Native tongue/translations

[Kirsten Meyer]

I take it to mean that these are foreign ideas, and that difference can be
recognized and respected by deliberately choosing to use them in English,
as opposed to trying to "Indian-ize" them in the way that many of our
languages have adapted words for body parts to apply to car parts, for
example. There are many times when people make a concious effort to take
something useful from another culture and make it their own, but by
keeping these words in English, it might be a way to conciously draw a
line distinguishing Western concepts of questionable worth from Native
ones.

(Tribal council may be debateable, I think, depending on how they are
structured and operate, but many tribal governments operate under the BIA-
scripted constitutions of the Indian Reorganization Act, use Robert's
Rules of Order, and historically have employed policies and people that
are distinct from those traditionally recognized by Native communities).
Just an idea, I don't know if that's what Annie had in mind......
-kirsten

 At 4/24/2003 04:15 PM -0700, Annie G Ross wrote:
> >FYI
> >some words are impossible to translate effectively, by choice.
> >for example, i was in a meeting where the entire proceedings were in
> >Hopi.  the only words in english were
> >pesticide
> >BIA
> >tribal council
>
> I don't get it.  Why are these impossible to translate into Hopi?  And
what
> does "impossible... by choice" mean?
>
>
> --
> Sean M. Burke  sburke at cpan.org  http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/
>