Dirk Elzinga wrote:
> The fellow I'm going to be working with most is in his late
> 30s. He was raised by his grandmother who used only
> Chemehuevi at home. He tells the story of when he went to
> school; he couldn't speak English, and the other kids teased
> him quite a bit. It got to the point where the teacher had to
> put him out of the classroom because of the disruptions. He
I imagine many of us can relate to this in some way, although not nearly to
this extreme.
> got into fights frequently because of the teasing and never
> finished school. He now realizes that he is actually a
> community resource because of his first-hand knowledge of the
> language and culture (along with the remaining
> Chemehuevi-speaking elders). He is also a very courageous
> person; he bought a computer and signed up for internet
> access at his own expense even though he has very little
> experience with this technology, because he knew that it
> would be instrumental in helping to preserve (or at least
> document) his language and culture; he's really putting
> himself "out there".
Incredible. He has my admiration for his commitment for preserving the
language and culture.
> The other elders are also eager to help,
> but are much more skeptical of my motives, etc. Years of
> getting shafted by the White Man has made them understandibly
> wary. I've gotten a lot of help from a semi-speaker who has
Completely understandable.
> coordinated a lot of the interactions between me and the
> elders. Her mother is a fluent speaker, and she is learning
> the language now herself.
Very cool.
> The project will have several stages. First, we need to
> establish a practical orthography. This work is mostly
> finished, but there are some details which need to be worked
> out. (I'll be happy to elaborate if there is interest.) After
I personally, am content to wait until I get to see the "final form" on the
web. I don't feel my skills are up to making useful suggestions to any
problems the orthography has presented. I suspect, though, that there are
many on the list that would be interested in the orthography as it stands,
and what problems you have yet to overcome.
> the orthography is settled, I will be training the remaining
> speakers in using it to write in Chemehuevi. This will be a
Hmm. Was Chemehuevi entirely oral until this point? (My apologies if you've
already said, and I missed it!)
> daunting task; no matter how transparent the orthography is
> from a linguistic (or even naive user's) point of view, the
> *idea* of writing traditional, and possibly sacred,
> narratives is very foreign to many native cultures.
> Persuading them that they can write even seemingly
Is the barrier going to be belief in their own ability, or that writing
these things down may be "taboo"?
> incosequential things will be hard enough. And that it's okay
> to make mistakes. Once we have a body of text, we can start
> creating pedagogical materials and putting them into various
> print and electronic formats. At best what we'll have by the
> end of the summer is the shell of a web site, but probably
> not much material there.
Hmmm. If some of us here on conlang do take the time to learn, and then
attempt to translate something from our native language to Chemehuevi, would
it help the process? It occurs to me to wonder if the Elders or the fellow
earlier would be entertained by our attempts. On the other hand, they might
find it paranoia-inducing, complete strangers learning their language.
Depends on their point of view, I would imagine.
> The only
> published descriptive work on Chemehuevi is a short
> grammatical sketch and lexicon by Margaret Press published by
> the University of California Publications in Linguistics
> series in 1980. It covers the phonology in 20 pages, syntax
> in the next 100. The lexicon contains barely 1000 items, and
> there are no texts. So there is still plenty of work to be done.
Hmm. I wonder how difficult it would be to get a copy of that work. As
limited as it is, when it is all we have...
Iain