infundibulum

Tlingit, which should be pronounced something like “Klinkit” according to Wikipedia , is a Na-Dené language spoken in what is now Alaska and British Columbia (same family as Navajo, how about that?) .

That’s a long way from Stratford-on-Avon, but you can go see a version of Macbeth in Tlingit this month at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC:

Perseverance to Do ‘Macbeth’ in Tlingit

But this time the 12-member cast, whose ages range from 15 to 42, has agreed to perform most of the play in Tlingit (pronounced klink-it).

“It’s like running a marathon, without training for it,” said actor Ishmael Hope, who plays Malcolm, the son of King Duncan who is killed by Macbeth. “But we’re doing the work to make it happen.

“None of us is going to sound like a fluent speaker, because no matter how meticulous we are, it’s a difficult language. But we’ll still be able to convey meaning.”

Apparently the actors don’t really “understand” their lines, except insofar as they understand their English equivalents:

“It takes 10 times longer to learn just one line,” said Waid, who plays Macbeth and has performed Shakespeare in theaters worldwide with various production groups since he was a teenager. “As far as the structure of the language and the grammar, it’s still a mystery.”

That’s kind of weird… but when you’re dealing with a languages that has very few fluent speakers, the “publicity” aspect of a project like this is arguably at least as important as the “preservation” aspect. I imagine it would be almost impossible to put a big production like this together exclusively with fluent speakers. How many Tlingit speakers are actors, after all.

I wonder if they will be publishing the text in some form for Tlingit learners.

Some rummaging about for stuff about Tlingit turned up TroubledRaven.com, a site by Lance Twitchell, who is the language consultant for the DC performance and mentioned in the article. He has some nice materials on Tlingit: Lingit X’einaxh’.

Technorati sent me a link to an interesting article at the ever-awesome LJWorld.com (the little paper/media empire that Django built):

Split-apart nation comes together

The paper is about a family reunion, of sorts, and a long overdue one: the two parts of the Ponca tribe have been living as as two separate entities in Nebraska and Oklahoma since the 1870s.

I happened to stumbled across this history before, because I was digging around in the Wikipedia article on the Omaha, who speak a related Siouan language. This detail in the article caught my eye:

Congress terminated the tribe in Nebraska in the 1960s, and it was reinstated in 1990. The northern tribe is still feeling the effects of that period, as the Nebraska members have no fluent speakers of the Ponca language.

“In order for us to continue to be a strong nation, Poncas, we need to have that language. We need to have that culture,” Wright said.

Long title, huh?

Long post.

I finally got around to ordering Mother of Writing : The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic Script from Amazon.

Anyway, I’ve only just begun to dig in, but the book is about a rather mysterious writing system which was invented for the Hmong language, spoken primarily in Laos, but also in France, Canada, Australia, China, Thailand, French Guyana and the United States.

This isn’t to be confused with the various roman-script systems for writing the language, which are rather interesting and worth a post in their own right– no, the book is about a totally distinct script called Pahawh Hmong. You can see images of it at Omniglot under Pahawh Hmong alphabet.

The alphabet is believed by some Hmong to have been the divinely inspired creation of Shong Lue Yang (Soob Lwj Yaj).

(And by the way, eek the Wikipedia article on the Hmong language is abysmal…)

The book was written by a Christian missionary. I found it pretty interesting trying to peel back the layers of who was trying to interpret whom (and what). Yang himself was a (not exactly Christian) missionary, and part of the book was written by one of his followers. But the part which is strictly linguistic can be read without regard to any of that stuff, and the Pahawh Hmong is certainly a fine and interesting piece of orthographic engineering.

The topic of the intersection of religion and linguistics is something which kind of gets my blood boiling. Linguistics is a science, and it should be treated as such. But because missionary “work” overlaps so much with linguistic research, we end up with that the new language codes have a religious organization as their authority… And I mean the authority. As in, the ISO calls these guys up and asks for “the answer” on linguistic nomenclature.
Now, think about that for a second. What if the ISO called up the “Intelligent Design” guys for authoritative answers on biological classification? Maybe they should call up a proper psychic to resolve disputes on whether global warming is real.

I kid, slightly.

So why is the linguistics world okay with being reduced to being the authority on “Ancient, historical, and constructed languages,” while SIL is the authority for… most of the languages on the planet, and most of the languages for which you really need unyielding impartiality?

Here are some language- and translation-related stories for your perusal.

The Telegraph - Calcutta : Metro “The mosquito coil brand being advertised is Maxo, marketed by Jyothi laboratories. It is a national brand and therefore must be having campaigns running in areas other than Bengal. This ad is in Bengali and from all indications it is not a translation of the national campaign. It is an ad conceived and created in the local language.”

The Enquirer - Translator helps patients overcome language barrier “”When you have a child dying, you can barely remember your own language,” Morales said.”

MetroWestDailyNews.com - News & Opinion: Police who speak the language “Just two hours into his shift for the night, Milford Police Officer Carlos Sousa encountered three drivers who spoke little or no English.
Sousa slipped easily into Portuguese to talk with a Brazilian teen whose car was towed from East Main Street because he had no valid license. After pulling over a pickup truck, Sousa broke into Spanish to explain a traffic ticket.
In a town with growing Ecuadorian and Brazilian immigrant populations, Sousa’s fluency in three languages is a valuable skill on the force.”

I’ve been following the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) Newsline for a while in Bloglines. It’s updated a lot, and I would say it’s *cough* fair and balanced on most issues. Here are a few recent links:

• Malaysia Mulls Fines on English Use in Legislature
• Shop Names in English: Support Lost in Translation
• An American Indian Charter School Plans to Teach Navajo Language

Worth a look if you’re interested in language policy issues.

I put together one of those Google Co-op search engines for sites related to language, translation, linguistics, and stuff like that. Check it out:

Language Search

Site recommendations welcome.

BBC NEWS | England | Cornwall | Beatles get the Cornish treatment

Covers of the Beatles in Cornish .

A few years back there were some interesting blog postings going about regarding whether Cornish was dead or not — see Languagehat for details. (My old blog exists only as an Internet Archive ghost.)

Taipei Times: Flanders PM sparks linguistic storm

If, like me, you are a connoisseur of linguistic brouhaha of all flavors, you should look no further than Belgium to get your kicks. Because good grief! I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t quite figured out exactly who is talking about what when you the terms thrown around in that neck of the woods — starting a sentence with “Flemish” in particular, seems like a pretty good way to get into an argument.

I for one will gladly bow out beforehand…

“Apparently, the Francophones are intellectually incapable of learning Dutch,” Leterme was quoted as saying in the interview, published on Thursday. “Look at the difficulties Francophone leaders, even the king in this country, have speaking Dutch fluently.”

SHAZZAM!

“One can only imagine that the remarks … must have been mistranslated or are an example of improper usage of the French language,” he was quoted by another leading French-language daily, La Libre, as saying.

FTHWAP!

Please insert rambunctious onomatopoeia in your dialect of choice.

PS, I’m just kidding!

Thanks to pal Amy for the tip:

Australia picks first Aboriginal-language movie as Oscars entry

The movie, which was filmed entirely in the indigenous language of Ganalbingu, was screened at the Cannes film festival in May, winning de Heer a special jury prize.

Starring Jamie Gulpilil, Richard Birrinbirrin and Frances Djulibing, it tells a fictional story set in the distant past in which the lead character is attracted to one of the wives of his older brother.

In order to teach his brother tribal law, the older sibling tells a mythical story of love, kidnapping, sorcery and revenge.

Neat.

There’s just one (!) hit for “Ganalbingu” in Wikipedia, here you go:

The linguistic variety is echoed by the cultural diversity in the area, evidenced by the number of different religious ceremonies and the multitude of artistic forms in design, music and dance. People speak Ndjébbana, eastern Kunwinjku, Kune, Rembarrnga, Dangbon/Dalabon, Nakkara, Gurrgoni, Djinang, Wurlaki, Ganalbingu, Gupapuyngu, Kunbarlang, Gun-nartpa, Burarra, and English. Most people have command of at least three of these languages.

That’s from the article about the Maningrida indigenous community. (You can see where it is in Google Maps.)

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.