Linguists Find the Words, and Pocahontas Speaks Again (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

March 7, 2006 

 LINGUISTS FIND THE WORDS, AND POCAHONTAS SPEAKS AGAIN 

BY JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

HTTP://WWW.NYTIMES.COM/2006/03/07/SCIENCE/07LANG.HTML 

  In the new movie about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in
North America, founded in 1607, the paramount Indian chief Powhatan asks Capt.
John Smith where his people came from. The sky? 

  Responding to the question, translated by an Indian whose smattering of
English probably came indirectly from the earlier failed Roanoke colony in
North Carolina, Smith replies: "The sky? No. We come from England, an island on
the other side of the sea." 

  The dialogue continues as the interpreter puts Smith's reply in Powhatan's
own words, Virginia Algonquian, a language not spoken for more than two
centuries. Like most of the 800 or more indigenous languages of North America
when Europeans first arrived, Powhatan's became extinct as Indians declined in
number, dispersed and lost their cultural identity. 

  But a small yet growing number of linguists and anthropologists has been busy
in recent years recreating such dead or dying Indian speech. Their field is
language revitalization, the science of reconstructing lost languages. One
byproduct of the scholarship is the dialogue in Virginia Algonquian for the
movie "The New World."  

  More than moviemaking is behind the research. A revival of ethnic pride and
cultural studies among Indians has stimulated Indians' interest in their
languages, some long dead. Of the more than 15 original Algonquian languages in
eastern North America, the two still spoken are Passamaquoddy-Malecite in Maine
and Mikmaq in New Brunswick. 

  In other cases, the few speakers of an Indian tongue are the old people,
never their grandchildren, and so the research is a desperate attempt to save
another language from burial with a departing generation.  

  The passing of a language diminishes cultural diversity, anthropologists say,
and the restoration of at least some part of a language is an act of reclaiming
a people's heritage. 

  Blair A. Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte,
who specializes in reconstructing Indian languages, said several Algonquian
communities in the East had efforts under way to recover their lost languages
and return them to daily use. 

  "What turns out to be really important is just that they learn some piece of
the language because it is reclaiming their heritage," Dr. Rudes said. "So much
was lost that reclaiming any of it is a major event." 

  Ives Goddard, who is a curator for linguistics and anthropology at the
Smithsonian Institution, said, "The loss of languages continues, and it's a
worldwide phenomenon." 

  At least half the world's estimated 6,000 languages, Dr. Goddard said, have
so few remaining speakers that they are threatened with extinction. By 2100, he
predicted, "there will be fewer than 3,000 languages still spoken." 

  When the director of "The New World," Terrence Malick, decided that for
authenticity Powhatan should speak in his own language, he called in Dr. Rudes,
who has worked with Dr. Goddard in reconstructing the defunct Algonquian
language of the Pequot of Connecticut. He is also engaged in language
restoration for the Catawba of North Carolina and is collaborating with Helen
Rountree, emeritus professor of anthropology at Old Dominion University, on a
dictionary of Virginia Algonquian. 

  Dr. Rudes was asked what Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas would say and
how they would say it. It was a daunting assignment. 

  The related Algonquian languages were among the first in America to die out,
and no one is known to have spoken Virginia Algonquian since 1785. Like many
other Indians, except some cultures in Mexico and Central America, Algonquian
speakers had no writing system, and their grammar and most of their vocabulary
were lost. 

  Just two contemporary accounts — one by Captain Smith and the other by the
Jamestown colony secretary, William Strachey — preserved some Virginia
Algonquian words, including ones that have passed into modern English as
raccoon, terrapin, moccasins and tomahawk. 

  Clearly, even the wits of the celebrated roundtable at the namesake Algonquin
Hotel, who had something cutting to say about everything and everybody, would
have for once been at a loss for words in the presence of Powhatan and
Pocahontas. Unless, perhaps, the two happened to wear their moccasins and the
soup of the day was terrapin. 

  The first challenge for Dr. Rudes was the limited vocabulary. Smith, the
colony leader, set down just 50 Indian words, and Strachey compiled 600. The
lists were written phonetically by Englishmen who were not expert in
linguistics and whose spelling and pronunciation differed considerably from
modern usage, making it difficult to determine the words' actual Indian form. 

  Dr. Rudes had to apply techniques of historical linguistics to rebuilding a
language from these sketchy, unreliable word lists. He compared Strachey's
recorded words with vocabularies of related Algonquian languages, especially
those spoken from the Carolinas north into Canada that had survived longer and
are thus better known. 

  This family of Indian tongues, in one respect, reminded linguists of the
Romance languages. Each was distinctive but as closely related as Spanish is to
Italian or Italian to Romanian. Comparisons with related languages revealed the
common elements of grammar and sentence structure and many similarities in
vocabulary. 

  A translation of the Bible into the language once spoken by Massachusetts
Indians offered more insights into the grammar. The Munsee Delaware version
spoken by coastal Indians from Delaware to New York, including those who sold
Manhattan, may be dead, but its grammar and vocabulary are fairly well known to
scholars. 

  "We have a big fat dictionary of Munsee Delaware," said Dr. Rudes, who
adapted some of those words when needed for Virginia Algonquian. Recordings of
the last Munsee Delaware speakers, a century ago, were a valuable guide to
pronunciations. 

  Another research tool was what is called Proto-Algonquian. It is the
hypothetical ancestor common to all Algonquian speech, 4,000 words that
scholars have compiled from the surviving tongues and documentation of the
extinct ones.  

  The reconstruction involves educated guesses. Strachey set down words for
walnut, shoes and two kinds of beast, "paukauns," "mawhcasuns," "aroughcoune"
and "opposum." In Proto-Algonquian, similar words are paka-ni (meaning large
nut), maxkesen (shoe), la-le-ckani (raccoon) and wa-pa'oemwi (white dog). 

  From this, Dr. Rudes reconstructed the Virginia Algonquian words pakán,
mahkusun, árehkan and wápahshum," or pecan, moccasin, raccoon and opossum.  

  When he started the project, he was handed the movie script for the parts to
be translated. "I had to rewrite terms for the dialogue," he said. "For
example, we often use nonspecific verbs, 'He went to town.' In Algonquian, you
have to tell the mode of travel, 'He walked to town.' " 

  The peculiar sentence structure required changes in the Indian translation.
Pocahontas would not have said to Smith, if she ever actually did, "I love
you." She would have used the verb for love, with a prefix meaning you and a
suffix for I. "It is one of the few languages that give greater importance to
the listener than the speaker," Dr. Rudes said. 

  Then there was the problem of creating dialogue reflecting what the Indians
would have understood in the early 17th century. This also required changing
the script for the initial Powhatan-Smith conversation. 

  In a paper summarizing his methods, Dr. Rudes said the original script had
Smith saying: "The sky? No. From England, a land to the east." At the time,
though, a land to the east was for the Indians more myth than reality, he
noted, but they probably had already heard about "white-skinned people who
lived on islands in the Caribbean." 

  So Smith's reply was changed to "We came from England, an island on the other
side of the sea," and the translator then used documented words of Virginia
Algonquian for sky, no, island and sea. The spelling was slightly modified to
account for Strachey's misspellings and conform to similar words in other
Algonquian speech. Because the word signifying a question is not known in
Virginia Algonquian, Dr. Rudes borrowed the word sá from a related language. 

  Of course, Powhatan's interpreter could not be expected to have a word for
England. He presumably did his best to reproduce what it sounded like in
Algonquian, Inkurent, to which he added the general locational ending -unk,
meaning at or in. He also followed the practice of naming the place first and
adding the word for "we come from there." 

  The translation thus reads: "Sá  arahqat? Mahta. Inkurent-unk kunowamun -
mununag akamunk yapam." 

  William M. Kelso, director of archaeology of the Association for the
Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, which owns the Jamestown fort site, said
that he could not assess the language of the dialogue, but that the costumes,
armor, arms and nearly all aspects of the fort were realistic. 

  Dr. Kelso and other archaeologists found the remains of the three-sided
Jamestown fort in 1996. Their goal between now and the 400th anniversary
celebration of Jamestown next year is to excavate the well at the site, search
for artifacts and look for the foundations of the colony's storehouse and
church. At the festivities next spring, some of the words of celebration may
echo the Virginia Algonquian of 1607, the resurrected language of Powhatan and
Pocahontas.  
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