Siraya update

[MJ Hardman]

Oh this one!  The person most qualified to run the Jaqaru bilingual program
doesn't have the right certificate!!  She does have the course work and she
is a linguist and a native speaker, but not the right piece of paper!  And
the only one to work with Kawki has only been able to work because the
community itself paid him (and he also farms) and the community it too far
away for people to care.  When they do find out, he gets fired.

And the other problems ‹ in the Jaqi languages a major division is
human/non-human, so if you want to discuss people, you discuss people, and
the greatest complement is that one is a human.  It can also be said 'good
human', but if one adds a word that carries sex-identification, then it
turns into a sexy meaning.  You can imagine the problems.  One old one in
Aymara is in the liturgical materials where the sentence was 'good girl' and
they added the suffix meaning 'personal  knowledge' that they thought was
only an adornment.  You can guess what worshippers might have thought of
that one, especially given the reputation of priests.  Given the ordinary
sex-identification required in European languages, the messes in the texts
are easy to imagine.

What we are working on currently here at UF is, I hope, one step in the
direction of a) making the differences between the languages known and b)
providing in an open manner a lot of original texts that can be used by the
teachers.  While we're in Peru this summer we're hoping to get some of them
heavily involved so that we can do it right.   Working by telephone isn't
enough.

MJ

On 4/23/09 6:18 PM, "Rolland Nadjiwon" <mikinakn at SHAW.CA> wrote:

> 
> Give our communities that same opportunity to do the job right...no way. We
> are not educated enough, smart enough, aggressive enough, cosmopolitan enough
> and definitely not certified enough.
> 
> -------
> wahjeh
> rolland nadjiwon
> 
> 
> 
> 


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