Instructors study disappearing languages at UND (fwd link)

[Phillip E Cash Cash]

Published July 24, 2012, 08:28 PM

Instructors study disappearing languages at UND

By: Stephen J. Lee, Grand Forks Herald

Cathy Moser Marlett was a baby when she first came to UND’s Summer
Institute of Linguistics in 1953. Her parents Ed and Becky Moser were some
of the school’s first instructors.

The Mosers had begun learning the language of the Seri people of Mexico’s
California Gulf Coast in 1951.

“When my parents went there, there were only about 215 speakers of the
language, so it was a very small group,” she said Tuesday after teaching
phonetics to 11 students in Merrifield Hall.

Cathy and her husband Steve Marlett have continued her parents’ work. The
Seri now number perhaps 1,000 and are writing their own stories in their
own language using a written version created by the Mosers.

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http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/241487/group/homepage/
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