FEL info: Endangered Native American Languages hit the FT letters page, and the NY Times, in the same week

Sun Mar 12 16:53:46 UTC 2006

This letter, linking rescue of the bald eagle with endangered languages, 
was brought to my notice by its author, Wilhelm K. Meya.

And the following piece in the NYT was pointed out by  William Fierman. 
It recounts FEL member Blair Rudes' work to reconstruct Powhatan, and 
neatly segues into issues of  language endangerment more generally,

The FT letter is currently on line at
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6f2bf9e4-b0a4-11da-a142-0000779e2340.html

Nicholas Ostler
FEL Chairman

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Endangered native American Languages
Date: 	Sun, 12 Mar 2006 11:28:44 -0500
From: 	Wilhelm K. Meya <meya at lakhota.org>
To: 	<nostler at chibcha.demon.co.uk>

Dear Mr. Ostler,

I thought you might be interested to know that an Op-Ed piece that I 
wrote will appear in this Saturday's March 11-12th, *Financial Times*, 
world-wide edition.

Abstract:

The piece suggests that the bald eagle’s rescue is symbolic of America’s 
own redemption and ability to come back from a kind of moral brink. 
 Meya points out, however, that a greater crisis now looms- that of mass 
linguistic extinctions where Native American languages are its leading 
victims.  The Op-Ed discusses the value of language preservation and 
compares the state of endangered languages today to the state of 
endangered species a mere forty years ago.  

If you can’t find a print copy, the link to the page is:

_http://news.ft.com/comment/letters
_

Thanks much,

Wil

------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Wilhelm K. Meya, Executive Director

    *Lakota Language Consortium
    *1130 N. Union #115
    Bloomington, IN 47408

    Tel. 812.340.3517
    Fax. 812.857.4482
    meya at lakhota.org

    http://www.lakhota.org
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Science Desk; SECTF

*Linguists Find The Words, And Pocahontas Speaks Again *

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

1887 words

7 March 2006

The New York Times <javascript:void(0)>

Late Edition - Final

1

English

In the new movie about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement 
in North America, founded in 1607, the paramount Indian chief Powhatan 
asks Capt. John Smith where his people came from. The sky?

Responding to the question, translated by an Indian whose smattering of 
English probably came indirectly from the earlier failed Roanoke colony 
in North Carolina, Smith replies: ''The sky? No. We come from England, 
an island on the other side of the sea.''

The dialogue continues as the interpreter puts Smith's reply in 
Powhatan's own words, Virginia Algonquian, a language not spoken for 
more than two centuries. Like most of the 800 or more indigenous 
languages of North America when Europeans first arrived, Powhatan's 
became extinct as Indians declined in number, dispersed and lost their 
cultural identity.

But a small yet growing number of linguists and anthropologists has been 
busy in recent years recreating such dead or dying Indian speech. Their 
field is language revitalization, the science of reconstructing lost 
languages. One byproduct of the scholarship is the dialogue in Virginia 
Algonquian for the movie ''The New World.''

More than moviemaking is behind the research. A revival of ethnic pride 
and cultural studies among Indians has stimulated Indians' interest in 
their languages, some long dead. Of the more than 15 original Algonquian 
languages in eastern North America, the two still spoken are 
Passamaquoddy-Malecite in Maine and Mikmaq in New Brunswick.

In other cases, the few speakers of an Indian tongue are the old people, 
never their grandchildren, and so the research is a desperate attempt to 
save another language from burial with a departing generation.

The passing of a language diminishes cultural diversity, anthropologists 
say, and the restoration of at least some part of a language is an act 
of reclaiming a people's heritage.

Blair A. Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina, 
Charlotte, who specializes in reconstructing Indian languages, said 
several Algonquian communities in the East had efforts under way to 
recover their lost languages and return them to daily use.

''What turns out to be really important is just that they learn some 
piece of the language because it is reclaiming their heritage,'' Dr. 
Rudes said. ''So much was lost that reclaiming any of it is a major 
event.''

Ives Goddard, who is a curator for linguistics and anthropology at the 
Smithsonian Institution, said, ''The loss of languages continues, and 
it's a worldwide phenomenon.''

At least half the world's estimated 6,000 languages, Dr. Goddard said, 
have so few remaining speakers that they are threatened with extinction. 
By 2100, he predicted, ''there will be fewer than 3,000 languages still 
spoken.''

When the director of ''The New World,'' Terrence Malick, decided that 
for authenticity Powhatan should speak in his own language, he called in 
Dr. Rudes, who has worked with Dr. Goddard in reconstructing the defunct 
Algonquian language of the Pequot of Connecticut. He is also engaged in 
language restoration for the Catawba of North Carolina and is 
collaborating with Helen Rountree, emeritus professor of anthropology at 
Old Dominion University, on a dictionary of Virginia Algonquian.

Dr. Rudes was asked what Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas would say 
and how they would say it. It was a daunting assignment.

The related Algonquian languages were among the first in America to die 
out, and no one is known to have spoken Virginia Algonquian since 1785. 
Like many other Indians, except some cultures in Mexico and Central 
America, Algonquian speakers had no writing system, and their grammar 
and most of their vocabulary were lost.

Just two contemporary accounts -- one by Captain Smith and the other by 
the Jamestown colony secretary, William Strachey -- preserved some 
Virginia Algonquian words, including ones that have passed into modern 
English as raccoon, terrapin, moccasins and tomahawk.

Clearly, even the wits of the celebrated roundtable at the namesake 
Algonquin Hotel, who had something cutting to say about everything and 
everybody, would have for once been at a loss for words in the presence 
of Powhatan and Pocahontas. Unless, perhaps, the two happened to wear 
their moccasins and the soup of the day was terrapin.

The first challenge for Dr. Rudes was the limited vocabulary. Smith, the 
colony leader, set down just 50 Indian words, and Strachey compiled 600. 
The lists were written phonetically by Englishmen who were not expert in 
linguistics and whose spelling and pronunciation differed considerably 
from modern usage, making it difficult to determine the words' actual 
Indian form.

Dr. Rudes had to apply techniques of historical linguistics to 
rebuilding a language from these sketchy, unreliable word lists. He 
compared Strachey's recorded words with vocabularies of related 
Algonquian languages, especially those spoken from the Carolinas north 
into Canada that had survived longer and are thus better known.

This family of Indian tongues, in one respect, reminded linguists of the 
Romance languages. Each was distinctive but as closely related as 
Spanish is to Italian or Italian to Romanian. Comparisons with related 
languages revealed the common elements of grammar and sentence structure 
and many similarities in vocabulary.

A translation of the Bible into the language once spoken by 
Massachusetts Indians offered more insights into the grammar. The Munsee 
Delaware version spoken by coastal Indians from Delaware to New York, 
including those who sold Manhattan, may be dead, but its grammar and 
vocabulary are fairly well known to scholars.

''We have a big fat dictionary of Munsee Delaware,'' said Dr. Rudes, who 
adapted some of those words when needed for Virginia Algonquian. 
Recordings of the last Munsee Delaware speakers, a century ago, were a 
valuable guide to pronunciations.

Another research tool was what is called Proto-Algonquian. It is the 
hypothetical ancestor common to all Algonquian speech, 4,000 words that 
scholars have compiled from the surviving tongues and documentation of 
the extinct ones.

The reconstruction involves educated guesses. Strachey set down words 
for walnut, shoes and two kinds of beast, ''paukauns,'' ''mawhcasuns,'' 
''aroughcoune'' and ''opposum.'' In Proto-Algonquian, similar words are 
paka-ni (meaning large nut), maxkesen (shoe), la-le-ckani (raccoon) and 
wa-pa'oemwi (white dog).

>From this, Dr. Rudes reconstructed the Virginia Algonquian words pakan, 
mahkusun, arehkan and wapahshum,'' or pecan, moccasin, raccoon and opossum.

When he started the project, he was handed the movie script for the 
parts to be translated. ''I had to rewrite terms for the dialogue,'' he 
said. ''For example, we often use nonspecific verbs, 'He went to town.' 
In Algonquian, you have to tell the mode of travel, 'He walked to town.' ''

The peculiar sentence structure required changes in the Indian 
translation. Pocahontas would not have said to Smith, if she ever 
actually did, ''I love you.'' She would have used the verb for love, 
with a prefix meaning you and a suffix for I. ''It is one of the few 
languages that give greater importance to the listener than the 
speaker,'' Dr. Rudes said.

Then there was the problem of creating dialogue reflecting what the 
Indians would have understood in the early 17th century. This also 
required changing the script for the initial Powhatan-Smith conversation.

In a paper summarizing his methods, Dr. Rudes said the original script 
had Smith saying: ''The sky? No. From England, a land to the east.'' At 
the time, though, a land to the east was for the Indians more myth than 
reality,he noted, but they probably had already heard about 
''white-skinned people who lived on islands in the Caribbean.''

So Smith's reply was changed to ''We came from England, an island on the 
other side of the sea,'' and the translator then used documented words 
of Virginia Algonquian for sky, no, island and sea. The spelling was 
slightly modified to account for Strachey's misspellings and conform to 
similar words in other Algonquian speech. Because the word signifying a 
question is not known in Virginia Algonquian, Dr. Rudes borrowed the 
word sa from a related language.

Of course, Powhatan's interpreter could not be expected to have a word 
for England. He presumably did his best to reproduce what it sounded 
like in Algonquian, Inkurent, to which he added the general locational 
ending -unk, meaning at or in. He also followed the practice of naming 
the place first and adding the word for ''we come from there.''

The translation thus reads: ''Sa arahqat? Mahta. Inkurent-unk kunowamun 
- mununag akamunk yapam.''

William M. Kelso, director of archaeology of the Association for the 
Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, which owns the Jamestown fort 
site, said that he could not assess the language of the dialogue, but 
that the costumes, armor, arms and nearly all aspects of the fort were 
realistic.

Dr. Kelso and other archaeologists found the remains of the three-sided 
Jamestown fort in 1996. Their goal between now and the 400th anniversary 
celebration of Jamestown next year is to excavate the well at the site, 
search for artifacts and look for the foundations of the colony's 
storehouse and church. At the festivities next spring, some of the words 
of celebration may echo the Virginia Algonquian of 1607, the resurrected 
language of Powhatan and Pocahontas.

Photos: WRITING IT RIGHT -- Blair A. Rudes, left, used sketchy word 
lists and techniques of historical linguistics to piece together lines 
delivered in Virginia Algonquian for ''The New World,'' featuring 
Q'Orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas and Colin Farrell as Capt. John Smith. 
(Photos by Merie Wallace/New Line Productions); (Photo by Chris Keane 
for The New York Times)(pg. F4)

Chart: ''Giving Voice to a Lost Language''

In reconstructing the Virginia Algonquian language, scholars reviewed a 
list of 600 vocabulary words compiled in 1612 by the Jamestown colony's 
secretary, William Strachey, and the language of similar Indian groups.

Examples of words that eventually passed into English

English word -- raccoon

Word as written by Strachey -- aroughcoune

Strachey's definition -- kind of beast

Word in Proto-Algonquian -- la$(7$)le$(7$)ckani

Proto-Algonquian definition -- raccoon

Virginia Algonquian spelling -- arehkan

Virginia Algonquian pronunciation -- [aw-REH-kahn]

English word -- moccasins

Word as written by Strachey -- mawhcasuns

Strachey's definition -- shoes

Word in Proto-Algonquian -- maxkesen

Proto-Algonquian definition -- shoe

Virginia Algonquian spelling -- mahkusun

Virginia Algonquian pronunciation -- [MAH-kuh-suhn]

English word -- opossum

Word as written by Strachey -- opposum

Strachey's definition -- kind of beast

Word in Proto-Algonquian -- wa$(7$)pa'0emwi

Proto-Algonquian definition -- white dog

Virginia Algonquian spelling -- wapahshum

Virginia Algonquian pronunciation -- [WOE-pah-shum]

English word -- pecan

Word as written by Strachey -- paukauns

Strachey's definition -- walnut

Word in Proto-Algonquian -- paka$(7$)ni

Proto-Algonquian definition -- large nut

Virginia Algonquian spelling -- pakan

Virginia Algonquian pronunciation -- [pa-KAUN]

English word -- persimmons

Word as written by Strachey -- pessemins

Strachey's definition -- plum

Word in Proto-Algonquian -- pe' 3/5scaron 4/5imini

Proto-Algonquian definition -- husked fruit

Virginia Algonquian spelling -- puhshimin

Virginia Algonquian pronunciation -- [puh-SHIH-min]

English word -- tomahawk

Word as written by Strachey -- tamahaak

Strachey's definition -- hatchet

Word in Proto-Algonquian -- temaha$(7$)kani

Proto-Algonquian definition -- hatchet

Virginia Algonquian spelling -- tumahak

Virginia Algonquian pronunciation -- [tuh-mah-HAWK]

Scholars have created a hypothetical ancestral language called 
Proto-Algonquian, which is compilation of more than 25 Algonquian 
languages that were once spoken.

(Source by Blair A. Rudes, University of North Carolina)(pg. F4)

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