Canadian missionary works to keep alive Brazilian indigenous language (fwd link)

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MACDONELL-MACUXI Oct-16-2008 (970 words) With photo. xxxi

Canadian missionary works to keep alive Brazilian indigenous language

By Yone Simidzu
Catholic News Service

TORONTO (CNS) -- Every two weeks, a language dies, and with it, the history of
the people who spoke it and their vision of the world.

In Brazil, of the 1,200 languages spoken when Europeans arrived around 1500,
only a few remain, and soon they also will disappear. But Macuxi has a greater
chance of survival because of the efforts of a Canadian missionary, Father
Ronald MacDonell.

Father MacDonell, a member of the Toronto-based Scarboro Missions, is the
producer of a radio show airing in October on a Brazilian church-run radio
service. He is also the coordinator of a dictionary in the indigenous language
of the Macuxi people of Brazil's Roraima state, in the northernmost tip of
Brazil at the border of Venezuela and Guyana.

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