Help with language samples

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Hello,

Thanks to Liz Coville, Lavanya Murali Proctor, Tracy Duvall, Kathryn Graber, Zane Goebel, and Stef Slembrouck (my apologies if I forgot someone) for helping me so quickly medicate (and mitigate) my ignorance about languages (including one I had mis-identified). I've updated the webpage and added "OK" to the confirmed samples. But, I still would like to identify a number of samples from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Zambia, Brazil, Ethiopia/Somalia (a Somalian refugee?), India and Thailand, as well as those labeled "Chinese".

By the way, in case anyone is interested: The last segment in my webpage, "Yagan - Chile", is a three-minute report in Spanish on Cristina Calderón Harban, the allegued last speaker of Yaghan, in Tierra del Fuego. She'll turn 84 in May. Cristina Calderón's story is, apart from a worrying example of language death, intriguing. After her sister's death in 2005 or so, she is said to remain as the last speaker of Yaghan, though not the only ethnically Yaghan person alive. Her grand-daughter Cristina Zárraga, who has learned a little of the language, wrote in Spanish the Yaghan stories that Calderón told her (also in Spanish) a few years ago. The stories were published in Spanish and English as Hai Kur Mamashu Shis ('I Want to Tell You a Story'), with Jennifer Windh as the English translator (the book is out of print; a new edition only in English is in the making).

In an article in The New York Times in 2004, "Say No More", Jack Hitt reports how he had tried to contact Calderón, but she requested "impossible sums of money" for Hitt to see her, as alleguedly she did then and does now in order to have her picture taken, or to hear her speak in Yaghan. But apparently back then Calderón was not the very last speaker. So Hitt went on to visit another old woman who knew the language, Emelinda Acuña, who lived alone. Acuña was pleasant about the visit, and said she used and practiced the language by talking to herself while doing household chores. When asked, then if she had ever met Cristina Calderón to converse in Yaghan,  Acuña restlessly said "No. We don't talk to each other". The story is a bittersweet metaphor of language extinction, isn't it?  I made a PDF version of Hitt's article:

http://db.tt/FG4y55ci

The Spanish television segment on Cristina Calderón and the Yaghan which you can find in my language samples web page, 

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3997668/LDM/index.htm

is from April 24, 2006 (evening news "Noticias de la 2", TVE2, Televisión Española).

-celso

Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
lxalvarz at udc.es
=============

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Linguistic Anthropology Discussion Group [mailto:LINGANTH at listserv.linguistlist.org] On Behalf Of Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
> Sent: zondag 29 januari 2012 22:48
> To: LINGANTH at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> Subject: [LINGANTH] Help with language samples
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> For my introductory classes (Linguistics, and, this semester, Language, Discourse and Communication) , I have been collecting a number of short (a few seconds to a minute) language samples from TV in order to illustrate aspects of human communication or structure (mostly phonology and phonetics). But I haven't dared to identify some of the languages, and I'm requesting your help with this. The video fragments are (provisionally) in this page (just excuse the basic formatting):
> 
> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3997668/LDM/index.htm
> 
> Videos are MP4. Most segments are subtitled in Spanish (one or two, in Portuguese). Just click and a separate window should open. I need help to identify only the numbered samples, from 1 to 38. Most are from pieces of news in location. In 1-2, I have no information. In others, I only  know the country, but I cannot assume which language the speaker was using. In samples 15-38, I use question marks (e.g. Tonga ?, Hindi ?), or use such useless labels as "Chinese", as I don't know whether that's Mandarin or not.
> 
> I would appreciate any help. Please reply to my account, lxalvarz at udc.es , just indicating the sample number and the language. You may use these fragments freely, too, in case you find any useful.
> 
> Thank you very much,
> -celso
> 
> Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
> lxalvarz at udc.es
> =============