What people call things around them (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

What people call things around them
John Craig  - Staff writer

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news-story.asp?date=020304&ID=s1482520&cat=section.Tribal_news
[subscription]

While Kalispel tribal leaders try to preserve their language by teaching
young people, tribal natural resources director Deane Osterman is
generating public interest one fish at a time.

Osterman, who is not Native American, has been studying the Interior
Salish languages in this region for 15 years as a means of
understanding the relationship between culture and biology.

"The best way to do that is through language," according to Osterman,
who recently lectured on the Kalispel language in Newport, Wash.

What people call the things around them says a lot about the importance
they attach to those things, Osterman said. Fish must be important to
people who have names even for sculpin so scrawny you'd need a
half-dozen to make a sandwich.

"They knew this resource like the back of their hand," Osterman said.
"There's a lot of specificity in their fish nomenclature."

For example, he said there are three names for varieties of sculpin, all
referring in some way to the barbels, or whiskers, on their upper lips.

To begin to appreciate the names, one must understand that Salish words
-- both nouns and verbs -- are formed by tacking prefixes and suffixes
onto descriptive roots, Osterman said. Plurals are formed by doubling
the root. Thus, a "hairy-mouthed" fish has "upup" (pronounced oop-oop),
or more than one hair, as part of its name.

It is remarkable how similar the Kalispel fish classification system is
to modern scientific designations, Osterman said. Kalispel and other
Salish names "all key in on how these animals look," he said.

That kind of insight is why Newport-area resident John Stuart was among
some 15 people who turned out for the WSU/Pend Oreille Cooperative
Extension program last week at the CREATE arts center in Newport.

Stuart is active in a conservation group and hoped to learn shades of
meaning from Kalispel animal and plant names. His adult son, Tighe
Stuart, shared that motive as well as an interest in linguistics,
having visited some Latin American countries after studying Spanish in
high school.

Tighe Stuart said one of his friends is an avid linguist, and "knowing
someone else is excited about it makes you wonder what's there."

Cathy Stolarik, manager of a Newport title insurance office, said she
has always been fascinated by languages and attended Osterman's lecture
as a way "to further humble me."

She was humbled when Osterman discussed the sounds used in the Kalispel
language and the parts of the mouth used to produce them.

"What do you do with that thing in the back of your mouth?" Stolarik
asked.

"Oh, that sound," she said, prompting laughter, when Osterman attempted
to demonstrate a sound that doesn't come naturally to non-native
speakers.

Osterman knows all the international phonetic symbols used to represent
Kalispel and other American Indian languages and recognizes the sounds
when he hears them. But some of the sounds in the "consonant-rich"
language just won't come out of his mouth, he said.

Sue Finley has the opposite problem. She's one of only 10 or so tribal
members who still speak Kalispel, but some of the symbols used to write
the language still elude her.

"Just to sit down and write a letter in Indian, I couldn't do that,"
Finley said in an interview from the tribe's cultural office.

Despite the difficulty, she translated eight children's books last year
as part of the tribe's effort to teach its language to schoolchildren
during summer breaks.

Pronouncing the words seems "pretty simple" to Finley, who didn't learn
English until she started grade school at the Indian Day School on the
reservation across the Pend Oreille River from Cusick, Wash. But, she
acknowledges, "a lot of people tell me it's hard."

To help beginners learn some of the unfamiliar sounds, Finley resorts to
instructions such as, "Make the sound like you're going to cough or
you're clearing your throat or something like that."

Osterman's instruction began with a year of classes from Spokane tribal
elder Pauline Flett at Eastern Washington University, where he earned a
master's degree combining anthropology, biology and linguistics in
1994.

The Spokanes have an "R" sound that the Kalispels don't have and they
pronounce some words differently, but native speakers of both tribes as
well as the Montana Flatheads can communicate easily.

Those tribes speak dialects of the same language, according to Raymond
Brinkman, director of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe's language program.

Brinkman wasn't surprised that Finley sometimes can and sometimes can't
understand native speakers from the Coeur d'Alene Tribe. The Coeur
d'Alenes have a separate Salish language, as distinct from Kalispel as
Portuguese is from Spanish, he said.

Since the 19th century, the Coeur d'Alenes and other tribes throughout
the region have used Kalispel as a lingua franca, or trade language,
when they want to be more widely understood, Brinkman said.

Still, all the Salish languages in the Inland Northwest have much in
common.

That's why Rathdrum, Idaho, resident Laura Hunter felt at home when
Osterman listed the four words Kalispels use for grandparents -- words
that mean mother's mother, mother's father, father's mother and
father's father.

Hunter is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, and the Arrow
Lakes Band words her father taught her were essentially the same. She
said she is interested in learning more of her tribal language.

Hunter's 14-year-old son, Zach, said he didn't get much from Osterman's
lecture. He may have wished he had. "We home-school," Laura Hunter
said. "There might be a little quiz tomorrow."