Giving Hawaiian meaning saves language (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Giving Hawaiian meaning saves language
With many tongues dying, UH linguists point to success here

By Jim Borg
jborg at starbulletin.com
http://starbulletin.com/2007/02/19/news/story05.html

SAN FRANCISCO » As thousands of indigenous languages approach
extinction, two linguists from the University of Hawaii at Hilo shared
success stories yesterday in keeping the Hawaiian language alive and
relevant.

The keys, they said, are to expose children to the language at home and
in schools and to create terms for new technology that are
concept-driven rather than simple phonetic mimicry of the English.

"In language revitalization, everybody wants to be distinct, so there
are less phonetic things," said UH-Hilo professor William Wilson. "We
have that big issue for scientific terms -- are we going to make
Hawaiian terms for everything or just have a Hawaiian pronunciation?
But for things like the Internet, we have our own Hawaiian root terms."

The Hawaiian term for the World Wide Web, Punaewele puni honua, means
literally "network around the world." Similarly, the word for
photosynthesis, ka'ama'ai, means "acting through light to produce
food."

Wilson and his wife and UH-Hilo colleague, Kauanoe Kamana, said much of
the credit for re-establishing the language among young families goes
to the Punana Leo Hawaiian-language immersion programs for
schoolchildren.

"We believe that the only way for our language to come back as a living
language today is to use it all the time every day, everywhere, with
everyone," said Kamana. "The answer is with children. It needs to be
generational."

Wilson and Kamana made their remarks as part of a panel discussion at
the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. Also weighing in on the topic, "Language Revitalization for
Societal Well-Being," were experts in the Miami Indian language once
prevalent in Illinois, Indiana and western Ohio; and in Karuk, one of
the 100 indigenous languages of California.

The panel was moderated by Blair Rudes, a University of North Carolina
linguist who as a consultant wrote the Algonquin dialogue for the movie
"The New World," starring Colin Farrell as Capt. John Smith and
Q'Orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas. This he accomplished from a list of
600 known words of a language that had not been spoken since 1783.

Hawaiian and other indigenous languages have the advantage of a more
extensive written record, but many simply fell from use as English
became the new lingua franca.

Of the world's 7,000 languages, most are endangered, Rudes and others
estimate.

"Over half of the languages have so few speakers that they are in danger
of extinction," Rudes said.

Daryl Baldwin, a linguist at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, said the
far-flung descendants of the Miami nation have found some success with
a master-apprentice program that assigns one student to a trained
mentor.

"For many of us, our language provides us with the lens for our
accumulated and ongoing human experiences," Baldwin said.

The responsibility for coining new phrases falls to a committee of
experts for both the Miami language and for Hawaiian, although both
processes are largely informal.

"We have a committee, but we also have people that propose words to them
and they approve it or develop it," said Wilson. "Because we now have
people who have expertise in different areas, like telecommunications,
they try to make the word and bring it to the committee. And sometimes
(the word) spreads before the committee approves it. Sometimes we have
competing words because of that."