The fate of Forest Enets – a short commen t

[Trond Trosterud]

Florian Siegl kirjoitti 24. apr. 2007 kello 19.07:
> I have just returned from fieldwork on Forest Enets on the Taimyr  
> Peninsula (22.11.06 - 19.04.07).
Thanks to Florian for several valuable observations, and for raising  
an imporant debate. The observations summarised here:
> I’m tempted to say that only 4 fully competent speakers of FE remain.
> ·    The Forest Enets intelligentsia in Dudinka is wondering why  
> there is so few primary material published albeit almost all Forest  
> Enetses alive have been serving as consultants
The natural follow-up question here is to what extent the younger  
forest enets are interested in participating in revitalisation work,  
or, rather, what kind of revitalisation they would be interested in.

> Personally I share their concerns, the former practice of doing  
> fieldwork for the sake of science is a concept antiquated by now.
I, for one, certainly have had my share of theory-driven fieldwork,  
with no feedback whatsoever to the community, and am not in any  
position to moralise. On the behalf of the research community, I  
would still like to point out that some of our predecessors certainly  
have done work relevant to the language communities. One prime  
example is Konrad Nielsen, his lexicographic work for Northern Sámi  
continues to be a source for language workes to this day. One aspect  
of commitment to the language within the community, the will to get  
to know the world view, the language and the beliefs of the  
predecessors; material of great help here can be found in the texts  
and dictionaries published by the different Finno-Ugric societies.  
(even more helpful it would of course be if transliterated and  
parallel-published in Russian instead of German).

> Language endangerment has resulted in the emancipation of native  
> speakers who no longer see themselves as “something” to be studied.  
> Whereas this trend has started in other parts of the world already  
> in the late 1970s this understanding has arrived in Russia by now.
(Side note: The emancipation probably has other causes.) It would be  
interesting hering more about to what extent this understanding "has  
arrived", i.e., to what extent speakers and descendants of speakers  
really are perpared to change their behaviour, and in what way.

> Nowadays one has to justify one’s work and speakers of endangered  
> languages have become critics of scientific practice. A central  
> consultant of mine in Potapovo initially asked me why she should  
> tell me “the old stories” again as “everything I know or found  
> worth to tell I have told many times to…” which was followed by a  
> list of researchers.
This certainly is a valid protest on her part. The question is what  
the language community wants (or will appreciate, if it is made  
accessible to them). This will vary from community to community, of  
course, but as long we do not have any clear answer to this question   
we will have a hard time changing our practice.

One answer is of course dictionaries:
> „I would also like to express the hope that more effort might be  
> put into producing dictionaries of Australian languages than has  
> been case to date. (...) In particular, ’the academic’ linguists  
> have essentially contented themselves with long grammatical  
> studies, squeezing out ’theoretical’ conclusions of various sorts,  
> and have as yet published few or no texts and no adequate  
> dictionaries. I
Florian then goes on:
> Principally the situation in Uralic linguistics outside the  
> historical-comparative framework is similar. There are still no  
> modern grammars (“long” grammatical studies) for the majority of  
> Uralic languages and for several languages well known to the  
> subscribers of this list I personally doubt that long grammatical  
> studies can be expected. In
Here, there is a misunderstanding. The "long grammatical studies"  
referred to in the Australian case are not "modern grammars" in the  
sense of "reference grammars", they are treatises of the type "is  
there a VP in Dyirbal or not" (or, equally irrelevant, "the history  
of Mansi vowels"). If descendants of next generations' forest enets  
would like to restore their ancestors' language (like Cornishmen do),  
they would need both texts, dictnionary, AND a reference grammar.
> the Forest Enets case, linguists are already judged harshly for  
> their behavior.
And rightly so, it seems (in this particular case, even the texts,  
grammars and dictionaries are missing).

This debate turns interesting if we are able to move forward, to find  
better strategies, and answer both the Forest Enets informant, and  
other informants as well.

 From Tromsø work on Sámi during the last decade (building on initial  
work by Pekka Sammallahti), I can report the following:

Work first on localisation (character encoding, keyboard layout,  
sorting order, etc), and then on language technology (constructing  
first morphological automata, syntactic parsers, and then  
spellchecker programs), makes Sámi text production and reading in the  
computer age much easier than it would otherwise have been. The work  
also has been portable: With our Sámi infrastructure as a starting  
point, we have been able to make a Greenlandic spellchecker (releast  
last autumn).

As a further extension, one could take the morphological dictionary  
of Tundra Nenets, write it into a finite-state transducer (which it,  
in a way, already is), and use the resulting parser as a basis  
component in a Nenets spellchecker. Although computer-based text  
production is not what the average Tundra Nenets activity, the  
existence of such tools certainly would make the production of Nenets  
publication easier.

The same story could be retold for all the Uralic literary languages.  
There already are automata for Eastern Mari, Erzya; partial work for  
Komi and Udmurt, in Budapest they have analysed several Uralic languages

Still, when traditional uralistics work focuses on Sámi, as the  
ongoing etymological Álgu project in Helsinki, this certainly is  
something that would have been interesting to the language community  
(and its neighbours), had they known anything about it: Sámi  
prehistory is one of the most hotly debated issues in the North  
Norwegian press, and errouneous (Norwegian-biased) laymen arguments  
flourish, without competent protests, due to the disinterest for  
historical lingustics among Norway-based linguists. So, there  
certainly is a place for core uralistics also in the popular debate.

Now, language revitalisation certainly is more than computers  
(languages are preserved by being spoken), and linguistics certainly  
is more than computer  linguistics. Rather than trying to give a  
coherent picture of the "new" role of the linguist, I have mentioned  
one tiny part of it, along with the observation that in order to be  
able to rewrite the grammar as an automaton, I will need a  
comprehensive generative grammar (in the classical meaning of the  
word, which is "explicict grammar") of the language in question.

With the observation that the classical uralic diciplines of language  
history, extensive dictionaries and text editions actually may be of  
interest to the speech community (admittedly provided that it is  
communicated back to them after the fieldwork), and that grammars may  
be relevant, albeit indirectly, as basis for other activities, I  
conclude in a slightly more optimistic tone than did Florian. To me  
it seems we do have something to report back to the language  
communities, and we might as well starting doing just that.

Trond Trosterud.

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Trond Trosterud                                        t +47 7764 4763
Institutt for språkvitskap, Det humanistiske fakultet  m +47 950 70140
N-9037 Universitetet i Tromsø, Noreg                   f +47 7764 5216
Trond.Trosterud (a) hum.uit.no          http://www.hum.uit.no/a/trond/
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