Scarce resources hobble Dene native language efforts

[Mia Kalish (LFP)]

Hi, Rudy.

Thanks for this really great email describing issues that are not apparent
to huge parts of the world.

I thought I would say what I was doing, and people could check it out.

I didn't know about Ozzie Werner's project, but I will check it out. I do
know that most of the world thinks you can just "translate" stuff. I am
digging deeply into my technological soul to find a way to abstract the
concepts from the language, since if recontextualization doesn't start with
the basics, you don't get a successful representation.

This abstraction is hard because you have to do what Lakoff & Nunez did, and
this takes either a) lots of manual time, or, b) some technology to help. I
am going to do a little (a), to teach my body how to do it, and then develop
some (b), to extract concepts from the language in which they are embedded.

Then, we start with the extension issues that Rudy mentioned. About a year
ago, I sent out email asking whether people knew how many Indigenous
languages had words for common mathematical forms and processes. I got back
a few emails telling me I "could just translate", but almost nothing about
representation of mathematical forms in language. I assumed that there were
several possible explanations for this:
	1. People hadn't thought of the huge amount of mathematics that
Indigenous people had and used (e.g.,  Architecture of the Moundbuilders
(Callusas?), Mayans, Aztecs, petroglyphs, astronomy, calendricality,
counting systems and so on, not only of the people here but in Africa).
Mathematics is pretty innate; Lakoff and Nunez talk about the human
metaphors that allow extension from innate capabilities to an evolving
theoretical and applied mathematics.
	2. Powell's influence had made people believe (an example of a human
metaphor constructing reality) that Indigenous people had no math or
science, and hence words from the disciplines were not reflected in their
languages. So when he put out his prescriptive document of somewhere around
1897, there were no STEM spaces for words.
	3. This idea is an implication from MacDonald and Duff, who
hypothesized that the medicine people traveled around the world sharing
knowledge. It is possible that some of the words died with the medicine
people who were targeted and killed during the colonization. The
mathematical figures are clearly present, in the petroglyphs, in the
calendrical (presumed)triangulations.
	4. Different representational systems (as opposed to 'words for . .
.'): People have argued Sapir/Whorf, although I don't really know why: If
you don't have a sweet potato, you don't need a word for it. I think though,
that what happened with the Hopi time argument is truly (and
ethnocentrically) amazing. Hopi language has all these fine distinctions for
time; they are embedded in the language. So of course, they don't need to be
stated explicitly, as in English. Lakoff and Nunez would see the
White-Males-Are-Superior paradigm derived from early publications as the
metaphor that created a blend where ethnographers and linguists were unable
to conceive of different systems. A consequence of early publications was
the wide-spread belief that there was an evolutionary hierarchy of people,
and everyone was "progressing" up that hierarchy, and a consequence of this
was that analysts assumed that sophisticated intellectual words did not
exist in the languages of people on these postulated lower levels.

I liked your discussion of arbol, Rudy. I had a similar experience with a
mathematician recently. We were talking about building some
teaching/learning materials, and he had simply plopped the term "continuous"
into the discussion. Until I made him look back to find where the term had
been introduced, he didn't realize that he had just assumed that people
(students, learners, the people he was trying to teach) would just "know"
what the mathematical meaning of continuous was. It is absolutely parallel
to your experience with arbol and arbusto.

I think that "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" in
some form may be an early step of this entire process. Using Fauconnier &
Turner's Conceptual Blending Model, it is necessary to develop the
structures that produce the blends (metaphors). To take a simple example,
choose the blend Word. A 'word' is composed of a) its target (the real
thing: cat, house, tree, bush, burning; not the theoretical "reference"
here); b) how you say the word for it in the target language; c) how you
spell the word for it in the target language if it is written. In CBT, it
looks like this:

	Blend: WORD
	Inputs: Word_Structure (a,b,c, above)
		  Target_Language
			Word_if_Exists
				Spoken.wav
				Text_If_Written

Thus it is implicit in the analysis that you might:
	1) Find things that didn't have words/expressions/ways of
representing in the target language;
	2) "Things" in the target language that have no
words/expressions/ways of representing in English (or Spanish, or French, or
even Russian, Polish or Lithuanian)
	3) Criss-cross of linguistic types, especially state words ('red' in
Apache is a verb, "it is (being) red";
	4) Words that have direct embodiment (a la Lakoff and Nunez), as the
shape suffixes common to Southern Athapascan, maybe others.
	

I'm sure there are more, but I have written what I hope is a wonderful
treatise in response to Rudy's wonderful message, and I think enough is
enough.

Mia

-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of phil cash cash
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 4:25 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] Scarce resources hobble Dene native language efforts

----- 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 -----