upsurge

[Kevin Brousseau]

This is the first time I hear about work being done on Wyandot - this is a community driven study? Are you trying to bring the language back to the point of having fluent speakers once again? 
   
  I'm very curious because as you probably know there is a Wyandot community here in Quebec and a small diaspora of Wyandot people from the Ohio valley who are scattered a little bit everywhere. A few years ago a meeting was organized at Georgian bay I think it was called, where some Wyandot people from a few different places met in order to discuss language revitalisation and land claims I think. This was the first time I heard of Wyadot people organizing in order to bring back their language, but I had been hearing about the idea by some Wyadot friends of mine for a long time, who wish to bring back the language and have been studying Mohawk in the mean time to acquire competence in a closely related language, hoping it will help them acquire Wyandot with the proper accent or pronunciation. Is your team working with present Iroqiuan languages too for comparative purposes and are you involved with the community in Quebec?
   
  Kevin Brousseau
   
  

Richard Smith <rzs at TDS.NET> wrote:
  thanks Bill,
good points to consider...our linguists haven't had the honor
to sit with fluent speakers...though they could listen to the various
longhouse speeches on recordings for helpful hints

Aidan was pretty much right on target.

Wyandotte or wandat is one of those languages said to be extinct.
well .... i never liked that word- "extinct"
We have a mass of material left by ethnologists,linguists and even speakers
- a huge dictionary and MANY lists,over forty narratives,incredible stories
written in Wandat, including recordings of spoken words,over 300 songs and
part of a story ,all originally collected on wax cylinders.
This was collected here in 1911 by good ol' french canadian Marius Barbeau.
Barbeau wasn't educated in Iroquoian morphology ...he simply recorded
what he heard often running words together or dividing them in funny places.
But actually,He was complimented by Wyandottes in this area for his good
pronunciation,though teased for his rather feminine voice.
As we have no other record of any outsider given this compliment,
we tend to trust his phonetic chart as a pretty good standard,
and it actually lines up with specific voiced word examples recorded.
We also have a good recording of a Green Corn speech by a Wyandot
from this area,though it's spoken in what's referred to as "Seneca".

I don't want to discredit what our linguist has contributed !
He is an unpaid hard worker who mostly works in isolation in a distant
state. Unraveling patterns of the morphology is a huge success and we're all
very grateful.
However phoneticly ,he teaches adults a "simplified" pronunciation.
one example:
On his own,He decided to represent EVERY o written as a nasal ö.
but not the original nasal ö as in french "bon" as Barbeau heard,
and as i hear it spoken in longhouse speeches.
He teaches ö as in "known"
which to me is the same o as in "bone"
I hear "bone" and "bon" as two differant "o" sounds
both important to keep distinct.

another example:
-Barbeau indicates-nasal ä as in the french "marchand"
our linguist now teaches ä as in "none"
....huh?
but he also decided to drop most of the nasal "ä" anyway
in his own translation work he reduces them to a simple "a"
as in "father" well?...can they do that and still publish?

It's made me realize we need a team of Wyandotte tribal members to
form a group who can make important decisions so that linguist work is
evaluated, proposals made and decisions can be agreed upon
if he is to have the nations endorsement.
Then he can truthfully write in his upcoming book,
"the present Wyandotte Community prefers..."

am i just being fussy?

Richard
Wyandotte Oklahoma


       
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