Tech anthropologist works to save dying Comanche language

[Adsos Letter]

Source: LubbockOnline
By Matthew Mcgowan | AVALANCHE-JOURNAL

The language of the Comanche people, a lifeline of its culture, is fading fast.

Its muted vowels and sapient cadence once echoed throughout the fenceless grasslands of the South Plains, but today it can muster barely a whisper.

That's why Texas Tech anthropologist Jeff Williams and a handful of other researchers have devised a plan that could help save Comanche from confinement in history books.

With a recent $215,000 two-year grant from the Administration for Native Americans, they'll shoulder the task on modern technology and a new generation of Comanche students eager to learn their ancestral tongue.

http://lubbockonline.com/stories/121809/loc_536884399.shtml

[AwakeAtLast]

1. Good to know

Technology is useful for so many things - this is a great way to use it!

K & R!

[vadawg]

2. yup but aside from a scientific viewpoint is it worthwhile to keep dieing languages

especially if the people who speak them dont want to continue them or themselves are dieing out. I can see keeping a computerized version just in case we ever need to translate something, but language is something that will change and die over time...

[Canuckistanian]

3. You have a narrow view of language

Every language carries with it its people's own history, culture, traditions and songs. So not only the language has been lost, but also a way of life. No computerized grammar book or dictionary can replace that.

And as for your statement "the people who speak them dont want to continue", did you read the article? There are young people who WANT to learn the language and elders who WANT to continue teaching it.

And furthermore, Commanche was a language that was deliberately eradicated. The Commanches were forcibly displaced from their land and their children sent to schools where it was forbidden to speak their own language. Children were beaten for speaking it.

I for one am glad that somebody is trying to save at least a piece of what was once a major part of history.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. This story was repeated all through the Americas

Native Americans weren't "disinclined" to speak their ancestral language. The U.S. government had a deliberate policy of destroying Native cultures by taking children as young as six from their parents, sending them to boarding schools far from home, putting them among children from other tribes so that their only common language was English, sometimes didn't allow them to go home for years at a time, and beat them for speaking their language.

Even when the children weren't taken to boarding schools, teachers in the local public schools would shame them into speaking only English. (The same thing happened to Latinos in the Southwest and Cajuns in Louisiana and even to European immigrants in American cities. The father of one of my graduate school friends was told by his teacher that his native Yiddish wasn't really a language, just "ignorant peddlars' jargon.")

Americans acquired their disinclination, even hostility, toward other languages through decades of these kinds of attitudes.

"You're in America! Speak English!" is a freeper bumpersticker, but it echoes what generations of children, including, ironically, Native Americans, were told by their teachers.

[madmom]

5. This is really great. My daughter is studying archeology/anthropology and

so wants to learn one of our "original" native languages.

[niyad]

6. kick