<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>Florian Siegl kirjoitti 24. apr. 2007 kello 19.07:</DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;">I have just returned from fieldwork on Forest Enets on the <ST1:PLACE w:st="on">Taimyr Peninsula</ST1:PLACE> (22.11.06 - 19.04.07). <BR></P></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV>Thanks to Florian for several valuable observations, and for raising an imporant debate. The observations summarised here:</DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: auto;line-height: 150%; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;">I’m tempted to say that only 4 fully competent speakers of FE remain. </SPAN><B></B></P></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt; line-height: 150%;"><SPAN style="font-family: Symbol;"><SPAN style="">·<SPAN style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;"> <FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;">The Forest Enets intelligentsia in Dudinka is wondering why there is so few primary material published albeit almost all Forest Enetses alive have been serving as consultants<BR></SPAN></FONT></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></P></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV>The natural follow-up question here is to what extent the younger forest enets are interested in participating in revitalisation work, or, rather, what kind of revitalisation they would be interested in.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt; line-height: 150%;"><SPAN style="font-family: Symbol;"><SPAN style=""><SPAN style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;">Personally I share their concerns, the former practice of doing fieldwork for the sake of science is a concept antiquated by now. <BR></SPAN></FONT></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></P></BLOCKQUOTE>I, for one, certainly have had my share of theory-driven fieldwork, with no feedback whatsoever to the community, and am not in any position to moralise. On the behalf of the research community, I would still like to point out that some of our predecessors certainly have done work relevant to the language communities. One prime example is Konrad Nielsen, his lexicographic work for Northern Sámi continues to be a source for language workes to this day. One aspect of commitment to the language within the community, the will to get to know the world view, the language and the beliefs of the predecessors; material of great help here can be found in the texts and dictionaries published by the different Finno-Ugric societies. (even more helpful it would of course be if transliterated and parallel-published in Russian instead of German).</DIV><DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt; line-height: 150%;"><SPAN style="font-family: Symbol;"><SPAN style=""><SPAN style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;">Language endangerment has resulted in the emancipation of native speakers who no longer see themselves as “something” to be studied. Whereas this trend has started in other parts of the world already in the late 1970s this understanding has arrived in </SPAN></FONT><ST1:COUNTRY-REGION w:st="on"><ST1:PLACE w:st="on"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;">Russia</SPAN></SPAN></FONT></ST1:PLACE></ST1:COUNTRY-REGION><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;"> by now. <BR></SPAN></FONT></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></P></BLOCKQUOTE>(Side note: The emancipation probably has other causes.) It would be interesting hering more about to what extent this understanding "has arrived", i.e., to what extent speakers and descendants of speakers really are perpared to change their behaviour, and in what way. <BR><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: -18pt; line-height: 150%;"><SPAN style="font-family: Symbol;"><SPAN style=""><SPAN style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px;">Nowadays one has to justify one’s work and speakers of endangered languages have become critics of scientific practice. A central consultant of mine in Potapovo initially asked me why she should tell me “the old stories” again as “everything I know or found worth to tell I have told many times to…” which was followed by a list of researchers. <BR></SPAN></FONT></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></P></BLOCKQUOTE>This certainly is a valid protest on her part. The question is what the language community wants (or will appreciate, if it is made accessible to them). This will vary from community to community, of course, but as long we do not have any clear answer to this question we will have a hard time changing our practice.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>One answer is of course dictionaries:<BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"></BLOCKQUOTE><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><SPAN style="" lang="ET">„<I>I would also like to express the hope that more effort might be put into producing dictionaries of Australian languages than has been case to date. (...) In particular, ’the academic’ linguists have essentially contented themselves with long grammatical studies, squeezing out ’theoretical’ conclusions of various sorts, and have as yet published few or no texts and no adequate dictionaries. I <BR></I></SPAN></P></BLOCKQUOTE>Florian then goes on:<BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><SPAN style="" lang="ET">Principally the situation </SPAN><SPAN style="">in Uralic linguistics outside the historical-comparative framework is similar. There are still no modern grammars (“<I>long</I>”<I> grammatical studies</I>) for the majority of Uralic languages and for several languages well known to the subscribers of this list I personally doubt that long grammatical studies can be expected. In <BR></SPAN></P></BLOCKQUOTE>Here, there is a misunderstanding. The "long grammatical studies" referred to in the Australian case are not "modern grammars" in the sense of "reference grammars", they are treatises of the type "is there a VP in Dyirbal or not" (or, equally irrelevant, "the history of Mansi vowels"). If descendants of next generations' forest enets would like to restore their ancestors' language (like Cornishmen do), they would need both texts, dictnionary, AND a reference grammar. <BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%;"><SPAN style="">the Forest Enets case, linguists are already <I>judged harshly for their behavior</I>.</SPAN></P></BLOCKQUOTE>And rightly so, it seems (in this particular case, even the texts, grammars and dictionaries are missing). </DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>This debate turns interesting if we are able to move forward, to find better strategies, and answer both the Forest Enets informant, and other informants as well.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>From Tromsø work on Sámi during the last decade (building on initial work by Pekka Sammallahti), I can report the following: </DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Work first on localisation (character encoding, keyboard layout, sorting order, etc), and then on language technology (constructing first morphological automata, syntactic parsers, and then spellchecker programs), makes Sámi text production and reading in the computer age much easier than it would otherwise have been. The work also has been portable: With our Sámi infrastructure as a starting point, we have been able to make a Greenlandic spellchecker (releast last autumn). </DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>As a further extension, one could take the morphological dictionary of Tundra Nenets, write it into a finite-state transducer (which it, in a way, already is), and use the resulting parser as a basis component in a Nenets spellchecker. Although computer-based text production is not what the average Tundra Nenets activity, the existence of such tools certainly would make the production of Nenets publication easier.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The same story could be retold for all the Uralic literary languages. There already are automata for Eastern Mari, Erzya; partial work for Komi and Udmurt, in Budapest they have analysed several Uralic languages</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Still, when traditional uralistics work focuses on Sámi, as the ongoing etymological Álgu project in Helsinki, this certainly is something that would have been interesting to the language community (and its neighbours), had they known anything about it: Sámi prehistory is one of the most hotly debated issues in the North Norwegian press, and errouneous (Norwegian-biased) laymen arguments flourish, without competent protests, due to the disinterest for historical lingustics among Norway-based linguists. So, there certainly is a place for core uralistics also in the popular debate.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV>Now, language revitalisation certainly is more than computers (languages are preserved by being spoken), and linguistics certainly is more than computer linguistics. Rather than trying to give a coherent picture of the "new" role of the linguist, I have mentioned one tiny part of it, along with the observation that in order to be able to rewrite the grammar as an automaton, I will need a comprehensive generative grammar (in the classical meaning of the word, which is "explicict grammar") of the language in question.<DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>With the observation that the classical uralic diciplines of language history, extensive dictionaries and text editions actually may be of interest to the speech community (admittedly provided that it is communicated back to them after the fieldwork), and that grammars may be relevant, albeit indirectly, as basis for other activities, I conclude in a slightly more optimistic tone than did Florian. To me it seems we do have something to report back to the language communities, and we might as well starting doing just that.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Trond Trosterud.</DIV><DIV><BR><DIV> <P style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Monaco; ">----------------------------------------------------------------------</P><P style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Monaco; ">Trond Trosterud t +47 7764 4763</P><P style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Monaco; ">Institutt for språkvitskap, Det humanistiske fakultet m +47 950 70140</P><P style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Monaco; ">N-9037 Universitetet i Tromsø, Noreg f +47 7764 5216</P><P style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Monaco; ">Trond.Trosterud (a) hum.uit.no <A href="http://www.hum.uit.no/a/trond/">http://www.hum.uit.no/a/trond/</A></P><P style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Monaco; ">----------------------------------------------------------------------</P><P style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 10px/normal Monaco; "><BR><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></P> </DIV><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>