A language revisited (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

A language revisited

Indians and scholars hope to revive the words that once dominated
coastal Virginia

BY DAVID A. FAHRENTHOLD
January 4, 2007
http://www.dailypress.com/features/lifestyle/dp-14097sy0jan04,1,3148117.story?coll=dp-features-thurslife

MATTAPONI INDIAN RESERVATION, VA. -- "Muh-shay-wah-NUH-toe.
Chess-kay-dah-KAY-wak." In his house overlooking the silvery Mattaponi
River, Ken Custalow said the words over and over until it drove his
wife crazy. Until she yelled from the next room: Have you memorized
that thing yet?

Custalow, 70, a member of the Mattaponi tribe, was preparing to give a
blessing at a powwow for Virginia Indians in England, part of the
events commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown Colony. He
was nervous. He would be speaking - and some of the audience would be
hearing - his native language for the first time.

"Muh-shay-wah-NUH-toe ... (Great Spirit ... )" he began the salutation.
Then: "Chess-kay-dah-KAY-wak ... (All nations ... )" The words came
from a language that once dominated coastal Virginia. Pocahontas spoke
it. Tongue-tied colonists littered our maps with mispronunciations of
it: Potomac, Anacostia, Chesapeake. Then, sometime around 1800, it died
out.

But now, in a story with starring roles for a university linguist,
sloppy 17th-century scribes and a perfectionist Hollywood director
making a movie about Jamestown, the language that scholars call
Virginia Algonquian has come back from the dead.

The result, for Virginia Indians such as Custalow, has been a stunning
opportunity - to speak in words that their grandparents never knew.

"It was absolutely awesome," Custalow said. "To think, 'Golly, here was
the language that my people spoke.' "

The language they spoke was just one of several in Virginia before
colonization. Its home territory probably included the lower Eastern
Shore and the coastal plain between Hampton Roads and the Potomac
River, experts say.

The Virginia it described is hard to superimpose on today's. It was a
place where bears and elk roamed, where life alternated between stints
at farming villages and seasonal migrations for hunting and gathering.

Then Europe landed on its doorstep. Language was one of many casualties.

"It is a natural process that happens to small communities," said Helen
Rountree, a professor emerita at Old Dominion University who has
studied Virginia tribes.

The same thing happened across the continent. Of perhaps 400 Indian
languages spoken in North America in 1500, about 45 are in common use
today, one expert estimated.

A few traces survived among Virginia Indians: Chief Anne Richardson of
the Rappahannock tribe said her family didn't use the word "bread."

"My grandparents and my parents would say, 'I'm making up apone,' " she
said. The old Algonquian word had been "apon." Corn pone shares the
same linguistic link.

For the first half of the 20th century, the loss of their language was a
minor concern for Virginia Indians. They were lumped into the "colored"
side of a segregated society, barred from jobs and schools, and many
moved away.

By the 1970s, discrimination eased, and interest grew in the old
Algonquian language. Researching it was not easy. The best source was a
list of Indian words and their meanings compiled by a Jamestown colonist
in the 1600s. But it had been recopied by some of the 17th century's
most incompetent scribes. Their N's looked like A's, which looked like
U's, and they had a serious problem with spelling. The Algonquian word
for "ants" had been mislabeled as "aunts," and the word for "herring"
had become "hearing."

Then Hollywood entered the picture. In 2003, director Terrence Malick
was preparing to film a movie about Jamestown, "The New World." Blair
Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, was
hired to translate dialogue for Pocahontas' people.

Rudes started with Colonial-era word lists and scholarly work and filled
in the linguistic blanks using better-known Algonquian languages from
all over the Eastern Seaboard. One scene with three pages of dialogue
took him a month.

The director loved it. He wanted 50 scenes. Rudes translated in his
hotel room for two weeks solid. At the end, people were speaking entire
sentences in Virginia Algonquian - or at least a linguist's best guess
at it - for the first time in 200 years.

His work has helped to dispel one of the area's beliefs: that
"Chesapeake" means something like "Great Shellfish Bay." It doesn't,
Rudes said. The name might mean something like "Great Water," or it
might have been a village at the bay's mouth.

A glimpse of the future might have come this past summer in Great
Britain, at a powwow the tribes held where Pocahontas is buried.

This was what Custalow had been preparing for: He didn't trust himself
to memorize the strange syllables, so he brought a cheat sheet.

Custalow said he did it flawlessly, ending the prayer with "NAH-daych."

The crowd responded with the same word in English: Amen.