Keepers of a Lost Language

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from MotherJones.com


Keepers of a Lost Language


An 82-year-old linguist and his young protg are among the last speakers of
a native California language  and its final chance.

Dashka Slater
July/August 2004 Issue

After devoting his life to understanding the mechanics and music of
languages, William Shipley speaks fewer than you might expect. The
82-year-old linguist studied Latin and Greek as a youth, learned Mandarin
during World War II, and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese. But the
language Shipley is most proud of knowing, the one that has shaped his
career and much of the course of his life, is understood by less than a
dozen people on earth. It is Mountain Maidu, and it was once spoken by
some two to three thousand California Indians who lived in the northern
Sierra Nevada.

Shipley learned the language 50 years ago, from a half-Maidu, half-Dutch
woman named Maym Benner Gallagher. As a 32-year-old graduate student in
linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, Shipley had arrived
at Gallagher's door in Maidu country, roughly 200 miles northeast of San
Francisco, one snowy December afternoon in 1953. Armed with a tape
recorder the size of a footlocker, he explained that he was looking for
someone to teach him Maidu. Gallagher's husband, Lee, was concerned that
Shipley had traveled a long way for nothing. "I've always heard it told,"
he explained, "that white people couldn't learn these languages."

Maidu is certainly unlike anything most white people are likely to have
encountered. It has eight cases and no prepositions and contains an
arsenal of sounds not found in any European language--glottalized k's and
g's, imploded b's and d's. Like many Indian languages, it is
polysynthetic, meaning that what we would express in a sentence the Maidu
express in a single word containing a long string of suffixes.

Yet Shipley thought he might be able to manage it. Languages came easily
to him--as a child he used to invent his own, a pastime his father
considered a sign of impending lunacy. After studying anthropology and
linguistics at Berkeley, he joined a kind of linguistic salvage operation
funded by the California Legislature. Each summer five graduate students
were provided with a car, a tape recorder, and enough money to hire a
native teacher. The goal was to document California Indian languages
before they disappeared.

Maym Gallagher was 64 when Shipley met her, although she looked and seemed
much younger. She had wavy black hair, a talent for the violin, and a
raunchy sense of humor quite unlike anything Shipley had ever encountered
in a woman. She had grown up both bilingual and bicultural, speaking Maidu
with her mother and English with her father, a Dutch settler who had come
to the Mount Lassen foothills from Wisconsin by covered wagon as a child.
Her formal education had ended after high school, but she was a natural
scholar. Within a few weeks of working together, the two had dispensed
with the traditional relationship between academic and informant and began
collaborating as colleagues, thus commencing what Shipley describes as
"one of the great friendships of my life."

Over the course of the next two summers, the pair developed a routine.
They worked on the language three or four afternoons a week, knocking off
around five to drink beer and talk. Some days they'd go driving around
Maidu country, looking for old-timers who could still speak the language
and stopping off for a drink at a local tavern on the way home. Gallagher
loved to sit there smiling pleasantly at the overweight white clientele
and then lean over to ask Shipley in Maidu, "Did you ever see anything
fatter and more disgusting?"

Shipley still has the pale turquoise eyes and easy grin he had as a young
man, and it sometimes startles him to realize that those backcountry
rambles are a half-century in the past. Throughout his career as a
linguistics professor at the University of California, Maidu has been his
enduring passion, and Gallagherwho died in 1978has been the blithe spirit
inhabiting his work. He developed a system for writing the language and
has published a grammar, a dictionary, and a lyrical translation of Maidu
myths and stories. He is now one of the last living speakers of the
language, and he sometimes worries that there is no one left among the
tribe who can teach it with Gallagher's level of particularity and care.
"I have all this language in my head and I want to get it down," he
explained recently. "Because if I don't do it, nobody else can."

But lately, Shipley has been worrying less than he used to. Two years ago
he acquired a roommate, a young Maidu of mixed blood with an uncanny ear
for language, a sweet and openhearted view of the world, and a firm desire
to return the Maidu language to his people. His name is Kenny Holbrook,
and he is Maym Gallagher's grandson.

**************************************************************************

Dashka Slater received a 2004 Creative Writing Fellowship from the
National Endowment for the Arts and is the author of the novel The Wishing
Box. She is also a contributor to such magazines as Sierra, Legal Affairs,
and San Francisco.

http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/07/06_400.html