Nothing new here. There are dying languages all over the world. But here in the Idaho/eastern Washington/western Montana area, with a fairly homogeneous population base, it is exciting to see the Native American heritage honored and strengthened.
This video, courtesy of Spokane, Washington’s Spokesman Review, describes the work and lets you hear some of the language:
More information on preserving Salish can be found at
the Salish Language Revitalization Institute’s website.
An employee at MultiLingual Computing, Inc. since 1998, Laurel quickly found a home and took the editorial reins of MultiLingual. A self-confessed Luddite, she nevertheless jumped into all the editorial content, including the more technically oriented coding pieces. She had a sharp eye and a sharper editing pencil when editorial content was submitted, always keeping the integrity of the magazine and the interests of the readers in the forefront.
A bright student who headed to college at the age of 16, Laurel majored in journalism, but also studied French, which became a lifelong passion.
We are a small team in a small town, so we are close as coworkers and we know each other from community activities as well. This was definitely true with Laurel, who served on the local library board for five years, worked as an accompanist at local churches, and who helped to save the town’s historic theater and served on its board for many years.
At MultiLingual Computing, we will miss the curmudgeon who hated bringing food to our monthly pot lucks—so much so that she wrote an essay entitled “Potluck Anxiety Disorder.” But her standby of apples and cheese were always welcomed. It was Laurel who encouraged us to talk like a pirate on September 19. And who would often show up for work in costume on Halloween. It was Laurel who put together the MultiLingual spelling bee team for local competition.
As a critical staff member, as a coworker, as a friend—we will all miss Laurel.
The UK’s Guardian covers the story well here and here, as well as it being picked up by Wired, describing Meedan (which means “town square” in Arabic) thus:
Think of it a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.
You can also view a YouTube video that explains how the system works:
I am sure we will be hearing a lot more about this story soon.
"Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lie a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature. Westerners share, for instance, evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We’ve come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. (The National Institute of Mental Health reports that a quarter of Americans have diagnosable mental illnesses each year.) The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for ‘psychologizing’ daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and unconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group. These Western ideas of the mind are proving as seductive to the rest of the world as fast food and rap music, and we are spreading them with speed and vigor.”
If Western ideas about the mind so easily creep into the subconscious of the rest of the world, what other cultural mentalities will drift away with time and globalization?
CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” just ran a segment (video also available) on the central African forest elephants. The segment profiles Andrea Turkalo’s two decades of observing these elephants, and categorizing their sounds and actions. Many of the sounds are at levels below the pitches that humans can hear.
The Elephant Listening Project is associated with the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. Cornell University researcher Katy Payne began the Elephant Listening Project. She’s building an “elephant dictionary” that might help researchers learn how many elephants there are in an area, how they interact, what they’re doing—and if they’re reproducing. Turkalo frequently travels to Cornell to present data and observations from her work in the field.
The “elephant dictionary” itself is in its infancy and work continues. The good side effect of this is that at least this particular batch of elephants has escaped poachers due to the fact that others are watching them.
It’s the fake relative pronoun. A relative pronoun, obviously, is a word that begins a relative clause. In the sentence just previous to this one, the word is “that;” essentially, this pronoun melds two sentences, “a relative pronoun is a word” and “the word connects two relative clauses,” into one. Other such pronouns in modern English usage are who, whom, whose and which, as you no doubt know from grammar class.
Correctly, the opening example should be “the thing is that John doesn’t love me,” or merely the invisible “the thing is, John doesn’t love me.” Over the years, however, I’ve noticed people inserting an extra “is” in sentences like this because their brain tells them (assumedly) that something is missing from the more natural, more colloquial relative clause “, John doesn’t love me.” In many languages, one needs a relative pronoun at all times; it is not optional (C’est que John me n’aime plus) like it sometimes is in English. This option appears to cause confusion. Should there be something more? What if we just repeat “is”?
In the end I can’t pretend to know the motivation of the human brain, but I do find this phenomenon interesting. I predict that in the future, we may begin to see “is” labeled as a dialectical relative pronoun, much like the “what” found, for example, in archaic rural outposts of the UK: “The boy what eats more meat gets more dessert!”
As a side note, from the quick search I did on the internet, I did not see any research on this subject. I’m totally calling it, then.
Typically, of course, languages develop in context, just as they are learned in context. This did actually happen occasionally even in this constructed language, as Frommer explains in the Vanity Fair article.
To some extent, new language creeps into being all the time. This year, for example, “unfriend" was officially recognized in English. Language evolves with the times and technology.
And also with the subculture. I had the strange experience of growing up in a rural microculture of ten souls: me, my four siblings, and the five children we played with. Somehow we invented our own words to keep the peace, the most important of which sounded something like “ught.” If someone said this word, everyone else had to shut up and listen. If you “broke ught,” everyone else looked at you like you were evil (In retrospect, this sounds disturbingly like the conch in Lord of the Flies, but fortunately our microculture remained entrenched in the rules rather than fragmenting into anarchy. Maybe this was because of the ten, six of us were girls, and our parents were never that far away).
As someone who generally feels at ease in cultures not my own, I’m trying to weigh this, ask if it is true. On some level, I have to say that it is: culturally, things get lost in translation; I remember consistently being confused when I asked a foreigner if he wanted to do this or that, and his reply was “that’s Ok.” To his ear, this meant a polite yes; to mine, it meant a polite no.
But that’s simple lack of idiomatic translation. The idea that words mean less when they’re not in the language of your upbringing goes further. And I’m not sure I completely agree. I was perhaps more thrilled, not less, to be told affectionately “Je t’aime bien,” by a friend in France than I would be by a friend in the States saying the (more or less) equivalent “I love you, man.” A language not your own may still work its way deep into your heart. Sometimes it is merely by virtue of the fact that the person speaking the language is beloved; to hear “I love you” in any language, spoken with sincerity, is extremely moving as long as the translation is known. One watches the eyes, the voice, the intention, the kept promise, more than one watches the cultural diction. It’s amazing, really, how similar each culture’s facial expressions and moral tenants are (a frown is bad, a laugh is good, deception is bad, generosity is good).
And perhaps that’s this writer’s dilemma: doubting love (or anything) not because of language, but because of those unexpressed things, those nonverbals. Is an apparent lack of commitment real lack of commitment, or is it mere cultural rote? Does she doubt him because they don’t speak the same native language, or because he isn’t trustworthy?
This could apply to business as well as personal life, and the added obstacle here is our cultural delicacy — or indelicacy. We may be too PC to inquire into something we suspect might just be cultural difference, for example, and get cheated on a business deal. We may be too callous or xenophobic, and end up offending a potential business partner.
Whatever the case, language and culture continue to fascinate us and continue to demand education and better idiomatic translation, better localization. Making sure your actions match your words certainly doesn’t hurt in anyplace I’ve ever heard of, either.
The New York Times reports from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a study of monkeys in Africa finds them putting conditional suffixes on sounds—or shall we say words? Klaus Zuberbühler and researchers previously identified sounds with meanings when studying Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai National Park of the Ivory Coast. They now have shown that the monkeys modify their sounds to communicate further refinements of the sound meanings.
Now, I know that some suffixes on sounds are a far cry from Shakespeare, but it’s fun to realize that these guys have been communicating quite well while we assumed, in our hubris, that such communication was ours alone.
Recent reports from the Iraq Programme of the Institute of War & Peace Reporting indicate a continuing language problem between Arabic-speaking Iraq and its Kurdish-speaking neighbors.
“Though they share the same country, Arabs and Kurds know little of each other’s history and even less today of each other’s languages,” writes Husam al-Saray, a journalist in Baghdad. “Their shared legacy of revolts against colonial Britain lies long forgotten amid a simmering internal conflict over land and resources.”
Under the Iraqi constitution Arabs and Kurds have equal rights as citizens. Both languages must be taught in all Iraqi schools. But few young Kurds speak Arabic, and even fewer young Arabs learn Kurdish.
Signs on roads and official buildings in each region tend to be either in Arabic or in Kurdish, rarely both. If a second language is used, it is usually English.
Journalist Najeeba Mohammed in Erbil reports the number of Kurds who can speak Arabic fluently is rapidly shrinking, and analysts say the next generation of Kurdish leaders could be compromised by their lack of fluent Arabic.
Some 44 of 21,635 schools in Kurdistan offer education in Arabic at present, according to government figures. Many private language academies have popped up in the region, and English courses appear to be the most popular.
(© Andrea Turkalo)
