Bloomington man helps save dying languages (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Bloomington man helps save dying languages

by Jessica Wolfe
Indiana Daily Student
http://www.idsnews.com/subsite/story.php?id=31866&adid=city

Published Tuesday, October 18, 2005
As a young teenager, Indrek Park learned to play bagpipes in Estonia, a
country less than half the size of Indiana with one-fifth its
population.

Now 34 and an IU graduate student, Park is still playing. Last week, he
played his Estonian bagpipes for a sixth-grade class at Bloomington's
University Elementary School because the students were studying the
region in Europe where Estonia lies.

The students giggled as Park finished his tunes with a loud honk from
the pipes.

Growing up in a small country with its own native language, Estonian,
Park developed a desire to protect the languages and cultures of small,
indigenous groups of people. And if bagpipes could talk, Park's would
tell about a man who has traveled the world, working with people to
discover, preserve and revitalize their dying languages.

"People say, 'What is the point?' But when a language dies, it's like an
endangered species dies," he said.

Beyond social and academic value, Park said he enjoys studying languages
out of pure fascination. He can't give an exact count of all the
languages he can speak, but Park generally lists Estonian, Tibetan,
Korean, Chinese and the major European languages.

"Languages are fascinating, like a hobby, if you get to know the soul of
a language," he said.

Right now, he is working to get his Ph.D. in linguistics and trying to
get grants for a project with the American Indian Studies Research
Institute. The project is focused on revitalizing Arikara, an American
Indian language in North Dakota with few speakers left.

In the beginning, although his focus was not as narrow as it is today,
he still had the same researcher's heart, he remembered.

When he was 6, he convinced a girl to escape kindergarten for a research
adventure with him. When someone noticed their absence, the police were
called and, unfortunately for the young adventurers, cut the outing
short.

"The kindergarten built a big fence around it after that incident," he
said.

After that, his research adventures were more successful. In his late
teens, he spent summers and winters with a friend in Siberia studying
the Nenets and Manisi people, collecting their folk songs and materials
to donate to the Estonian National Museum in Tartu.

What was it like to live with strangers in 50-below-zero weather while
researching their culture?

"Oh, nice. We had our own reindeer team and stayed in a teepee," Park
said.

Within the next two years, Park was invited to come to America to intern
with Cultural Survival, Inc., a program founded to defend the human
rights of indigenous peoples and oppressed ethnic minorities.

He later studied on scholarship in Beijing, where he met his wife,
Sayon, who is Korean. They both knew English, but Sayon did not speak
Chinese. They met the first week Park was in China, when he translated
for her to help her find the dining halls. They married two years
later.

His translating abilities have been helpful for more people than Sayon,
however.

Currently, Park is using his ability to grasp foreign languages teaching
Qeq'chi, a Mayan language, to members of St. Thomas Evangelical Lutheran
Church in Bloomington. Park, who is involved in the church, is giving
the language instruction to prepare the group for a trip to Chichipate,
Guatemala -- the church's "sister parish" community -- this November.

St. Thomas' Rev. Lyle McKee said he has been very impressed with Park's
ability to grasp the language so quickly.

"On his first trip to Chichipate (in 2001), he picked up the language
while he was there," McKee said. "It's simply amazing. I've never met
anyone like him."

Park plans to be with the group in November and has been working on
compiling a grammar dictionary for the people in Chichipate, McKee
said.

Now, after playing his bagpipes in America at the top of the World Trade
Center, on the Great Wall of China, in Guatemala's rain forests, halfway
up Mt. Everest and in a Bloomington elementary classroom, Park plans to
move back to Estonia someday with Sayon, following more extensive
research in American Indian languages.

Beyond those tentative plans, Park remains unsure, much like a
6-year-old ready for more adventures.

"Long term is hard to see," he said. "We'll see what happens."



"Bloomington man helps save dying languages"
http://www.idsnews.com/story.php?id=31866

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