Quechans getting creative to help keep their language alive (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Quechans getting creative to help keep their language alive

BY PAIGE LAUREN DEINER
Apr 2, 2005
http://sun.yumasun.com/artman/publish/articles/story_15793.php

Susie Gilbert is learning Quechan for her husband.

Once she's mastered the language, she plans to teach it to her husband,
a Quechan who never learned his native tongue.

"I am doing this to give something back to my husband. It's his
language. It's my gift to him," Gilbert said.

Gilbert has a common goal with the people who turned out Friday at the
Yuma Civic and Convention center for the fourth annual Yuman Family
Language Summit sponsored by the Quechan Indian tribe, the theme of
which is "e-yah ny aam pii pik" — Language is Our Survival.

The goal of the conference, which began on March 21 and ends today, is
to promote and educate attendees about lan- guage and cultural
preservation through different projects undertaken by the 17 Yuman
tribes from Arizona, California and Mexico. The projects ranged from
teaching language and culture through games and arts and crafts to
creating oral history movies and computer software to learn native
languages.

Gilbert said in an interview with The Sun that she began taking classes
this year with Barbara Levy, a Quechan language teacher in Yuma, but
the schedule is somewhat irregular because Levy does not have a
classroom or a regular meeting place. Students gather at Levy's house
at night, or meet under the trees on the Fort Yuma reservation.

Still, students manage to meet with Levy about three times a week to
learn about their culture, language and hear stories that elders once
told, said Gilbert, who gave a presentation with Levy about Quechan
language learning during the summit.

Levy has been teaching the class for four years, while at the same time
participating in another project to keep the Quechan language alive.

That project, also discussed at the summit, involves developing an
English-to-Quechan dictionary to enable people to look up and learn
Quechan words and phrases. The project began more than 70 years ago,
when linguist Abraham Halpern came to study the Quechan language. He
stayed with the Quechans off and on for three years, writing down words
and figuring out the grammatical structure of the language, said Amy
Miller, who is creating the dictionary.

The time lapse occurred because Halpern became involved in other
projects and did not return to the Quechan reservation until his
retirement in 1975. Then he began to record the language and stories of
the elders, who feared that without some sort of record their language
and culture might be lost, said Miller, who has spent the last seven
years trying to finish the dictionary Halpern started.

She is working with Levy and with 84-year-old George Bryant of Yuma, who
grew up speaking Quechan and didn't learn English until he started
school, to develop the dictionary.

Miller said the project has taught her "how beautiful and complex the
Quechan language is."

She said creating a dictionary for the Quechan language is sometimes
complicated because it has 38 sounds, many of which are not found in
English. So far the dictionary has 3,964 words, about 800 contributed
or verified by Bryant.

The first word in the sample dictionary Miller provides was 'axakatom
paa'aw, a hippopotamus. The word is used as a common phrase said
jokingly about a large person swimming, according to Miller's
dictionary. 'Axakatom paa'awets veeyemk is the phrase meaning "there
goes a hippo."

Bryant said this dictionary will allow people "to keep a record of our
language."

"All we know is that we talk the language and what we say makes sense,"
said Levy. She added that she was reluctant to get involved with the
project at first because she felt she wasn't old enough, but decided
that since she grew up speaking Quechan, she could be helpful to
Miller.

Provided that no other words are discovered, Miller said the dictionary
will take more than two years to compete.

"It seemed like a job that would never be completed, but I see an end
coming. I hope schools will computerize all these systems into one big
system while we still have people who know the language — I think it's
a good thing to know," said George Bryant.

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