> The morphology is non-concatenative when viewed by a professional >> linguist who sees historical and derivational relationships in terms of >> processes. This isn't necessarily true of the learner though. S/he can >> just plug newly-memorized lexical items into the Slavic syntax and >> happily chatter away. I argued Willem's point with Wexler when he >> lectured here, since he made similar claims for Romanian (which retains >> its Romance morphology pretty much intact). So I agree his definition of >> Israeli Hebrew as a Creole may be extreme, but that doesn't alter the >> fact that what is taught/spoken there is very different from Hebrew when >> it was spoken as a natural language. I question whether we can call it >> "revival". >> > To get back a bit about what Modern Hebrew is. The reason I would > question that it is a revival would rather be that it has never died in > all its spheres of usage. It died as a first language acquired after > birth, but it never died as a language of prayer and as a written > language. The Jewish tradition of Hebrew education was such that there > were always people who could write very fluent Hebrew. All this made the > transition to revived spoken language much easier, and less artificial. > There is no situation comparable with Indigenous Languages because (with > the exception of Maya) there was no Indigenous tradition of writing. > > It is also interesting to think of Latin. We think of Latin as a dead > language, deader than Hebrew, but Latin has had an extremely slow death. > Like Hebrew, Latin ceased as a spoken language long ago, but as a written > and even spoken language of science, religion and scholarship it continued > well into the 19th century. The literature written by second language > speakers or writers of Latin is massive compared to what was written by > the Romans themselves. And Latin is still not dead: there are still > individuals, mostly living within the confines of the Vatican, who are > able to write and speak quite fluently in Latin. So, if we needed to > revive Latin as an everyday language (I am sure this will never happen), > it would be an easy thing to do. But would it be the same language as > what Cesar and Cicero spoke? In pronunciation, Cesar and Cicero would > probably not recognize what they hear as Latin, but in writing they would > probably understand it fairly well, and certain usages of modern > Latinists, comparable to the Lakota "good morning" example given by Dave > Rood, would be very puzzling to them. > > To summarize, the case of Modern Hebrew and (potentially revivable) Latin, > are probably not helpful models for activists reviving languages. But on > the other hand, the standards of Modern Hebrew and Modern Latin are quite > high. > > When little is documented about the language to be revived, the concern of > linguists (not necessarily shared by Indigenous Activists) is that the > language looks like some sort of Esperanto relexified with native words. > > It is interesting that one of the specialists in the extinct Mutsun > language (a Costanoan language from California, well documented by Spanish > missionaries and by J. P. Harrington) is Marc Okrand, also the creator of > the artificial language Klingon. But despite efforts of Mutsun activists, > there are now more speakers of Klingon than there are of Mutsun. (Of > course, Okrand could be the judge of what is good Klingon, but he wisely > does not comment on such speakers, and he does not consider himself a > speaker either.) I asked a Mutsun activist about that, and the answer > was: "Oh, well, what is happening to Klingon is an inspiration to us." > We don't all feel this way about it. > > So our goals for a revived language should approach these of Hebrew and > Latin as far as authenticity is concerned, and we should be cautious about > the temptation to "Klingonize" or "Esperantoize", i.e. simplify the > morphology because the existing documentation of the extinct language does > not tell us what it should be. > > So, what is a "sufficiently authentic" revived language, will, to be sure, > be a matter of debate for quite some time. > > Willem From mwmosaka at gmail.com Thu Jul 10 16:11:29 2008 From: mwmosaka at gmail.com (Mike Morgan) Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:41:29 +0530 Subject: [NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages In-Reply-To: <060855723F944EFF95BA99B3AE877827@JGHP> Message-ID: Hi! I don't often comment, but ... does anyone know where the revitalized Welch language figures into this > discussion. Just a word of caution: the spelling "Welch" is considered offensive by some (though in fact the high school in West Virginia where my father graduated from is in the town of Welch with exactly this spelling, and exactly this etymology). But then the term "Welsh" (< Anglo Saxon for "foreigner"!) is also considered offensive for the pre-Anglo=Saxon natives of Britain ... The language is Cymraeg (or cymreig or cymrag depending on dialect), and the "country" Cymru. > Some fluent speakers in the conclaves of traditional Wales have remarked > on the current robust Cymraeg as having strayed from their on-going fluent > speaker usage. > Yes, without a doubt the language being taught in Welsh second language (and language revitalization) classrooms in Wales is a bit "foreign". BUT, it is MUCH less foreign NOW than it was 25 years ago when such language vitalization programs were starting to gain momentum and a form of Welsh called Cymaeg Buw "Living Welsh" was introduced; "easy to learn" and being a compromise between the rather divergent modern North and South Welsh dialects -- and also from the literary Welsh established by the Bible. (Ironically of course, because "Living" Welsh was spoken natively by no living being! at the time) Fortunately though for Welsh, there are not only many speakers of a "real" Welsh, but also some excellent writers -- my favorite being the North Welsh writer Kate Roberts (who though i will need to google, as by NOW she probably is either extremely old or dead ... but hopefully "replaced" by a new generation of dialect writers). PS Some years ago, the last time I visited my grad-school mentor CH van Schooneveld in his retirement in Haute Savoie before he passed away, I brought with me a copy of the Dutch Volkskrant to remind him of "home", and he made a comment about it being more English than Dutch ... referring not only to the content but more to the lexicosemantics and syntax. So, at least that one rather leftward leaning newspaper was, in the eyes of one old fashioned Dutch expatriot, relexified English. MWM || ??? || ???? || ???? || ???? || ???? ================ Dr Michael W Morgan Managing Director Ishara Foundation Mumbai (Bombay), India ++++++++++++++++ ????? ?????? (??.??.??.) ???????? ????????? ????? ???????? (????? ) ++++++++++++++++ ??????(?????) ???????????????? ????(????)???? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ahartley at d.umn.edu Tue Jul 15 16:19:05 2008 From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley) Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:19:05 -0500 Subject: [Fwd: Chicago Tribune "On Language" 7/15/08: Gadget helps save ancient tongues] Message-ID: Gadget helps save ancient tongues -------------- By Nathan Bierma July 15, 2008 When Don Thornton meets an elder of an American Indian tribe, he takes out a hand-held electronic device that looks like a giant cell phone. It's called the Phraselator--short for "phrase translator"--a hand-held computer that can record and play phrases in different languages. It's not the fictional Universal Translator from "Star Trek," but Thornton says the Phraselator is becoming a key tool in the fight to save dying American Indian languages. "The first step in learning a language is that you have to hear it correctly, especially for sounds that aren't used in your own native tongue," Thornton said in a telephone interview. "To speak the language, you just have to start using this [device]." The Phraselator doesn't translate words and sentences from scratch. Instead, when you type or speak an English phrase into the Phraselator, it retrieves an audio clip of the translation of that phrase. Thornton got the idea from the U.S. military, which has been using Phraselators in Afghanistan and Iraq, where interpreters are in short supply. He arranged with Voxtec (voxtec.com), the developer and manufacturer of the Phraselator, to adapt it for preserving dying American Indian languages. He founded Thornton Media (ndnlanguage.com) to sell the product and accompanying software to tribes and help train them how to use it. Tribes record their speakers saying phrases from their languages and then have young people listen to the recordings to help them learn the language. Thornton says while the technology is aimed at young people learning a language, and doesn't depend on getting a tribal elder to learn the technology, sometimes tribal elders get hooked on the gadget too. "I've seen elders sit there and play with the Phraselator like a little kid playing with a video game," he says. Thornton estimates that nearly half of the 300 American Indian languages once spoken in the U.S. are now extinct, and most of the rest will die out within a generation unless they are learned and used by younger speakers. He says his Phraselator has been used to record almost 50 languages--including Cherokee, Dakota Sioux and several smaller languages, many with fewer than 10 speakers left. But other language preservationists question whether the Phraselator is a magic bullet for saving dying languages. Leanne Hinton, linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and author of "How to Keep Your Language Alive: A Commonsense Approach to One-On-One Language Learning" (Heyday Books, $15.95), prefers a different approach to promoting dying languages among younger speakers. She developed a method for young speakers to learn their tribal language through pure immersion, or extended exposure in conversations with older speakers, avoiding grammar or vocabulary books. "The Phraselator is a good oral dictionary, and there's nothing wrong with that," Hinton said by telephone. "But you learn a language by using it in real life with other people." Hinton also wonders if the Phraselator is worth the cost to tribes. Phraselators cost more than $3,000 each (but Thornton says he can waive or cut the cost if tribes agree to let him use their recordings as sample audio files). Hinton says if American Indian tribes do turn to technology, they should develop free Web sites with audio files that can be downloaded onto iPods, rather than buy a separate expensive gadget. Thornton says Phraselators have better sound quality and more storage space than other hand-held devices, and he asserts that they promote more interaction among speakers. While modern technology perhaps cannot keep a language alive by itself, Thornton says, it can be a way to help speakers save their native tribal tongues. "We like to look at Phraselators not as language preservation tools, but language revitalization tools," he says. "We hope that somebody in a tribe will put the work in and become a speaker of the tribal language. We're working against the tendency to just record the language and put it up on a shelf like a museum piece." --- Contact Nathan Bierma at onlanguage at gmail.com Copyright ? 2008, Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-language-0715jul15,0,3495516.story Nathan Bierma writes the "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune. He is also contributing editor to Books & Culture magazine, and teaches English and communications at Calvin College, where he works as communications and research coordinator for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. His website is www.nbierma.com. From linguista at gmail.com Tue Jul 15 17:56:13 2008 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan James Gordon) Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:56:13 -0500 Subject: [Fwd: Chicago Tribune "On Language" 7/15/08: Gadget helps save ancient tongues] In-Reply-To: <487CCDF9.9090402@d.umn.edu> Message-ID: Thank heavens Bierma interviewed Hinton for this piece. I question his motives based on both the title of the piece and his giving Thornton the last word - a disingenuous last word if you ask me, for two reasons: 1) Does Thornton mean to imply that Hinton is part of the tendency to put of linguistic fossils on museum shelves? She is most certainly not. If Thornton doesn't mean that, then Bierma is implying it by his quote placement. 2) The phraselator itself, regardless of Thornton's words to the contrary, is just a fancy (and expensive) museum fossil. It has nothing to do with revitalisation as opposed to documentation. It's going to sit on people's mantles like a linguistic Christmas ornament after there are no speakers left, and to the extent that its money and effort are diverted from more productive efforts like the ones Hinton suggests (thanks Bierma for quoting them), it is complicit in the death of our languages and the languages of others, and in the false hopes of our communities and the communities we work with. The phraselator COULD be put to good use, but it will never produce fluent speakers without the aid of other speakers or at least of language courses (which are pretty measly at producing fluent speakers, too). I think my parents' word for this kind of gadget is "snake oil". - Bryan James Gordon 2008/7/15 Alan H. Hartley : > Gadget helps save ancient tongues > > -------------- > > By Nathan Bierma > July 15, 2008 > > When Don Thornton meets an elder of an American Indian tribe, he takes out > a hand-held electronic device that looks like a giant cell phone. > > It's called the Phraselator--short for "phrase translator"--a hand-held > computer that can record and play phrases in different languages. It's not > the fictional Universal Translator from "Star Trek," but Thornton says the > Phraselator is becoming a key tool in the fight to save dying American > Indian languages. > > "The first step in learning a language is that you have to hear it > correctly, especially for sounds that aren't used in your own native > tongue," Thornton said in a telephone interview. "To speak the language, you > just have to start using this [device]." > > The Phraselator doesn't translate words and sentences from scratch. > Instead, when you type or speak an English phrase into the Phraselator, it > retrieves an audio clip of the translation of that phrase. > > Thornton got the idea from the U.S. military, which has been using > Phraselators in Afghanistan and Iraq, where interpreters are in short > supply. > > He arranged with Voxtec (voxtec.com), the developer and manufacturer of > the Phraselator, to adapt it for preserving dying American Indian languages. > He founded Thornton Media (ndnlanguage.com) to sell the product and > accompanying software to tribes and help train them how to use it. Tribes > record their speakers saying phrases from their languages and then have > young people listen to the recordings to help them learn the language. > > Thornton says while the technology is aimed at young people learning a > language, and doesn't depend on getting a tribal elder to learn the > technology, sometimes tribal elders get hooked on the gadget too. > > "I've seen elders sit there and play with the Phraselator like a little kid > playing with a video game," he says. > > Thornton estimates that nearly half of the 300 American Indian languages > once spoken in the U.S. are now extinct, and most of the rest will die out > within a generation unless they are learned and used by younger speakers. He > says his Phraselator has been used to record almost 50 languages--including > Cherokee, Dakota Sioux and several smaller languages, many with fewer than > 10 speakers left. > > But other language preservationists question whether the Phraselator is a > magic bullet for saving dying languages. Leanne Hinton, linguist at the > University of California at Berkeley and author of "How to Keep Your > Language Alive: A Commonsense Approach to One-On-One Language Learning" > (Heyday Books, $15.95), prefers a different approach to promoting dying > languages among younger speakers. She developed a method for young speakers > to learn their tribal language through pure immersion, or extended exposure > in conversations with older speakers, avoiding grammar or vocabulary books. > > "The Phraselator is a good oral dictionary, and there's nothing wrong with > that," Hinton said by telephone. "But you learn a language by using it in > real life with other people." > > Hinton also wonders if the Phraselator is worth the cost to tribes. > > Phraselators cost more than $3,000 each (but Thornton says he can waive or > cut the cost if tribes agree to let him use their recordings as sample audio > files). Hinton says if American Indian tribes do turn to technology, they > should develop free Web sites with audio files that can be downloaded onto > iPods, rather than buy a separate expensive gadget. > > Thornton says Phraselators have better sound quality and more storage space > than other hand-held devices, and he asserts that they promote more > interaction among speakers. > > While modern technology perhaps cannot keep a language alive by itself, > Thornton says, it can be a way to help speakers save their native tribal > tongues. > > "We like to look at Phraselators not as language preservation tools, but > language revitalization tools," he says. "We hope that somebody in a tribe > will put the work in and become a speaker of the tribal language. We're > working against the tendency to just record the language and put it up on a > shelf like a museum piece." > > --- > Contact Nathan Bierma at onlanguage at gmail.com > > Copyright (c) 2008, Chicago Tribune > > > http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-language-0715jul15,0,3495516.story > > > Nathan Bierma writes the "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune. He is > also contributing editor to Books & Culture magazine, and teaches English > and communications at Calvin College, where he works as communications and > research coordinator for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. His > website is www.nbierma.com. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: