Reviving a dead Alaska Native language

There was big news last year for the Eyak language, the arrival of 22-year-old Guillaume Leduey, a French student who had stumbled upon Eyak while randomly surfing the Internet at age 15. Leduey had taught himself to speak Eyak using materials he ordered from Alaska. His 2010 trip to the United States came at the invitation of Michael Krauss, University of Alaska linguistics professor, and the only living speaker of Eyak on the planet since the death of Marie Smith-Jones, honorary Eyak chief and the last fluent Eyak speaker of the language; and, Laura Bliss-Spaan, a former television reporter who has taken up preservation of the language as a personal mission since discovering Eyak while covering the Cordova Iceworm Festival years ago.

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Dictionary Of Ancient Akkadian Provides Glimpse Into Civilization’s Cradle

Linguists and researchers of ancient Mesopotamia began compiling the dictionary in 1921. The dictionary, which spans some 10,000 pages in 21 volumes, took no less than nine decades to complete. In the process, it outlived some of the nearly 100 scholars who devoted their careers to it. The final volume, published just weeks ago, caps what editor-in-charge Martha Roth describes as far beyond a mere lexicon. "There are about 28,000 entries in this -- 28,000 words -- that provide a window into the history, culture, and society of the ancient Near East. This was not designed to be a glossary. The entire project sought to explicate the world of ancient Mesopotamia through the words we have preserved," Roth says. Like each reference for each of the dictionary's words, it was discovered on one of the millions of tablets that have survived the centuries. And each line of wedge-shaped cuneiform writing, carved into the clay, has a story to tell.

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