Scarce resources hobble Dene native language efforts

[phil cash cash]

----- Forwarded message from rtroike at U.Arizona.EDU -----

Mia, Jan, et al.,

	What Mia is doing sounds fascinating. Since you are using Lakoff &
Nunez' embodied perspective, I imagine you know about the big
ethnoscience
project of Ozzie Werner some years ago on the atlas of Navajo
terminology
for the human body. That seems relevant to this approach.

	One caution in general about adapting or translating materials
from English/Spanish/French etc. to native languages is that these
Eurocentric materials assume a universal categorization of the world
that
needs to be problematized and subjected to ethnographic examination for
each case. A couple of examples are pertinent. Some years ago when
Muriel Saville-Troike was working on a Navajo kindergarten curriculum,
she found that although Navajo has a term for the hexagonal shape of the
hogan 'house' (how many English speakers are readily familiar with
'hexagon'?), there was no term for Plato's supposed universal triangle,
which available math and reading-readiness materials took for granted.
In visiting schools on the reservation, she found that teachers had had
to make up their own term for 'triangle' (after all, the code-talkers
made up terms for tanks and airplanes), but each teacher had come up
with a different expression. If off-the-shelf materials are to be used
which presuppose the universality of certain categorizations, it should
be checked and established first whether there are native categories
and recognized labels which correspond to these, or whether these will
have to be introduced as "foreign" categories/concepts, and labels
invented and standardized for them.

	One cannot always be sure that just because native speakers are
developing or consulting on materials development, their intuition will
securely flag problems such as this. The difficulty here is that most
native consultants or developers have themselves been educated largely
through the dominant language, and have unconsciously internalized the
categories of the dominant language/culture and have accepted the
(unrecognized) ethnocentric assumption that these categories are
'natural'
and universal. Thus an ethnographically-oriented examination of the
native lexicon may be necessary/desirable to raise consciousness as to
the differences between native conceptualizations and Eurocentric ones.
(Even fluent bilinguals are rarely conscious of comparative differences
between their own language and the second language, and most speakers
of most languages are largely unaware of the structure and categories
of their own language. Someone -- perhaps on this list -- recently
remarked on the surprise of a German speaker when it was pointed out
to him that the German word for 'glove', Handschuh, was literally
"hand-shoe", i.e. shoe for the hand.)

	A few years ago when I was consulting on a project to develop
materials for Mayan languages in Guatemala, I found that native speakers
were taking the standard Spanish-language materials and, without
changing
illustrations, supplying Mayan (Mam, Quiche, Kekchi, etc.) labels for
them. In one lesson devoted to practicing recognizing groups and giving
appropriate numbers for them (three trees, two houses, etc.), I found
that the categories presumed by the Spanish texts were not being
questioned by the developers, who were themselves all elementary school
teachers who had been teaching the materials in Spanish. After some
discussion, it emerged that the distinction between 'arbol' (tree) and
'arbusto' (bush) did not fit the native categorizations of types of
plants, and that to apply the native labels in teaching sets (without
distorting the application of these labels by mapping them onto the
Spanish ones), it would be necessary to come up with different pictures.

	Especially labels for parts of the human body, which might seem
self-evident, need to be questioned. The 'foot', for which we have a
lexicalized distinction in English, is often not separated
terminologically from the 'ankle' or 'lower leg'; even English 'ear'
does not distinguish by itself the outer ear and the inner ear,
lexicalized separately in Spanish as 'oreja' and 'oido'. Thus whereas
"My ear hurts" is ambiguous in English, in Spanish it would not be.
Since most traditional math educators are predisposed to accept without
question the universality of mathematical concepts, they need to be
sensitized to the cultural embeddedness of instructional media, and
the need to examine ethnographically the appropriateness of categories
usually taken for granted in instruction.

    Rudy Troike
    University of Arizona

----- End forwarded message -----