Imagine helping to recreate the language your ancestors spoke. You have to start thinking like them, even if you don’t have all their words, and even if they did not have to name all the things that you work with today. “There must have been a word, for example, for watermelon,” Nitana Hicks of Mashpee told an audience at Tales of Cape Cod in Barnstable Village this week, but that word had been lost as use of the language died out because of the dominance of white settlers. So, said Hicks, who was talking about her part in a reclamation project for the language of the Wampanoag, she thought that “wet-squash” suited the summer fruit. By agreement of others, then, in modern Wampanoag, “wet-squash” it is. Right now, there is a 7-year-old child on Cape Cod who is being raised with the native tongue as her first language. Hicks said 250 families are enrolled in classes that allow everyone of native descent “to get to the level they want.”
As preliminary work, the language project has created a dictionary, some Wampanoag-based word games, coloring and storybooks, and even a three-day “immersion camp” where only the native language is spoken. A major characteristic of the language that Hicks called “complicated” is that it does not distinguish between genders but does separate “animate” and “inanimate.”
Click here to read the full article
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Insults to Confuse Enemies - Wordnik List
You're a sycophant!" "AM NOT! Wait, what?" More Insults to Confuse Your Enemies:
Insults to Confuse Enemies - Wordnik List
Insults to Confuse Enemies - Wordnik List
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Australian project hunts lost indigenous languages
Librarians in Australia have launched a three-year project to rediscover lost indigenous languages. The New South Wales State Library says fragments of many lost languages exist in papers left by early settlers. Before British colonialisation began there in 1788, around 250 aboriginal languages were spoken in Australia by an estimated one million people. Only a few dozen languages remain and the communities number around 470,000 people in a nation of 22 million.
The rest of this article can be read here
The rest of this article can be read here
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Federal Agencies Take Action to Digitally Document Nearly 50 Endangered Languages
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced the award of 10 fellowships and 24 institutional grants totaling $3.9 million in the agencies' ongoing Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program.
This is the seventh round of their campaign to preserve records of languages threatened with extinction. Experts estimate that more than half of the approximately 7,000 currently used human languages are bound for oblivion in this century, and the window of opportunity for high-quality language field documentation, they say, narrows with each passing year.
These new DEL awards will support digital documentation work on almost 50 endangered languages, enhance the computational infrastructure of the field and provide training for the next generation of researchers.
To continue reading this article, click here
This is the seventh round of their campaign to preserve records of languages threatened with extinction. Experts estimate that more than half of the approximately 7,000 currently used human languages are bound for oblivion in this century, and the window of opportunity for high-quality language field documentation, they say, narrows with each passing year.
These new DEL awards will support digital documentation work on almost 50 endangered languages, enhance the computational infrastructure of the field and provide training for the next generation of researchers.
To continue reading this article, click here
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Top 10 Weirdest Writing Systems
As writing goes, English is pretty straightforward. Sure, it has its weird parts: some of our letters combine to make new sounds, we have extra letters we don’t really need and there are spelling rules that only apply half the time. But on the whole, we have it easy.
It’s not always like this. The Latin alphabet that English uses is alphabetic – in general, there’s one letter for every sound. In other writing systems, one character can signal a whole syllable. Or it might be like the Chinese system, in which characters signify whole objects or concepts.
And sometimes, things can get even weirder. Click here to read about the top 10 strangest writing systems of the world...
It’s not always like this. The Latin alphabet that English uses is alphabetic – in general, there’s one letter for every sound. In other writing systems, one character can signal a whole syllable. Or it might be like the Chinese system, in which characters signify whole objects or concepts.
And sometimes, things can get even weirder. Click here to read about the top 10 strangest writing systems of the world...
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Endangered Alphabets
In doing some linguistic research, I came across a fascinating project, called the Endangered Alphabets Project. Fundraising is needed for this project - below is an introduction to it & the full website can be accessed here, at The Endangered Alphabets Project.
The world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, but as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. Another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the alphabets in which those languages are written.
Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters.
The Endangered Alphabets Project, which consists of an exhibition of fourteen carvings and a book, is the first-ever attempt to bring attention to this issue.
The world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, but as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. Another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the alphabets in which those languages are written.
Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters.
The Endangered Alphabets Project, which consists of an exhibition of fourteen carvings and a book, is the first-ever attempt to bring attention to this issue.
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