infundibulum

CITIZEN-TIMES.com: High-tech language lessons from tribe

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will use a federal grant to buy hand-held computers that translate English into Cherokee.

The computers, called Phraselators and made by Maryland-based VoxTec International, will help the tribe teach members how to speak Cherokee.

The Phraselator is a small hand-held translation device. In the articles I’ve read about the device, it’s mostly been used in combat (if I recall correctly it was first developed for the military). It’s nice to see it being used in a language preservation situation.

With about 20,000 speakers, Tsalagi, the Cherokee Language, is one of the most-spoken Native American languages.

You know, we here at Infundibulum, or rather, ME here at Infundibulum, well, we, I, you know what I mean… attempt to run a respectable operation.

I mean, we don’t go for the cheap joke around here.

Very often.

But sometimes man, it’s irresistible.

Now please, tell me, was that really the only spelling they could come up with to try to render the pronunciation of Albert Pujols’s last name?

Nay, we think not.

Somebody was feeling kind of second grade at ESPN.com, methinks.

Thanks for pointing that out, there, Amy.

Māori Queen Te Atairangikaahu passed away yesterday in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand. She helped to promote the Te Reo Māori (the Māori language) during her forty year reign.

Maori Queen worked for youth

Maori used to be dying language, but as patron of the Kohanga Reo movement, Dame Te Ata made Maori proud to speak their mother tongue.

The message from children at the marae: “It’s cool to korero!”

The Kōhanga reo (”language nest”) program which the Queen helped to promote has been quite a successful in helping to create a new generation of Māori speakers (and as a result it’s been emulated in Hawaiian punana leo).

The word “kōrero,” which our young interviewee used, means “to speak” or “to talk.” (There’s a very nice language learning website called Kōrero Māori.)

Here’s another obituary at the L.A. Times, and a lovely photo of her coronation in 1966.

Here in Montgomery County, Maryland, there’s a paper called “El Tiempo Latino.” Which I read because it’s *cough* free. The paper is published by the Washington Post. (Not sure, actually, if it started off that way or was bought…)

A couple days ago, this article caught my attention:

Enseñanza multilingüe: Frente a un pedido oficial, escuelas del área inician clases de español, y otros idiomas, desde la guardería (Multilingual education: In accord with an official requirement, area schools initiate classes in Spanish and other languages, beginning in preschool)

Well anyway, that’s my own translation of the headline and blurb. Since it’s an interesting article in its own right, I figured I’d look it up on the web and translate the key bits. So I googled the author, and lo and behold, the original was in English, at the Washington Post:

Schools Try Elementary Approach To Teaching Foreign Languages

Interestingly, as far as I can tell, there’s no formal indication at all that translation was involved. The English version is probably the original, since it’s much longer (1400 words vs. 400 in Spanish), but no translator’s name is mentioned.

One often comes across newspaper pieces that carry taglines at the end, along the lines of “So-and-so contributed to this article…” Why shouldn’t the translator get any such credit?

August is Philippine Languages Month in the Philippines.

Speaking in tongues–Pilipino-style

This overview has some interesting Tagalog Pilipino Filipino words thrown in. (I think that’s the current term for the national language… you know what? It’s complicated. )

For instance:

IT is not Linggo ng Wika; it’s Buwan ng Wika. It’s not Abakada and Tagalog; it’s ABCD and Pilipino. It’s no longer Taglish as a language borrowed and corrupted; it’s now translation and code switching as proof of comprehension and multilingual mastery. It’s more than just stodgy textbooks and formal oratorical balagtasan; it’s also a celebration of comic-book lore and street corner kwentuhan. It’s no longer Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa; it’s now Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa ay Buwan ng mga Wika sa Pilipinas.

Ricardo Nolasco of the Philippine Languages Commission (whaddya know, they have a wiki) has some more background on that last pair of phrases:

Nolasco explains, “Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa ay Buwan ng mga Wika sa Pilipinas is a pitch for linguistic diversity. Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa was the slogan during the martial-law regime and that promoted dangerous ideas such as that having many languages was disadvantageous to the country—and that’s not correct.”

With a bit of digging I discovered that Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa means “One nation, One spirit.” It was the motto from the bad old days of the Marcos government. (And more amusingly, perhaps, it recently resurfaced in the name of the wacky Eddie Gil’s Partido Isang Bansa Isang Diwa. He promised to “make every Filipino a millionaire within one hundred days” of being elected. That didn’t work out! (Unfortunately!).)

Haven’t managed to decipher the first, more agreeable phrase that Nolasco mentions, but buwan is “month,” wikang pambansa is “national language,” and wika sa Pilipinas is (I think) “languages of the Philippines.” So I’m guessing the whole thing means something like “The Month of the National Language and (All?) the Languages of the Philippines”?

It would also be fun to know what the languages on that poster are, specifically.

While wandering around the Technorati “Language” tag, I ran across a blog called café salemba, which gives us some insight into the politics of language in Indonesia.

I don’t know much about that neck of the woods myself, linguistically, except that Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are very similar languages indeed.

According to an article that Café Salemba points to, there is a movement afoot in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei to promote the use of Malay in the face of increasing use of English, Chinese, and Arabic. (The article seems to have been moved, but also it’s also available here, and there’s a followup article here ).

I think Café Salemba is right to disregard, and even mock, the idea that government can effectively legislate how language is used:

People communicate, regardless of what language they are using. As long as you understand what I mean and I understand what you mean, we’re fine. Misunderstandings might arise, but that’s how language develop in the first place.

That is to say, language is like market. It is supposed to be free. Non-imposed, non-enforced. It grows as people need it. Let people choose how they communicate. There were times when people thought they could impose some new words. And they failed. Umberto Eco told us a story about it. The Italian fascists tried to force people to say “mescita” instead of “bar”. They failed.

It’s just not possible to prevent people from using a particular language. One needn’t look further than the Indonesian Ministry of Education website to detect the influence of borrowings from English: struktur, statistik, kalender, program, publikasi, web mail, profil, nonformal, nasional, e-government, award, workshop…. Heck, the ministry itself is called the Departemen Pendidikan Nasional Republik Indonesia. Call me crazy, but that looks like a four out of five borrowing ratio…

But even so, it’s not quite true to say that governments can have no linguistic influence in the long run — they can and they do. If you compare, for instance, the history of the African countries of Kenya and Tanzania, it’s quite clear that the heavy hand of the Tanzanian government effectively positioned Swahili as the language of the country, whereas in Kenya, English is still widely understood and used.

So there’s at least one key place where imposing a language can play a critical role in shaping the linguistic future of a country: schools.

N.Va. Prisoner Lost in Translation

Every morning, dozens of Latinos come by Kaiser’s desk. Many appear confused, frustrated. Starved for familiarity, they devour her every word, even if her Spanish is a bit broken.

Kaiser, 59, speaks English with a strong Tennessee accent and Spanish with the inconsistency of someone who taught herself more through desire than formal training. But she tries, and she sympathizes, and on a February afternoon when the halls were mostly hushed except for a man wandering around with a worried look, she listened.

You can hear the sound of me groaning as you read the next bit:

“It seems like there was a breakdown on a couple of levels,” said Tawny G. Hays, clerk of the General District Court.

From the beginning, his last name was entered as “Antonio Cruz” in court documents and as “Cruz” in jail records — a problem that both jail and court officials say often arises with Hispanic names that tend to be long and include an also-known-as.

Col. Charles “Skip” Land, who heads the jail, said the name might explain why officials failed to take Cruz to court Dec. 12. “Some people also come in with a hyphen between their name and then don’t come up unless that hyphen is typed in,” he said.