language documentation

[Bernadette Santamaria]

Ms. Bowern:

For our ANA project years back to assess, plan, etc for lang programming on
our rez, one of the issues that became touchy & political was one that other
Tribes have also complained of at certain conferences--the issue of
disagreement on which community "dialect" (don't really like use of that
term but...) or "correct" language to use for various purposes. There isn't
any "correct" version, only differences in local pronunciations & word
usage.

We have various "versions" among our communities (total tribal population of
over 15,000 located in over 20 communities with distances from 5 to 60 miles
inbetween them on a large reservation), and due to these disagreements,
planning disintegrated.

Our Apache language status is an "A" (still spoken by some children) and we
do have numerous speakers among the communities but not as high among the
younger people from a certain age on down.  We want to do curriculum
development, improve on a previously published error-laden dictionary, but
some of us are discouraged because of the dialectal differences and
disagreements about them.  It is still an issue....but we will apply for an
ANA grant for a another project.

Another issue is the one on the importance of types of grammars to be taught
to language learners - some researchers state that teaching all types of
grammar is the rule and not to concentrate on only nouns or verbs.  But as a
fluent speaker of Apache, an Athabaskan Family language, I know that our
language is full of sentences that are verb-driven as most Athabaskan
language family languages are.  Researchers do agree that Athabaskan
languages have complex and rich verb morphologies and verb classificatory
systems that are larger than in other language families.  I believe that
Apache-language learners need to learn more of the verb conjugations and not
to concentrate on nouns as they will always be learned along with the
verbs.  I have had some success at the university level of teaching in the
past and my students praised this method after they had learned mostly nouns
in earlier language classes in schools.

Hope this is something that will assist your seeking of info.

Berni


Bernadette A. SantaMaria
White Mountain Apache Culture Advisory Board Member
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Claire Bowern <clairebowern at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> I'm writing an article for the Cambridge Handbook of Language Documentation
> on planning a documentation project. I'd be interested in comments from
> anyone here about things they wish they'd known when they started (I have a
> long list of those...). It's a fairly general article but I'll be
> illustrating it from a fair number of projects, I hope. I'd be particularly
> interested in stuff that looked promising but which didn't end up working
> for various reasons.
>
> Also, I remember a quotation somewhere by David Costa and Daryl Baldwin on
> the Miami project that was essentially 'follow your heart', don't get caught
> up agonising too much over the right orthography, etc. Does anyone know the
> source for this?
>
> Thanks,
> Claire
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