L. Hinton and the politics of orthographies

[David D. Robertson]

The well-known and respected linguist Leanne Hinton recently gave several
letures here at the University of Victoria, BC.  One topic she addressed
that was very stimulating was "the politics of writing endangered
languages", with special reference to California Native languages.  Her
points were well taken; one that reminded me strongly of events in the
Chinook Jargon circle was approximately this:

Linguists tend to be enamored of the internal consistency, the beautifully
perfect structure, of their logically devised writing systems for any
given language.  Linguists also tend to be ignorant of extralinguistic
factors, and ignorant also of the great importance those factors can have
in making linguists' pet alphabets unwelcome in a given language community.

Example:  It's pretty standard practice for a linguist studying language X
to analyze it into a scientifically valid set of phonemes (basic
contrastic sound patterns, essentially).  Linguists tend to take it for
granted that you should represent each of these contrasting sounds of
language X with a single symbol (one letter, essentially).  However,
getting the community whose language is X to adopt the linguist's very
rational alphabet may not be easy.  If language X is already severely
endangered, that is not being passed along to new generations of kids from
birth, it's likely the Xians are already using another language in daily
life, and if they're literate in that other language (say, English),
they're likely to habitually read things according to the spelling
conventions of English  -- which as we know aren't very rational.
Community members may prefer to see <ch> instead of some new single symbol
like c-with-a-wedge-on-top, and they may prefer to see <oo> instead
of /u/, especially if there's a long-versus-short /u/ sound in language X.

Another factor relating to the dominance of a non-X language, let's again
say English, is what happens when language X makes more distinctions than
English:  There are Native American languages that distinguish 2 kinds
of "t", a dental one (like Spanish or French "t") and an alveolar or
retroflex one (like that of English).  Now, the phonetic symbols used by
professional linguists tend to represent the alveolar "t" as a "t" with a
little extra mark on it; the dental "t" may be shown as simply "t".  A
linguist is liable to unthinkingly follow that pattern in creating an
alphabet for the Xians to use for their heritage language, for example
writing the Spanish-style dental one as <t> and the English-style alveolar
one as <tt>.  This may turn out to be a hard writing convention for the
Xians, even those that have spoken X from birth, to master, since they're
accustomed to reading & writing only in English (so far), and are likely
to read <t> just as you do in English -- just the opposite of what the
linguist intended.  This difficulty can conceivably be enough to doom our
linguist friend's alphabet to failure.

Also, the Xians may prefer a writing system that a member of their X
language community created, logically inconsistent though that writing
system may be.  The alphabet created by the outsider linguist may seem
quite lacking in cultural appropriateness to the Xians.

Similarly, the Xians may feel that any alphabet that gets adopted should
arise from a community-wide effort and consensus.  If the linguist's
alphabet is mainly her/his own creation, or even a product of work by the
linguist plus one or a few Xians, it may get a chilly reception from any
Xians who don't feel as if their wishes were represented in its creation.

The above is a brief sketch of some ideas I found really compelling in
Leanne Hinton's talk, and any inconsistencies are my own.  I hope I've
recreated some of her ideas successfully, because I feel they're relevant
to lots of discussion that's occurred on the subject of how to write
Chinook Jargon.

In parting, I'll note that Chinook Jargon's "community" ought to be
thought of as the Xians, the Y-onians, and the Z-landers:  it's an
extremely diverse set of people who clump into various partially exclusive
interest groups, and are likely to feel at odds with one another due to
the nature of their ties with Chinook Jargon, and because they may feel
closely tied to one variety of Jargon but not so closely to another (even
though they're mutually intelligible).

Your thoughts are always welcome.