Court rules against Yup ’'ik as an historically written language ...

[William J Poser]

At least without the legislative history, nobody seems to know what
Congress meant by "historically unwritten". Judge Burgess's interpretation
is evidently that a language is "historically unwritten" until a
significant fraction of its speakers are making use of the writing system.
Thus, he dismisses the example of Neck's writing since that was restricted
to a single person, and the Cyrillic systems on the grounds that they
were short-lived and never used by very many people. That seems to me
to be a reasonable interpretation, but not the only one.

One way to get an idea of what it means is to turn the question around
and ask, under what conditions would it be reasonable to provide
voting assistance ONLY in writing? (This isn't purely a hypothetical - there
actually is good reason to do this since oral solutions tend to involve
problems with privacy and secrecy of the ballot - if you have your
daughter in the voting booth with you translating, your vote isn't
secret). Providing assistance ONLY in writing would only be reasonable
if Yup'ik-speaking voters were sufficiently literate in Yup'ik to be
able to digest the materials without difficulty. What that would mean
would depend on the kind of election. If all they need is to be able
to recognize the names of the candidates and their parties, the literacy
skills necessary would be minimal. If, on the other hand, they have
to vote on propositions like in California, where they have to understand
the proposition itself plus arguments for and against, the literacy
skills needed would be considerably greater. Supposing that Yup'ik
people had to deal with California-style elections (and I have no idea
what they vote on in Yup'ik-land), if what literacy meant was that
some fraction of the speakers could follow the hymnal in Yup'ik,
then even though there might in some sense be a long-standing tradition
of Yup'ik literacy, it wouldn't be the kind of tradition that would support
written only voting assistance.

Bill