Anthro-Ling

2011-09-25T15:14:00.001-05:00

Serpent and egg

While working on my dissertation, which partly involves what has come to be called Mississippian culture (ca. 1000-1700 CE), I have been investigating iconography and archaeology linked to this culture. Some of you may have heard of or seen the Serpent Mound of Ohio, dating from ca. 1050 CE (see diagram of it below):

While many archaeologists still debate its actual meaning, I have found an interesting correlation between this image and the Biloxi language, a dormant Siouan language once spoken in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In Biloxi, the word for 'star' is iNtka (the N here represents nasalization of the prior vowel /i/), which literally breaks down to iNti 'egg' + -ka 'ATTRIB' suffix, or a suffix meaning 'like/somewhat', thus 'egg-like'. This correlation between a star and an egg is intriguing.

And what does a star, or egg, have to do with a serpent? Well, in the Mississippian world, a world which the Biloxis were once part of, a serpent, or, in particular, a rattlesnake, was associated with rulership or monarchy, much like the cobra was associated with ancient Egyptian pharaohs and the dragon was associated with the ancient Chinese emperors. Further, the serpent was associated with the Underworld. Ideas of the Underworld and Above World were associated with priests or otherwise powerful people who had access to esoteric knowledge not generally available to the common people. The association of a serpent from the Underworld to an egg, representing the stars (heavens), or the Above World, is thus powerful imagery for Mississippian aristocracy, who, along with priests, had knowledge of all things in the Underworld, the Above World, and the Earth in between. (This imagery, by the way, goes back probably well even before the Adena cultural horizon of Ohio, ca. 500 BCE-200 CE.) A good look at the Ohio Serpent Mound diagrammed above thus appears to show a serpent, or snake, perhaps giving birth to creation and the universe in the form of an egg, a creation to which any great ruler in the form of a God-Monarch would wish to align themselves.

But the story doesn't end in Ohio. Look at the topmost photo below of an image at the Blythe Intaglios in the desert of southern California associated with the Mojave peoples (perhaps among others):

Note anything similar to the Ohio Serpent Mound, such as the apparent snake with coiled tail and large head, or perhaps wide open jaw expelling an egg? (Unfortunately the dating of these intaglios is unclear, but currently they are placed between 1000-1500 CE.) If this correlation between two monumental depictions of a serpent and egg on two ends of the North American continent holds, this would suggest the apparent migration of a Mississippian cultural icon to the California Southwest, proving long-distance transcontinental trade and the long-distance migration of Mississippian cultural elements well into the West.

2011-07-05T13:28:00.001-05:00

Migration of a Word?

We all know that geese and other types of birds migrate, right? But words can also migrate from place to place. For example, several similar-looking words for 'goose' appear in several Native American languages of the Gulf Coast and Southeast: Natchez (isolate) laalak, Tunica (isolate) lálahki, Yuchi (isolate) shalala, Chickasaw (Muskogean) and Mobilian Jargon (Muskogean trade language or pidgin) shalaklak, and Karankawa (isolate) la-ak. Farther west, in California, there are: Yana (Hokan) laalaki, Nisenan (Maiduan) lalak, Mutsun (Ohlonean) lalak, Rumsen (Ohlonean) lalk, Pomoan (Hokan) lala, and Southern Sierra Miwok (Miwokan) langlang. Such long distance similarities are often attributed to onomatopoeia(1), which may indeed be the impetus for its origin, but "some resemblances are remarkably precise even if one allows for onomatopoeia" (Haas 1969). And the story of the migration may not end in the Americas: what's even more intriguing is that in the Vogul (Uralic) language of Central Asia there is a similar word for goose, lak. To stretch things even further, in Persian (Farsi), the word laklak means 'stork,' a bird appearing somewhat similar to a goose.

Is this linguistic proof of migration from Central Asia to North America, down along the Pacific coast of California and across to the Southeast? It is hard to say, but it is interesting that the similarity of these words for 'goose' extends in such a fairly well defined geographical pattern down western and across southern North America. Certainly it might indicate a well defined trade and communications network between the West Coast and the Southeast perhaps via the Colorado and/or Gila and Rio Grande Rivers. The term's origin may well extend right over into Siberia and Central Asia, perhaps leaving a linguistic footprint of one possible former route of human migration. More research needs to be done on this.

(1)onomatopoeia: refers to a word or name representing the sound or noise made by an object; in English, for instance, cocka-doodle-doo is onomatopoeic for the sound a rooster makes (the equivalent of which is ku-ku-ru-ku in Spanish).

Reference:
Haas, Mary. 1969. The prehistory of languages. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.

2011-05-31T00:55:00.000-05:00

Exodus Lost

I would like to recommend this book written by my friend Stephen Compton. Here is my review of it:

Exodus Lost is a page-turner for anyone interested in anthropology and history. I highly recommend this fascinating, educational read by a scholar refreshingly willing to think "out of the box."

This book can be ordered through Amazon and is also available for Kindle.

2011-05-30T15:42:00.002-05:00

Biloxi 'moon' and Chinese 'star'

It sometimes happens when you study different languages of the world that what seems to be a strange coincidence pops up, which then leads me to wonder if it REALLY is coincidence or due to some ancient connection. The Biloxi word for 'moon' and the Chinese written character for 'star' is a case in point.

I have analyzed the Biloxi word for 'moon,' nahinte, into its component parts as (i)na 'sun' + (h)iNte 'egg,' thus 'sun-egg.' (The Biloxi word for 'star' is iNtka, which I analyze as iNte 'egg' + ka 'like' (attributive), or 'egg-like.') The association of moon or star with egg seemed odd at first until I began learning Chinese writing and found that the (Simplified) Chinese character for 'star' 星 (xing1) incorporates the character for 'sun' (top) and 'seed/seedling' (bottom) (Lee 2003: 133). There is not much difference semantically between egg and seed, since they both convey the idea of a container for offspring or dissemination (and thus creation).

What does this mean? I'm not sure, except that I can't help but think that this may be more than mere coincidence. Creation narratives (often called 'mythologies' in our Western world, minimizing the validity of anything not originally written down) often show similar themes across Eurasia and the Americas. Could this link between moon, star, and egg/seed represent some ancient cultural belief that may have originated in Central Asia? Were stars considered the 'eggs' or 'seeds' of creation of the Universe?

Reference
Lee, Philip Yungkin. 2003. 250 essential Chinese characters for everyday use, Vol. 1. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing.

2011-05-30T15:08:00.000-05:00

I'm back!

After a long hiatus of being quite busy with Ph.D. program research and projects, I am back. It has been an exciting year of language study. I got up to the second level of intermediate Uyghur. Unfortunately, I cannot go any further, since KU does not offer advanced-level Uyghur courses. (Perhaps a trip to Xinjiang or Kazakhstan is in order?) I have also started taking Mandarin Chinese lessons through a private tutor--my first foray into studying a tone language!

As for my student status, I am now Ph.C. (Ph.D. Candidate), more popularly known as ABD (All But Dissertation). This after completing three Field Statements, three parts of a Comprehensive written exam plus an oral exam/Dissertation Proposal Defense. Now I begin writing the dissertation, which is titled, "The Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) As A Language Area." Essentially I am comparing the LMV language contact area ca. 500-1700 CE, researching evidence of contact among the several languages of the area, including Biloxi, Tunica, Atakapa, Chitimacha, Natchez, and Choctaw/Chickasaw. (The LMV can be compared to better known language contact areas, or Sprachbunds, such as the Balkans area of Europe, South Asia, Norteast Africa, and the Amazon.) I will also incorporate some archaeological and narrative evidence into the language contact research.

More on this as things evolve!

2010-05-01T11:14:00.002-05:00

Pyramids in the Plains

Although I am primarily a linguist by profession, I have taken more than a mere passive interest in archaeology, especially since archaeological evidence, like linguistic evidence, can reveal much about history we only thought we knew. Recently I went to the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conference in St. Louis. While at the conference, I took part in a group tour of Cahokia.

About 1,000 years ago, ca. 1050 CE, Cahokia was the largest city north of Mexico, larger than London at the time, estimated to have had a population of at least 10,000 and more if one includes the extensive surrounding network of farmsteads and villages. Cahokia was “about the size of an average ancient Mesopotamian city-state” (Pauketat 2009:26). Not until the early 1800s, when Philadelphia’s population surpassed 20,000, was there a city as large as Cahokia north of Mexico (Pauketat & Bernard 2004:12).

The first Euroamerican accounts of Cahokia came from Henry Marie Brackenridge, a young lawyer who corresponded with former president Thomas Jefferson. In a letter of 1813, Brackenridge stated that he was “astonished and awestruck at the number and size of the earthen pyramids clustered in a several-square- mile area in and opposite the French-American gateway city of St. Louis” (Pauketat 2009:27). Brackenridge stood atop one pyramid. He saw that “pyramids trailed off to the north-northwest along the banks of Cahokia Creek” (ibid.) and, when he decided to follow yet another line of pyramids leading off to the east, the path led him “into the midst of the ruins of an ancient city, with large symmetrical pyramids everywhere” (ibid.). He wrote: “I was struck with a degree of astonishment, not unlike that which is experienced in contemplating the Egyptian pyramids” (Brackenridge 1962/1814). This ancient city, with pyramids as awe-inspiring as those of Egypt, was Cahokia.

Stairway up Monks Mound pyramid

One of the primary archaeologists to conduct excavations in the Cahokia region, Timothy Pauketat, led our tour. Our tour began by crossing the mighty Mississippi River over to East St. Louis where we made our first stop. Both central St. Louis (the pyramids of which were removed in the nineteenth century) and East St. Louis were part of the Cahokian metropolitan complex. East St. Louis was once connected by a path, or causeway, to “downtown” Cahokia. At the East St. Louis site, we observed several archaeologists busy conducting excavations. We observed the excavated foundation of one of the settlement’s houses and the deep interior of a storage pit that once held grains for the community’s inhabitants.

Our next stop was at Grossman, a village between East St. Louis and Cahokia. We parked in a shopping center parking lot to quickly observe the remnants of small mounds along a nearby highway. All traces of the town itself are now obliterated by the modern world.

Next was a stop on a residential side street in another town to observe the remnants of more small mounds at the site of Pfeffer. According to Pauketat, the house foundations excavated in this area showed that they were not permanent—they were built and rebuilt over a period of decades and were uniquely aligned toward lunar standstills.

Our next stop was the site of Emerald, which lies along a narrow road in rural Illinois. The site is currently private property with a house lying next to a large hill, which was Emerald’s largest pyramid, now covered over with trees and vegetation. A couple of smaller mounds were barely distinguishable as small bumps a little farther along the side of the road.

After Emerald we finally went to the Big Daddy of ancient North American cities: Cahokia. At one time there were more than 200 packed-earth pyramids, habitually referred to as ‘mounds,’ of differing sizes and shapes: ridgetop, conical, and platform (flat-topped) (Pauketat & Bernard 2004:10). Only about half of these have survived the ravages of time and the careless treatment by builders of modern subdivisions and highways. The largest of these mounds is Monks Mound whose base is larger around than Egypt’s Gizeh Pyramid. Monks Mound, named for French Trappist monks who were found inhabiting the area nearby, is a two-tiered platform pyramid whose summit is thought to have contained several buildings, including a large structure, perhaps the home of a ruler or some other elite(s). We climbed to the top of this pyramid via the stairway leading up to its apex. From the top we had an amazing view in all directions, including of St. Louis in the distance, now sporting skyscrapers and the famous Arch, but in Cahokia’s heyday sporting more pyramids, visible from Cahokia itself. We could see several other mounds surrounding Monks Mound here in “downtown” Cahokia. And immediately below the south side of Monks Mound was the Great Plaza that extended for quite a distance toward other pyramids still visible in the distance. In this plaza is where the ancient inhabitants would have amassed for politico-religious spectacles, perhaps re-enacting ancient mythologies, by rulers, priests, or other elites.

Reconstruction of Great Plaza (Monks Mound at far end)

All of us were struck by the sheer size of Monks Mound, as well as the sheer size of Cahokia itself, which, along with many surrounding ‘suburban’ villages like Grossman, Pfeffer, and Emerald, extended for miles in all directions, villages up to a two-day walk on the outskirts of Cahokia. There is evidence of mass immigration to Cahokia by peoples of perhaps various nations. One village, Halliday, about ten miles southeast of Cahokia (which we did not visit), appears to have been settled primarily by women, immigrants or children of immigrants from southeastern Missouri or northeastern Arkansas who weaved, farmed, and made pottery but had a diet and cultural habits unlike most Cahokians (Pauketat 2009:121-122).

What Cahokia may really mean for North American history

Could Cahokia really have been the center of a political alliance involving several Native American nations speaking different languages? Peoples later identified as Siouan, Caddoan, and Algonquian may have all been associated with this large ancient city (Pauketat 2009:125). Linguistically, evidence of a pidgin or creole language, which often arises from such international1 alliances, is unfortunately lost to us due to lack of written data, but we know that such languages arose among Native Americans coming into contact, perhaps the best known of such being the Mobilian Trade Language (MTL) of the Southeast and the Chinook “jargon” of the Northwest. While these trade languages have traditionally, and rather ethnocentrically, been regarded as post-European phenomena, there is ample evidence that MTL at least was pre-contact, its OsV (object-subject-verb) word order like that of Proto-Muskogean, quite different from English, Spanish, or French SVO (subject-verb-object) and even different from the modern Muskogean languages’ SOV (subject-object-verb) word order, which, to me, in itself is a good indication of its having an ancient pre-European origin.

I believe, given the archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence so far amassed, that ancient Native Americans may have spent a lot of time cooperating and creating peaceful alliances. While skirmishes and some warfare are inevitable, I think what we are learning about Cahokia and what it means to ancient American history fits well with what writers such as Charles Mann in his book 1491 have been telling us: pre-contact North America was quite heavily populated before the arrival of European diseases. There is ample and still growing evidence that ancient North Americans traded with each other over vast distances, from one end of the continent to the other, coming in contact with each other and learning about each other’s customs and beliefs, and learning each other’s languages. Lisa Mills, in her analysis of DNA from an Ohio Hopewell site, demonstrated that the Algonquian Ojibwas had close association with the site. While this is not surprising, given the close geographical proximity of Ojibwas to the region, what is surprising is that genetic links are also apparent between the Ohio Hopewell site and groups as geographically diverse and widespread as the Apache, Iowa, Micmac, Pawnee, Pima, Seri, Sioux, and Yakima. This seems to indicate that indigenous nations from across North America were in contact at Hopewell, ca. 200 BCE - 500 CE, visiting with each other, probably establishing peaceful trading alliances and creating multiple trade, or pidgin, languages to enable successful communication with each other. Unfortunately, MTL may be the only example of an ancient trade language that survived by the time of European contact and was able to be recorded. It may have been only one of many of such languages that arose across the continent in ancient times, however. (There was also Plains Sign Language, used as a means of international communication on the Plains.)

What does this mean? It means, of course, that North America before the arrival of Europeans was no vast untouched wilderness populated only by nomadic hunters and gatherers as has so often been taught in school textbooks and popular media. Instead, it means that ancient North America had cities of monumental architecture2 and established long-range trading networks and political alliances across the continent. It means that we must rethink the Eurocentric attitudes that have plagued the true history of our continent since colonial times, originally written by biased and racist European and Euroamerican historians who thought that Native Americans were inferior and incapable of building cities and altering their landscapes and environments. The history of North America does not begin with the United States--there were cities and civilizations in North America thousands of years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.

1 Note that I use 'international' in this sense to refer to what has been habitually called 'intertribal.' However, the word 'tribe' has biased and negative connotations (perhaps meaning 'not quite civilized' people), and the words nation or people are more appropriate. Thus, I use 'international' in its true sense to refer to people coming from different indigenous nations.

2 There were other, although smaller, cities or towns of pyramids scattered throughout the Mississippi Valley and Southeast, including Moundville, Bottle Creek, Angel, Ocmulgee, Etowah, and Aztalan. There were thousands of earthen pyramids throughout the central and southeastern region of what is now the United States, most of which were destroyed by Euroamerican colonizers, their soils used for railroad ballast, among other things.

References:

http://ohio-archaeology.blogspot.com/2006/06/ancient-dna-from-ohio-hopewell.html

Brackenridge, Henry M. 1814 (1962). Views of Louisiana. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.

Mann, Charles. 2006. 1491: new revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Vintage.

Pauketat, Timothy. 2009. Cahokia: ancient America's great city on the Mississippi. New York: Penguin.

Pauketat, Timothy & Nancy Stone Bernard. 2004. Cahokia mounds. New York: Oxford University Press.

2010-01-22T13:41:00.000-06:00

Some Observations of Rumsen Ohlone Grammar

paper published online

My paper titled, Some Observations of Rumsen Ohlone Grammar has been published online in the Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics (KWPL). Here is the link:

https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/handle/1808/5719

2010-01-06T22:13:00.009-06:00

Mississippian and Maya cosmology
The Hand constellation and the Milky Way

As I have been working on a Biloxi ethnography (still in progress) and researching both MIIS1 and Maya mythology and cosmology, interesting similarities occur between the two. For instance, it is interesting that both cultures focus on Orion's Belt as having major cosmological significance in relation to creation, life, and death. In Mississippian cosmology this is reflected in the Hand constellation, where Orion's Belt forms the wrist of the cut-off hand (various Plains myths refer to a celestial chief's arm or hand being cut off and left to dangle in the sky) facing downward in the night sky (Lankford 2007). In Maya cosmology, Orion's Belt is referred to in the Popol Vuh, the Maya creation story, as both the 'three stones of creation' and the 'hearthstones' (Freidel et al. 1993).

The fact that the stars of Orion's Belt were important to ancient Native Americans is evident in the pyramidal layout of Teotihuacan's three largest pyramids: Pyramid of the Moon, Pyramid of the Sun, and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, which seem to match quite well the celestial configuration of Orion's three Belt stars. Of course, interestingly, the three pyramids of Egypt's Gizeh also seem to match this configuration!

Similarly, both cultures refer to the peculiar movement of the Milky Way in the night sky. The 'rising and falling sky' motif was apparently prevalent throughout the US Southeast (among at least the Chitimachas, Alabamas, Cherokees, Choctaws, Shawnees) (we can probably safely add Biloxis here), the Plains (Foxes, Poncas), and the Southwest (Navajos) (Lankford 2007: 204), represented in mythology and apparently based on the nightly movement of the Milky Way. The Milky Way moves from a near vertical position, in which Mayas refer to it as the 'cosmic tree,' to a nearly horizontal position, in which Mayas refer to it as the 'sky canoe.' This is the celestial canoe carrying the Two Paddler Gods who set the 'Three Stones of Creation' (Orion's Belt, Ak 'Ek, or Turtle) in place, from which First Father, or the Maize God, is reborn, thus creating a new universe (Freidel et al. 1993). The Canoe then 'sinks' on the western horizon at dawn, the time of the birth of creation (ibid.).

The Hand constellation is said to mark the location of the Portal to the Otherworld, at least in Southeastern mythology. Within the Hand constellation "lies a galaxy (Messier 42) visible as a fuzzy star that is understood to be a hole in the sky, a portal" (Lankford 2007: 197). "Today, [Alnitak, Saiph, and Rigel in Orion] are said to be the three hearthstones of the typical Quiché [Maya] kitchen fireplace, arranged to form a triangle, and the cloudy area they enclose (Great Nebula M[essier] 42) is said to be the smoke from the fire" (Tedlock 1985: 261 in Freidel et al. 1993: 79). The Southeastern Hand constellation portal may indeed be the same portal into which the Maya king "Pakal falls on his sarcophagus lid and out of which beings of the Otherworld emerge" (Freidel et al. 1993: 87).

The Hand-and-Eye motif of the MIIS. Could the 'eye' symbol represent 'see' while the 'hand' symbol represents the constellation? This may represent the idea of a god or gods seeing or looking down onto the earth from the Hand constellation, wherein lies the portal, possibly also represented by the eye, between earth and the Otherworld.

Similarly, the Milky Way plays similar roles in both cultures as a 'Path of Souls' used by the dead to journey into the Otherworld. In fact, the Mayan term for 'death' is 'och be, literally meaning 'enter the Road [of Souls],' meaning the Milky Way. There is a "quite similar understanding of the Milky Way among Siberian groups" (Lankford 2007: 212) suggesting "an impressive time-depth" (ibid.) for this association of the Milky Way with death and as a path to the afterlife.

This petroglyph from Chaco Canyon (once home to the Anasazis) in the US Southwest, thought by some to commemorate the 1054 CE Supernova explosion. The starburst may represent the explosion while the crescent moon and hand symbols represent the event's location in the sky: just above the moon and at or near the Hand constellation. If this interpretation is correct, it would show that the Hand constellation was known even in the Southwest and perhaps throughout much of Native America.

More work remains to be done on Southeastern (or Mississippian) cultural beliefs and cosmology in comparison with those of Mesoamerica. Perhaps more entries to come on this very complex topic....

1 MIIS = Mississippian Intercultural Interaction Sphere (also known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, or SECC)

References

Freidel, David, Schele, L. & Parker, J. 1993. Maya cosmos: three thousand years of the shaman's path. New York: HarperCollins.

Lankford, George. 2007. The "path of souls": some death imagery in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. In Ancient objects and sacred realms: interpretations of Mississippian iconography. Reilly, F. Kent & Garber, James, eds. Austin: University of Texas Press.

2010-01-01T21:47:00.001-06:00

Avatar

OK, if you haven't seen this movie yet but plan to, you may want to skip down to the Na'vi Language part of this entry, since I do give my thoughts on the movie itself here in this first part.

You can read movie critics galore critiquing this movie, so I will not do much of that here. But I will graciously offer my opinion overall: the movie is cinematographically (that's a long word!) excellent (especially in 3D), and the dialogue is so so. And, of course, I found the artificial language created especially for this movie quite interesting, but I'll come back to that below in its own separate entry.

As a linguistic anthropologist whose interests and passion lie in the preservation and documentation of already dormant or moribund languages and cultures, I find the movie wreaking with what has become known as "Noble Savage Syndrome," as exemplified in the words of Alexander Pope in his 1734 Essay on Man:

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, a humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

The analogy to the nineteenth century US with its European colonization and the abhorrent treatment of indigenous peoples, up to and including forced removal and all-out genocide, is very evident throughout the movie. The only major difference, of course, is that the movie has a Hollywood happy ending, utterly insulting to any Native Americans watching. American Indians did not in reality, unfortunately, have any Jake Scully defecting from the genocidal European and Euro-American war machine hellbent on Manifest Destiny to save the day and bring an end to what the movie calls the "Time of Sorrow." This time of sorrow is short-lived in the movie and soon ends, but, lest we need to remind ourselves, such sorrow never ended for our indigenous peoples who still suffer the multi-generational effects of several centuries of European and Euro-American racism, cruelty, and genocide.

But if you can manage to overlook another obvious Hollywood attempt at assuaging our "white guilt," then the movie is fairly good and entertaining.

Na'vi Language

First Tolkien's Elvish, then Okrand's Klingon, and now Frommer's Na'vi! Perhaps there will be a future for us linguists and linguistic anthropologists in the creation and development of artificial languages for sci-fi movies. In this latest sci-fi hit, the indigenous peoples of the planet Pandora are given a real (invented) language with real vocabulary and grammar. Paul Frommer, the USC professor who invented the language, tried to make it sound "alien" yet pronounceable. Probably the most notable sounds are the ejective p, t, and k, which appear in some Native American languages, including Mayan. Frommer was not the first linguist to examine Amerindian languages as models for inventing an artificial language. Okrand, a linguist who got his PhD at UC Berkeley with his dissertation on Mutsun Ohlone (a close cousin of Rumsen), admitted that the Ohlonean languages were the inspiration for some of the sounds and grammatical aspects he put into Klingon.

Click here for a short YouTube report on the Na'vi language. Perhaps there will be a dictionary and grammar forthcoming?

2010-01-01T14:13:00.000-06:00

Rumsen Folklore

It occurred to me that I didn't post information on the Rumsen (Ohlone) folklore article I got published in the Journal of Folklore Research in December 2008. Here is the abstract:

Sadly, it often happens that languages and cultures become dormant with no written record of their existence, of how the people perceived their world, and how they described it through their folk stories. Such would have been the case of the now dormant Rumsen Ohlone language of California were it not for the tireless dedication of linguist John P. Harrington. He spent years collaborating with the last native speaker of Rumsen, Isabelle Meadows, to discuss her culture and her folk stories. Among the cultural gems that arose from these discussions are the two narratives published here. Both stories feature the trickster figure, Coyote. The first tells of a visit by a sea monster, which causes Coyote's wife to die of fright. The second describes a battle of wits between Coyote and Hummingbird. Both stories give us, through the original Rumsen language, insight into the culture and sense of humor of the Rumsen people, whose descendants still inhabit the central coast of California.

A PDF version of the article can be purchased for $13.50 directly from the Journal via this link:

http://inscribe.iupress.org/doi/abs/10.2979/JFR.2008.45.3.383?cookieSet=1&journalCode=jfr

In relation to this, one of the stories from this article will be published in the upcoming online edition of the Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics (KWPL) that also includes a brief Rumsen grammatical sketch based on the grammatical aspects of the Rumsen version of the story. This will be free and downloadable from the Working Papers link (on the left) on the University of Kansas's Linguistics Department website. My two prior papers on Biloxi are also free and downloadable anytime from this site.

2010-01-01T13:40:00.002-06:00

Uyghur language - Uyghurche - ئۇيغۇرچە

In this coming Spring semester, I will be taking my first class in the Uyghur language. Uyghur (oo-ee-ghur) is spoken primarily in Xinjiang 'new dominion' (also called Chinese Turkestan) in the northwestern portion of the People's Republic of China (PRC). There are also speakers in neighboring Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan1. Uyghur is a Southeastern Turkic language. It is related to Turkish. (Turkish is spoken in Turkey, while other Turkic languages are spoken across central Asia, including Uyghur, Turkmen, Tatar, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz. Just remember that, while Turkish is a Turkic language, not all Turkic languages are Turkish.) While Uyghur has several million speakers, it is considered a "threatened" language due to the infiltration and imposition of the PRC's primary official language, Mandarin. (This is not unlike the situation here in the US with the imposition of our official language, English, upon Native Americans, for example, whose languages and cultures for the most part, if not already extinct, are close to it.)

Uyghur-speaking region of western China, centered around Kashgar.

The Uyghurs (often erroneously referred to as 'Chinese Muslims' even on such respected US national media as NPR, which should know better!) are one of over 50 ethnic minority groups of the PRC. They have inhabited northwestern China, which includes the Teklimakan Desert (Tarim Basin), since about 900 CE. The famous Silk Road passes through here and it has long been a major crossroads and trade route between West and East. Its inhabitants have included Tocharians (a possible Celtic group who inhabited the region from about 2000 BCE2), Persians, and Mongols as well as Uyghurs. Mummies have been unearthed in the Tarim Basin region buried under desert sands for some 4,000 years that are apparently the well-preserved bodies of the blond and blue-eyed Tocharians (see my prior post on this topic), probably originating in northern Europe. (In fact, many inhabitants of the region still have the light hair and facial features of their Tocharian ancestors.)

Red-haired child of Xinjiang

Uyghur and the other Turkic languages are part of the broader Altaic language family, which includes Turkic, Mongolian, Korean, and possibly Japanese. While Altaic was for a while also believed related to the Uralic languages, including Hungarian and Finnish, but this idea remains controversial. (The inclusion of Japanese under the Altaic umbrella is also still hotly debated.) For me, one of the most intriguing aspects of studying Uyghur is from the historical-comparative linguistic perspective of seeing how the language has borrowed from other languages throughout its history. For example, kitab 'book' and mu'ellim 'teacher' are from Arabic; istakan 'glass' and poyiz 'train' from Russian; dunya 'world' from Persian; much 'pepper' from Sanskrit; pul 'money' possibly from Tocharian (?); and yangyu 'potato' from Chinese. The meanings of these borrowed words occasionally changed when introduced into Uyghur; the Uyghur word lughet 'dictionary' was borrowed from Arabic, in which the word originally meant 'language.' Sometimes two borrowed words compete with each other: tëlëwizor (Russian) and dyanshi (Chinese), both meaning 'television.'

The letters of the (Latin) Uyghur alphabet are: a, e, b, p, t, j, ch, x, d, r, z, zh, s, sh, gh, f, q, k, g, ng, l, m, n, h, o, u, ö, ü, w, ë, i, and y. For English speakers, the hardest sounds to pronounce are the very Scandinavian-like ö and ü, and the three guttural sounds x, gh, and q. Uyghur has been written with three different scripts: Latin-based, Cyrillic-based (as used in Kazakhstan and other Commonwealth of Independent States [CIS] [formerly of the USSR] countries), and a modified Perso-Arabic script (used in writing Farsi, or Persian). The latter has been adopted by the Xinjiang Language and Script Committee (Xinjiang Til-Yëziq Komitëti Tetqiqat Merkizi 2008) as the official transliteration system for Uyghur.

Tarim Basin, Xinjiang

Like other Turkic languages, Uyghur is subject to rules of front-back vowel harmony. For instance, the locative ending -da changes according to the final vowel sound of the noun it is attached to: suda 'at/on the water', atta 'on the horse', mektepte 'at school.' Uyghur is heavily agglutinative, meaning suffixes are added to roots to build up larger words, words that must often be translated by entire sentences in English: oquwatqanimda 'When I was studying...." (Such agglutination, I might add, is also characteristic of many Native American languages, including those of the Algonquian family.) Uyghur, like its Turkic relatives, has a complex modal system, including a system of evidentiality, through which one communicates how they received a certain bit of information: first-hand, through witnessing the event directly oneself, or second-hand, via a second or third party report, which may incorporate the speaker's judgment of the information's reliability or believability. Such systems of evidentiality also occur (surprise, surprise?) in many Native American languages, including Biloxi, as well as in Tibeto-Burman languages.

Artist's rendition of Mahmud Kashgari, compiler of the first Uyghur dictionary ca. 1050 CE.

Some Uyghur words English speakers might recognize: chay چاي 'tea' , bazar بازار 'bazaar, market', aral ارالئ 'island' (Aral Sea 'Island Sea'), tansa تانسا 'dance' (Russian), nan نان 'bread' (Indian or Persian nan), salam سالام 'peace' (Arabic), seper ~ sefer سەفەر 'trip/journey' (cf. Swahili 'safari'; Arabic).

1 The ending -stan is a Persian suffix meaning 'place of' and is related to Sanskrit sthāna, Latin status, and English state.

2 Modern anthropologists have generally adopted the abbreviations BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) in place of the former BC (Before Christ) and AD (After Death [of Christ]) due to the Christian religious connotations of the latter.

2009-12-29T12:47:00.005-06:00

Christian Lord's Prayer in Biloxi

This is a first, tentative attempt at translating the Christian Lord's Prayer from English into Biloxi. The black font is of course the Biloxi, the blue is the actual traditional English form of the prayer, and the red is my literal English translation of my proposed Biloxi wording:

Ąkadi nacįtka

Our father in the sky

Our Father who art in Heaven

ayace xi

thy name is sacred

hallowed be thy Name

ithi xi hu

thy house sacred come

Thy Kingdom come

ite ǫǫni, amą itka nacįtka hą.

thy will to do, earth on and sky in

Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Nąpi dêê ąkpataaskǫǫ yąkhukąko

day this our bread us give

Give us this day our daily bread

ąksihu kicadkąko ką ksihu ąkicadi

our badness thee forget and badness we forget

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

te wayą kyąduskąkoni

desire toward do not us take

Lead us not into temptation

ksihu kyąhe yąkįpudahikąko

badness from us protect

But protect us from evil.

Ithi sąhį, ithi phixti, ithi xixti.

thy house strong, thy house good very, thy house sacred very.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,
įkxwi, įkxwi.
always, always.
forever and ever.

Amen.

2009-12-08T18:41:00.000-06:00

Quote

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

- Samuel P. Huntington

2009-11-26T00:23:00.000-06:00

How to cure a migraine

and other ailments in old Egypt

I was reading an article from the Journal of Coptic Studies about Coptic medicine practices. Apparently one of the first Coptic kings, Manaqiusch ibn Aschmun, of whom nothing is now known, ordered the construction of the first Egyptian hospitals. Also, during this early period in history, ca. 1300 AD, women were among the practicing doctors of Egypt, as mentioned in early Coptic medical documents: TCAEIN EEI EHOUN (tsaein eei ehoun) 'the (female) doctor (who) entered' (the T- prefix is the feminine definite article, thus indicating a female). The Coptic word for doctor, CAEIN1, goes back to Ancient Egyptian (AE) swnw (sunu); the word for medication, prescription or treatment, PAHRE (pahre), goes back to AE phrt (pahret?).2

Following are a couple of the more interesting treatments (some of the documents appear incomplete or in fragments):

For migraine: KOPROC N[EROMPE, LIBANOC, ARCUNIKON ... ;NOOU HI HYMJ (kopros ncherompe livanos arsynikon ... thno'ou hi heimdj xro) 'pigeon dung, incense, arsenic... rub with vinegar and turn.'

For a cold: OUACCWWD ETBE PEHREUMA MN PMAUE ETHORS ECWTM JI NAK ... NEUVORBIOU, ;NOOU HI NEH ME ] EHRAI HN SENTF SAULO EUO NHREUMA NCECWTM NKECOP (ouassood etve pehreuma mn pmaue ethorsh esotm dji nak ... neuforviou thno'ou hi neh me ti ehrai hn shentf shaulo euo nhreuma nsesotm nkesop) 'A cure for a cold and hard-of-hearingness: Take ... Euphorbium (?), rub it with olive oil. Give it in the nostril. The patient will cease being stuffed up and will again be able to hear.'

Well, it's up to you if you want to try these treatments at home!

From:

Kolta, Kamal. 2004. Krankheit und Therapiemethoden bei den Kopten. In Journal of Coptic Studies 6, 149-160.

(Translation from the original German is mine.)

1 Could this Egyptian word be the ultimate origin of the -cine and -cian suffixes of English medi-cine, physi-cian?

2 The vowel sounds of AE are often still a mystery, since the AE hieroglyphic writing did not indicate vowel sounds, only consonant sounds, as in the scripts of other Semitic languages. Coptic, written in a version of the Greek alphabet, can often help supply the unknown vowel sounds, however.

2009-11-22T22:05:00.003-06:00

The Tocharians

Celts in western China?

Among the interesting books I read during the summer was one called The Mummies of Urumchi, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (1999). She is an archaeologist, linguist, and textile expert all wrapped up in one. During the 1990s she went to western China to visit the museums of Ürümchi, the capital city of China's Xinjiang province, a.k.a. the Uyghur1 Autonomous Region, also sometimes called East Turkestan. Her main objective was to examine the mummies that have been retrieved from the sands of the Teklimakan Desert, or the Tarim Basin, found in almost perfectly preserved condition despite being around the same age as their Egyptian counterparts, ca. 2000 BC. Barber examined not only the physical features of the mummies but also the fabric of their well-preserved clothing.

One of the "Mummies of Ürümchi" unearthed in the Teklimakan desert

These mummies are not east Asian in appearance, but rather they exhibit western European physical features, including being tall (men and women often over 6 feet tall) and reddish-blond hair, with their method of textile manufacture and patterns appearing most like those of northern European groups, especially that of the Celts. Were there truly people of northern European descent living in the deserts of western China?

The "Beauty of Loulan" - mummy, bottom, and facial reconstruction, top.

There is both archaeological (Caucasoid mummies, fabrics, textiles) and linguistic evidence for it. Late in the nineteenth century, documents were found in the Teklimakan region (Tarim Basin) written in an Indic (Sanskrit-like) script that, when transcribed and translated, revealed an Indo-European (the large language family that includes Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, Greek, Russian, German, and English) language with close affinity to the Celtic languages. The language is called Tocharian, known to the Greeks, since Alexander probably encountered them, as tokharoi. Further, artwork of the region dating back to the ninth century reveals paintings of men with Caucasian features, reddish-blond head hair, and prolific facial hair. That they were converts to Buddhism is revealed not only by the artwork but also by the unearthed documents in the Tocharian language that relate to Buddhist teachings and philosophy.

Paintings (ca. 900 AD) showing Tocharians in what is now western China. Note Caucasian appearance and thick facial hair of (Celtic?) Tocharians. Both paintings portray the Tocharian association with Buddhism.

1 Although the Tarim Basin, or Teklimakan, was once a Tocharian and Persian settlement region, the Uyghurs, a Turkic group, often erroneously called Chinese Muslims, have inhabited the region since about the ninth century.

2009-11-17T22:22:00.000-06:00

Will the Coptic Language Rise Again?

Portion of an article appearing in Egyptology News and RantRave.

Some people agonise over endangered species. My pet cause is endangered languages. When I hear that a dialect is dying out or that young people aren’t passing on an obscure language, it saddens me. It is one thing to examine shards of pottery or fragments of a manuscript found insulating a wall. It is another matter entirely when people alive today represent and advocate a point of view that fell from political dominance. When I hear about the descendants of British Loyalists proudly proclaiming their ancestry, it makes my own country’s history come alive with the freshness and immediacy of current events. It is for this reason that I so enjoy Alistair Cooke’s history of America. To me, the proper way to study the past is to recreate the crossroads at which past generations once stood, to wonder anew about truths received as a part of collective memory.

It is generally believed that Coptic is an extinct language, alive only in the prayer books and scriptures of Coptic Christianity, which is one of the major branches of the Christian faith tradition. Coptic is the language of ancient Egypt. Unlike Arabic , it is not Semitic but Afro Asiatic.1 In its earliest from, it was written with hieroglyphics. Later, it was written with a phonetic alphabet which is mainly Greek but has added characters for sounds not found in Greek.

The Islamic conquest of Egypt involved harsh repression of coptic as a spoken language. Indeed even today, the adherents of Coptic Christianity endure civic liabilities in Egypt that are unimaginable in the west.

The most commonly believed time line of the Coptic language lists the mid 1600’s as the time in which the last speaker of this language died. Now there are reports that the language may still be spoken, still a living language.

The most solid report of Coptic language survival comes from the Coptic Monastery of St. Anthony in the Red Sea Mountains about 110 miles southeast of Cairo. According to the “redbooks” web site, the monks in this monastery speak Coptic among themselves as a language of daily business and discourse . The article notes as follows.

“Amazingly, the monks who live here still speak Coptic, a language directly descended from the language of the ancient Egyptians.”

Of course, what really makes a language alive is when families pass it on to children, or better still, when villages perpetuate an endangered tongue. Such reports about Coptic are not numerous enough for those who wish the language well.

Despite this, there is a report of an extended Egyptian family that speaks Coptic among themselves, including even the detail of a woman who got strange looks when she spoke it on her cell phone.

The Daily Star of Egypt reports ‘ “Mona Zaki is one of only a handful of people that continue to use the language in everyday conversation. She speaks a colloquial form of Coptic with her parents and a few relatives that dates back 2,000 years.

______________________________________________

I also hope that Coptic will revitalize and be successful. It would be a shame for the rich language and culture of the Egyptians to forever end up, like so many others, in the dustbin of history. - Dave

Footnote:

1 I must respectfully disagree with the author here. Semitic is part of the Afro-Asiatic family. Egyptian is related to Arabic, Hebrew, and Akkadian.

2009-11-17T16:29:00.001-06:00

El Mirador

One of the largest ancient Maya cities, and home to possibly the world's largest pyramid.

Click here to see CNN story on this ancient American metropolis.

2009-11-14T14:21:00.008-06:00

Ancient Mound Destruction

City leaders in Oxford, Ala. have approved the destruction of a 1,500-year-old Native American ceremonial mound and are using the dirt as fill for a new Sam's Club, a retail warehouse store operated by Wal-Mart.

This is proof that ignorance and racism against Native Americans persists to this day. This story represents the continuation of a 500-year-old Eurocentric racist idealism that basically says that nothing created by the American Indians is worth saving or even acknowledging. It's the continuation of an ethnocentric Euro-American attitude that says American history only began in 1492. Never mind the fact that American Indians had established civilizations on our continent thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans on its shores.

Part of the reason for this historical denial is the Western propensity to think that if a language and culture weren't written down then it certainly never achieved any level of 'civilization,' that such 'preliterate' people were mere nomads wandering through an 'unspoiled wilderness' chasing bison and gathering plants, nuts, and berries. But let's set the record straight: oral tradition is thought to be much more accurate than written tradition, less subject to manipulation and deception. And oral tradition forces feats of memorization and the learning of complex mnemonic devices the likes of which we, in our modern 'porta-brain' society of laptops and Blackberries, can scarcely hope to appreciate or imitate. Added to this of course was the U.S. government's policy of genocide and forced assimilation of American indigenous peoples, a policy which necessitated the spread of propaganda declaring Native Americans vastly inferior to 'civilized' Europeans. It is this propaganda of Manifest Destiny which still persists to this day.
This story reminds us that indeed there continues blatant disrespect for the nations that came before us on this continent. The Mississippian civilization, traditionally dated from ca. 950 A.D. to ca. 1550 A.D., constructed thousands of pyramidal mounds along the Mississippi River from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico and all across the southeastern U.S. Many of these flat-top mounds contained civic or religious buildings on their summits, or the houses of the highest-ranking elites. (Mississippian civilization is noted for being highly socially stratified, like Mesoamerican societies, with sharp class divisions. These were highly aristocratic agrarian societies, not more egalitarian hunter-gatherers.) Nobody now knows how many Mississippian mound cities or towns there actually were, since, in the nineteenth century, the soil of many unoccupied mounds was used for rail bed ballast (Kehoe 2002: 170) during the construction of the nation’s railroad system. Mounds were dismantled and built over with impunity, even though one large one, destroyed in 1869 for rail ballast and upon which modern St. Louis was built, “contained a tomb chamber described as having a ceiling of logs and plastered walls and floor,” many bodies lying in rows, “torsos covered with thousands of shell beads ... conch shell spine pendants, marine shell beads, ... and a pair of small copper masks (pendants)...” (ibid.: 173-74). Another large mound in Spiro, Oklahoma, was so filled with artistic riches, including thousands of pearl beads, blankets, conch shell gorgets, effigy pipes, repoussé copper plates, figurines, earspools, and copper hairpins (La Vere 2007), that the Kansas City Star named it a “King Tut Tomb” in North America. The second largest mound at Cahokia , Illinois, the largest Native American city-state north of Mexico, larger than the city of London at the time and built while Europe was entering the Dark Ages, was destroyed as late as 1930 (Pauketat 2004: 17). (The first largest mound, Monks Mound, which was larger in size than the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt, has largely been preserved as a national monument in what is currently East St. Louis.)

Unfortunately, this story is proof that old habits and ways of thinking die hard, and history repeats itself, again.

Click here for the original article.

References:

Kehoe, Alice. 1998. The land of prehistory: a critical history of American archaeology. New York: Routledge.

La Vere, David. 2007. Looting Spiro mounds: an American King Tut's tomb. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Pauketat, Timothy. 2004. Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2009-11-08T12:29:00.008-06:00

A Coptic (Egyptian) Magical Text

Yes, yes, I admit, it has been a long time since my last post. But my time offline has been productive. I have, in fact, begun learning Coptic, the 'modern' form of ancient Egyptian, and the official language of the Copts, the Egyptians who converted to Christianity early in the first millennium AD.

Just some notes on the following passage and on the language: Coptic is highly agglutinative, meaning that words often consist of a root plus one or more (usually more!) affixes, primarily prefixes. An interesting thing about Coptic is that verb conjugations are not suffixed but are prefixed to the verb. Also, the definite and indefinite articles are always prefixed to the noun, e.g., prome (p[e] 'masc def article' + rome 'man') 'the man'; the feminine definite article is t[e], thus tsxime (t[e] 'fem def article' + sxime 'woman') 'the woman' (the e of the articles often drops out before the noun). (The x here is pronounced like an h, although perhaps a bit more guttural.) Coptic incorporated many Greek words during the time of Greek rule over Egypt, so those of you familiar with Greek may notice some of these, e.g., soma 'body', sarks 'flesh', and tavos 'tomb.'

The translation is that of the author; the transliteration into the Roman alphabet from the Coptic is mine.

I can't help but wonder what the poor Pharaouo did to deserve such a curse upon him!

pmour etpe pmour epkah pmour epaeir pmour epestrewma pmour etchefmoute pmour eprei pmour epo'oh pmour enhalate pmour e peksoure epiot pmour entauror TC pe XC nheitf hijn pshe mpestis nheitf pmour epsashf n shaje nta-hiliseo'os jo'os ejn tape net toua'av ete nai ne newran Psuchou, Chasnai, Chasna, Ithouni, Anashns, Shourani, Shouranai. Mare pmour etnma'au1 shope hijo psoma nho'out nfaraouo men tefsarks ntetnsho'oye mos nthe noushe auou ntetna'as nthe noutoeis hijn tkoupria nnepefset dos nnefto'oun nneftisperma nnefkenonia men Touaien tsheinKamar men la'au nsxime oute ho'out oute tefnei shanta osh anok alla marefsho'oue npsoma nho'out nfaraouo psheinKirantales nnef kononia men Touaien tsheinKamar nthe nourefmo'out efkei hnou tavos ennefaraouo psheinKiranpoles neishkeinonia men Touaein tsheinKamar.

Aio aio, taxei taxei.

O spell of the sky, O spell of the earth, O spell of the air, O spell of the firmament, O spell of the Pleiades, O spell of the sun, O spell of the moon, O spell of the birds, O spell of the father’s ring, O spell with which Jesus the Christ was bound upon the cross, O spell of the seven words which Eliseus uttered over the heads of the saints, whose names are these: Psuchou, Chasnai, Chasna, Ithouni, Anashns, Shourani, Shouranai. May that spell be upon the male organ of Pharaouo, and his phallus, may ye dry it like wood, and may ye make it like a rag upon the dunghill. May his phallus not become stiff, may it not erect, may it not produce seed, may he not have intercourse with Touaein, the daughter of Kamar, or with any woman, wild or tame, until I myself call out; but may it dry the male organ of Pharaouo, the son of Kiranpales, may he not have intercourse with Touaein, the daughter of Kamar. Like a dead man lying in a tomb. May not Pharaouo, the son of Kiranpolis be able to have intercourse with Touaein, the daughter of Kamar.

Yea, yea. Quickly, quickly!

1 ma'au means 'mother,' but this doesn't appear anywhere in the author's translation (?). The ' equals a glottal stop.

Appearing in the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 56, No. 3, 1939, 305-7. From documents in the Moritz Collection, Oriental Institute No. 13767. Author and date of original document unknown.
Author of text translation: Elizabeth Stefanski.

2009-02-23T21:15:00.002-06:00

“The Linguists” to air this week on PBS (Week of Feb. 23)
By Michael Conner, AATIA
Scientists estimate that of 7,000 languages in the world, half will be gone by the end of this century. On average, one language disappears every two weeks.

“The Linguists” follows David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, scientists racing to document languages on the verge of extinction. Their journey takes them deep into the heart of the cultures, knowledge and communities at stake.

In Siberia, Harrison and Anderson seek to record the Chulym language, which hasn’t been heard by outsiders for more than 30 years. The linguists encounter remnants of the racist Soviet regime that may have silenced Chulym for good.

In India, tribal children attend boarding schools, where they learn Hindi and English, a trade, and the pointlessness of their native tongues. Similar boarding schools for tribal children existed in the US through most of the 20th century. Harrison and Anderson travel to the children’s villages, where economic unrest has stirred a violent Maoist insurgency. The linguists witness the fear and poverty that have driven youth from their native communities.

In Bolivia, the Kallawaya language has survived for centuries with fewer than 100 speakers. The linguists trek high into the Andes to unlock its secret.
The Linguists preview (trailer)
This PBS show apparently airs in Lawrence this Thursday, Feb. 26 at 9:00 PM. Check your local PBS listings for exact date and time in your area.

2009-02-13T21:31:00.005-06:00

Here we go again

This time it's Oklahoma

I just received this via the Siouan List. Such a bill is a slap in the face to those of us who commit ourselves to the preservation and revitalization of indigenous languages in the United States and around the world. It shows racism is still rampant in our country. Native Americans were forcibly moved to Oklahoma (formerly known as Indian Territory) by the thousands (remember the Trail of Tears) and now, on top of that, they're being told their languages are not good enough to be considered equal to English, the European colonial language that has been shoved down their throats (while literally having their mouths washed out with soap or being beaten for speaking their native languages) for centuries.

Here is the email that was forwarded:

Senator Sykes (R-24, Newcastle), SJR30 English Only bill will be heard before the Senate General Government Committee on Monday, February 16th at 10:00 a.m. This bill provides for a constitutional amendment declaring the English language to be the official language of the State of Oklahoma.

The Cherokee Nation opposes this legislation. Oklahoma tribes have come together to fight against the English Only legislation. Other professional groups in health, education, business and clergy have joined efforts to stand against this proposed legislation.

Oklahoma has been blessed with more than 35 Indian nations, each of which has a unique culture. Part of that culture comes from the richness of native languages, which have been spoken here for centuries before Oklahoma became a State. Part of Oklahoma's identity to the world is our rich tribal heritage and we should use our diversity to promote our state. The English Only initiative symbolizes injustice and discrimination. Why have an official language to show such narrow-mindedness?

It sends the wrong message to our youth, telling them that their native language isn't seen as valuable. Academic studies have shown that children who are fluent in more than one language perform better on standardized tests than children who speak only English. We should look to encourage language diversity among Oklahoma's citizens.

I wish Native Oklahomans and anyone who values multiple languages and cultures success in blocking passage of this bill.

2009-01-25T14:03:00.004-06:00

English words from Mohegan - Kikátohkawôkansh wuci Mohiksuyôtowáwôk

Some English speakers might be surprised to know that several fairly common English words come from Mohegan or other closely related Eastern Algonquian languages. This should probably not come as a big surprise since Mohegans and their neighbors were among the first Native Americans encountered by Europeans in the New World. An encounter with a new culture on a new continent with new types of flora and fauna and new traditions usually leads to the "borrowing" of words from the indigenous culture and language into the newly arrived, in this case European, foreign one. Many indigenous words were adopted by the Spaniards, the French, and the English from American Indian languages, such as chocolate, persimmon, tipi, tobacco, kayak, abalone, muskrat, pecan, opossum, hominy, succotash, muck-a-muck, and malamute (Cutler 2002).

Here are some Mohegan words that have come into English in one form or another. Can you identify them without looking at the answers below?

páhpohs (pah-poos)

skôks (skoNks)

mahkus (mah-kus), pl. mahkusunsh

sqah (skwah)

mos (moos)

tôpôk (toNboNk), pl. tôpôkansh

Did you figure them out?

Here are the answers:

papoose (baby), skunk, moccasin (shoe), squaw, moose, toboggan. 'Moccasin' and 'tobaggan' probably look more familiar in their Mohegan plural form. 'Skunk' is actually singular in Mohegan, although it probably looked like plural to English speakers with the s at the end, so it lost the final s in English to look more singular to English speakers. And even though, curiously, 'squaw' became a rather derogatory word in English, in Mohegan it means just 'woman', pure and simple.

Reference:

Cutler, Charles. 2002. Tracks that speak: the legacy of Native American words in North American culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

2009-01-24T23:21:00.002-06:00

And now for an update...

Happy 2009! What better way to start the new year off than with a new government and president who is actually intelligent and can speak in complete, coherent sentences. Everyone expects miracles from Obama in his first few days in office, but, hey--it took at least 8 years for us to get into this mess and will take time to try and undo what can be undone. I'm glad to see that Obama is already undoing some of Bush's legacy. I'm only sorry that he is not pursuing an investigation of the last "administration" to bring to light all the dirty deeds of the last 8 years. But anyway, thank goodness that's over!

I only have one course this semester, a linguistic typology course. Besides this, I have research hours which I will be using to write my first of three 30-40 page field statements, which are required before beginning the dissertation. The first statement, which will be on Eastern Algonquian stem structure and compound formation, is due in May.

It was a rather productive, if rather bland, winter break. I reviewed the proof of my article "Rumsen Folklore: Two Tales" for the Journal of Folklore Research (JFR) and made a few last-minute corrections. It should be in print any day now, and I await my two copies of this issue of the Journal to arrive in the mail. I also wrote another article which should hopefully be included in the next edition of the Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics (KWPL). This article is titled, "Some Observations of Rumsen Ohlone Grammar," and is a brief grammatical sketch of Rumsen based on one of the folktales from my article published in the JFR (in which I did not include grammatical notes). Little has been written on Ohlone grammar in general, and nothing on Rumsen in particular, so I felt getting these grammatical tidbits in print (at least electronically) was important.

I hope to go to the Siouan and Caddoan Linguistics Conference in Lincoln, NE this coming June, so I may have to come up with a topic for another article on Biloxi. Hopefully I can get some grant money in order to present it and pay a portion of trip expenses. Not sure what to write about yet, however.

I've also been working on the Biloxi ethnography or ethnohistory (not quite sure what to call it yet). This is to be included with the new dictionary and hopefully will be published at some point, some day.

That about covers the latest.

2008-11-27T11:29:00.007-06:00

The Maya Cosmic Prophecy 2012: From Sensation to Sensibility

Maya Scholars in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and North America have been watching with amusement and dismay as self-styled experts proclaim that ancient Maya prophets foretold an earth-shattering happening to occur December 21, 2012. This predicted phenomenon gets described in contradictory but always cataclysmic fashion--as an ecological collapse, a sunspot storm, a rare cosmic conjunction of the earth, sun, and the galactic center, a new and awesome stage of our evolution, and even a sudden reversal of the Earth's magnetic field which will erase all our computer drives. One even predicts the earth's initiation into a Galactic Federation, whose elders have been accelerating our evolution with a "galactic beam" for the last 5000 years. In sum, the world as we know it will suddenly come to a screeching halt.

These predictions are alleged to be prophecies by so-called "Ancient Mayans" whose "astronomically precise" calendar supposedly terminates on that date. According to such accounts, these mysterious Maya geniuses appeared suddenly, built an extraordinary civilization, designed in it clues for us, and then suddenly, inexplicably, vanished, as if they had completed their terrestrial mission. These same experts claim special credibility for the Maya prophecies by asserting that these historic sages, with their possible extraterrestrial origins, had tapped into an astonishing esoteric wisdom.

Could any of this be true? Is this a cosmic, or comic, prophecy?

Mark Van Stone, a REAL anthropologist and Mayanist, writes of the REAL meaning of December, 21, 2012, according to the Maya calendar:

http://www.famsi.org/research/vanstone/2012/index.html

This is a slide show, so don't be daunted by the number of pages. There is a lot of background info on the Maya calendar.

2008-10-10T16:40:00.006-05:00

To think this today (Peten jungle, Guatemala)...

...used to be this (El Mirador, Guatemala)...

...which looks a lot like this (Cahokia, Illinois)...

As part of my course on Classic Maya Civilization, we are actually learning about some pre-Classic Maya cities that have only recently come to light in the Peten lowlands of Guatemala. Perhaps the first large Maya city was located here, now called El Mirador. The middle picture above is an artist's conception of the ancient city based on current archaeological evidence. It is thought that perhaps up to 100,000 people may have lived here in the Maya city. The city was built of limestone and its monumental structures were painted red and white. Keep in mind the ruins of this once breathtaking Maya city date to ca. 300 BC, well before the Classic Maya civilization of great kings and monuments that we've known about for some time. That means that, indeed, Maya civilization dates back far earlier than we once thought, and their civilization achieved monumental grandeur much earlier than previously thought.

What's even more intriguing, although this comparison is still considered outside the mainstream perspective of most current anthropologists, is that large earthen monumental structures similar to the those of the Olmec and the stone structures of the Maya were present in North America's Mississippi Valley dating back to nearly 4,000 BC (Watson Brake, Louisiana).

This begs the question: Did the ancestors of the later Olmec and Maya civilizations live in the Mississippi Valley before migrating south into Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America)? Anthropologists have long tried to imply Mesoamerican influence upon the Mississippi Valley and Southeastern U.S., but it seems, more and more, we are being presented with evidence to the contrary: the Mississippi Valley may have influenced Mesoamerica.

2008-10-07T14:49:00.006-05:00

Update

Just to update what I've been up to:

Ajtz'ib Maya (Maya scribe)

I finished my Wikipedia project for the Classic Maya Civilization class. My project was writing a brief grammatical sketch of Q'anjob'al, a modern Maya language spoken in the Guatemala highlands. For those of you who are interested, here is the direct link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q'anjob'al_language

(It is also posted on the right side bar with the other Wikipedia articles I've written or had a hand in writing or editing.) There are still a few things I might add, but I think it is a good start for now, especially since almost nothing has been published in English on this language (a few books have been published in Spanish).

I am doing the final edits for my article to appear in the Journal of Folklore Research. I understand it will be published in the final edition of this year, probably around the end of October. This is the article I've written on two Rumsen Ohlone folktales that have never before been published in the original Rumsen language, along with the English translation. I hope this will encourage Rumsens to start a language revitalization project and perhaps teach these two stories to their children.

2008-09-07T19:58:00.004-05:00

Breaking the Maya Code

For those of you, who, like me, are interested in the Mayan hieroglyphs and the stories they tell about the ancient Maya civilization, a 2-hour documentary is slated to be available DVD on September 16, 2008. Apparently a brief 50-minute version of this was aired back in April on NOVA, which I unfortunately missed. The film is based on Michael Coe's book, Breaking the Maya Code, which I have read, documenting the history of how the ancient Mayan hieroglyphs were deciphered.

It was long thought that the Mayan glyphs were a form of picture-writing, perhaps similar to what the Mexica, or Aztecs, used. However, a Russian scholar, Yuri Knorosov, living in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in the USSR in the 1950s, who had never even visited the Maya ruins and worked only from pictures and paper copies, had discovered that the Mayan glyphs, like those of ancient Egypt and Sumeria, were partly phonetic, giving clues to their pronunciation and correct decipherment.

2008-08-31T13:47:00.003-05:00

Nude tengereg nga shage yi

The Fall semester has begun and I don’t know where summer went. I am currently enrolled in three courses: Cultural Anthropology, Ancient Maya Civilization, and Discourse Analysis.

As you may have noticed from the last several posts with photos, I did take a two-week break to go on my research trip to the Northeast (Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maine). I was also working on an article on Rumsen Ohlone folklore that is about to be published in the Journal of Folklore Research. It has gone through the peer-review process and is now in the final editing stage.

I spent much of the summer working on my Graduate Research Assistanceship (GRA) project with the Southwest Monguor language of central China. This is, at its base, a Mongolic language (‘Monguor’ derives from Mongol), with an admixture of Tibetan (primarily through the practice of Buddhism) and a northern dialect of Chinese.

The title of this post is in SW Monguor and means “Today the weather is very good.” Any of you who’ve seen the movie Mongol might recognize the Monguor word for ‘sky’ or ‘weather', tengereg, as being related to the name of the Mongolian sky god Tengri often mentioned in that film.

Here are a few more examples of the language:

be lhoma yi.
1S student COP.dir
‘I am a student.’

be hengen de yi.
1S teacher also COP.dir
‘I am also a teacher.’

qe rjacoh gaje mede u?
2S Chinese.Mongolian(Monguor) language know PRT.inter
‘Do you know the Monguor language?’

njang-ne aabe hale yi?
3S-GEN father where COP.dir
‘Where is his father?’

You might note from the above that Monguor is very much a 'mixed' language, since, for example, lhoma 'student' is actually Tibetan, while tengereg (< tenger), nude (< önöödör), mede (< medekh) are Mongolian in origin.

Quite an interesting tongue!

A note on pronunciation: e is pronounced like an English schwa or uh sound and lh is a lateral fricative.

2008-07-30T08:53:00.006-05:00

Gorgeous Maine

I have a rather crappy digital camera, so my pics, as you may have noticed, are not too great. But I took some pics of rural Maine yesterday as I did a little tour about an hour's drive northeast of Portland up to Georgetown. The title of this post says it all: Maine is beautiful! Most of Maine is very rural, looking much like the following pics.

I definitely would like to come back and spend more time in Maine.

I am now back in Boston.

2008-07-04T15:58:00.002-05:00

Kudos to US ambassador for singing in indigenous language

I was pleased to hear that a Native South American language, Guarani, and a US ambassador recently made headlines:

The US ambassador to Paraguay has become a music sensation in the country after recording an album of folk songs in the indigenous Guarani language. "What I've been trying to do is show respect for Paraguay and for its culture," James Cason told the BBC. Proceeds from the album sales are going to fund English-language grants for poor Paraguayan students. Mr. Cason's efforts have been well received, although one politician grumbled about his pronunciation. Mr. Cason's songs have been playing on the radio and listeners have been enthusiastic, he says. "I think they're just amazed and delighted that someone would take the time to learn a language which is probably harder than Chinese," said Mr. Cason, who leaves Paraguay, his final posting, on 2 August.

2008-07-01T13:09:00.003-05:00

Tômwihtawush uyôtowawôk.
Save the language. (Mohiks - Mohegan)

As usual these days, it has been a while since my last entry. So far it’s been a busy summer as a research assistant working with data on the Southwest Monguor language of Tongren, China, a Mongolic language with which I had no prior familiarity. The language has a Mongolic base with infusions of Tibetan (primarily through the practice of Buddhism) and Chinese (the dominant nationality and culture).

As for my own research, in a few weeks I will be making a trip to Boston from where I will drive down to southeastern Connecticut to the Mohegan (Mohican) reservation, home of the popular Mohegan Sun Casino. I will be spending a few days with the tribal linguist to gather data on the Mohegan language (Eastern Algonquian), which has been “sleeping” since 1908. They have a language revitalization program in place (click here to learn more), and classes are being taught. I will be working on Mohegan for my PhD dissertation, and thus indirectly assisting in the efforts of their language revitalization program. On this trip, I will also be driving up to Portland, Maine to meet the only living speaker of Penobscot, another “sleeping” Eastern Algonquian language. I hope to gain some insight from Penobscot data to assist in the Mohegan revitalization efforts. Needless to say, the idea of assisting in the Mohegan Nation's language revitalization efforts is exciting!

I also recently attended the Siouan and Caddoan Linguistics Conference (SCLC) in Joplin, Missouri. It was a good opportunity to spend time with fellow Siouanists and meet some Native Americans of the Omaha, Ioway-Otoe, Osage, and Hochunk (Winnebago) nations, all involved in their own language revitalization efforts in various stages of progress. Despite my upcoming new adventures in Eastern Algonquian, I still continue my efforts in preparing a revised Biloxi (Siouan) dictionary and ethnography. I also recently submitted an article of a translated Rumsen Ohlone (Penutian) text to the Journal of Folklore Research, which is still under review and which I hope will get published.

2008-03-30T00:09:00.005-05:00

Ancient Skull Deformation Practices

Ancient elongated skull from Paracas, Peru

For whatever reason, some ancient peoples, including some ancient Native Americans, practiced various types of intentional skull deformation. This would be performed soon after birth, while an infant’s head was still malleable. “A mother strapped her baby into a cradleboard and then bound another board across the child’s forehead until the forehead was flattened, the sides swelled outward, and the eyes developed a bulging look to them” (La Vere 2007: 60). It appears these practices took place all over ancient Native America, from the Mississippi Valley to Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) to Peru. (Biloxis were said to have practiced skull deformation to some degree, although to what degree is currently unknown.) “Flat-heading” seems to have been a favorite practice among many ancient Mississippian cultures, although, according to La Vere, Spiro (an ancient Mississippian mound center located in modern Oklahoma) appeared to favor head elongation. Elongation appears to have been practiced by some among the ancient Maya and by many ancient residents of Paracas, Peru. Whether this practice correlated with elite or priestly status, or to identify members of particular clans or allegiances, or simply as a symbol of beauty, is unknown. The practice also seems to have been performed to a certain degree among ancient Egyptians.

Reference

La Vere, David. 2007. Looting Spiro mounds: an American King Tut's tomb. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

2008-03-23T00:00:00.004-05:00

Linguistic Archaeology?

This is one of those entries where comments would really be appreciated, since this has been a major part of my research of late, and it would be nice to have feedback as to whether this all makes sense or not:

As many of you know, I have been working on the Biloxi language and trying to piece together some history based on linguistic evidence. While there is no known written history of the Biloxi nation before the European invasion, I believe there are clues to ancient Biloxi culture and society buried within the remains of its vocabulary.

It is currently my contention that Biloxi settlements, like many others of the Southeast, likely contained great earthen mound structures, some in the shape of large flat-topped pyramids and others smaller, rectangular or circular. These large pyramidal structures rose like mountains of monumental grandeur above the surrounding forests, rivers, and streams. While, to my knowledge, there are as yet no actual archaeological remains traceable to ancient Biloxi society, I invoke linguistic evidence to postulate the former existence of such structures.

The word for ‘stairway’ in Biloxi is asis(i)tu, which, broken into its component parts, is a- ‘place of’, si ‘step,’ reduplicated to represent plurality, and –tu, another plural marker that, together with reduplicated si, emphasizes a great number of steps or stairs, suggesting perhaps a long stairway such as those ascending the sides of large pyramids and mound structures (think of those in Cahokia or Mayan ruins). Upon the flattened summits of these structures would probably have perched a cabin with a grass roof, usually the residence of a high-ranking noble or elite. The tallest of these pyramids bespoke the superior status of its lofty occupant, called, in Biloxi, Yaaxitąąyą, ‘The Great Sacred One.’1 Adjacent to the largest pyramidal structures was at least one large open space, or plaza, in which the masses would congregate for an optimal viewing of the great king’s speeches or other ceremonies and rituals. (Biloxi narratives also refer to the king being elevated perhaps on a mound, platform, or chair above the masses.)

Biloxi vocabulary suggests a certain amount of societal stratification consistent with a predominantly agricultural economy. An agrarian economy usually leads to the creation of a class of elites and nobles, and this was quite apparent among Southeast Amerindian nations, many of which were of the "Mississippian Moundbuilder" cultures. Biloxi vocabulary indicates a certain amount of power-sharing by other ąyaaxi, or lesser nobles, and ixi 2, their deputies and assistants. Biloxi nobility likely legitimized their superior “sacred” status through the practice of what has been called shamanism 3. Their connection to the supernatural realm would have legitimized their decision-making by the process of communing with sacred spirits or ancestors. Such communing with the Otherworld as a means of justifying their actions would have been a powerful tool for keeping law and order. After all, shamans could shapeshift into were-animals, and the possible penalty for stepping out of line could be death by a noble ripping one to shreds in the form of a were-wolf or were-eagle or other type of powerful transformed being (at least that’s how it would be perceived by the masses, the belief probably being instilled in the citizenry from childhood). Such connections to the Otherworld would also serve to maintain an element of mystery around the activities and behaviors of those in the highest offices, thereby legitimizing their power by their special sacred knowledge and connections to spiritual realms that could either help, or injure, an individual or an entire community. ('Shaman-king' rulership shares probable parallels with the ancient Olmec and Mayan civilizations. Cultural similarities and possible influence and trade between the ancient Southeast and Mesoamerican [Olmec, Maya, Aztec] civilizations is still being debated.)

Notes:

1. Literally, (ą)yaa + xi + tąą + yą = person-sacred-big-DEF
2. Literally, i + xi = commitative (with)-sacred (one) = 'one who works with the sacred one(s)' (deputy)
3. As I've stated before, "shamanism" and "shaman" are terms that spawn hot debate among anthropologists, because these terms originated with the Tungus of Siberia, who do not share many of the traits found in Native American spiritual practices, especially those involving priest-kingship or shaman-kingship. (We should also not rule out the possibility of females holding the reigns of shamanic power. The ruler of Cofitachequi, believed to have been a Muskogean settlement in what is now Georgia, was a woman (queen) carried on a litter upon the shoulders of her male subordinates. This was documented by de Soto.)

2008-03-20T16:06:00.007-05:00

Pidgins and Creoles

I just finished reading a book titled Bastard Tongues by Derek Bickerton. In it, he explores the origin of pidgin and Creole languages around the world, specifically in Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and Hawai’i. His theory, not unlike what Chomsky postulates, is that children are born with a “bioprogram” that allows them to create Creoles out of pidgin tongues, filling in missing aspects of grammar by similar methods used worldwide regardless of the substrate language or languages influencing the pidgin. He states, for instance, that most Creole languages have subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, like English.

Bickerton unfortunately does not, however, take into consideration Native North American so-called pidgins, such as those that have been traditionally called Mobilian (Trade) Jargon or Choctaw-Chickasaw Trade Jargon (once spoken in the Southeast and Mississippi Valley) and Chinook Jargon (once spoken in the Northwest). Mobilian in fact has an OsV word order (small ‘s’ indicating that the subject is optional and often not employed). Thus:

ete (eno) cãle.
wood (1S) cut
I cut the wood.

While many linguists and others have postulated that, what I now like to refer to as the Mobilian International Language (MIL)1, came about only after European contact, I agree with Drechsel (1997) who postulates that this “pidgin” language shows far more ancient origins. For one thing, the OsV word order is unknown to any of the modern languages of the Southeast, including Choctaw and Chickasaw (SOV), from which MIL is supposed to have arisen, and it certainly does not display the SVO word order that is common to all the European contact languages (Spanish, French, English). This OsV word order is, however, the word order of Proto-Muskogean. There is also the fact that, despite later contact with Spanish, French, and English, few words from these European languages entered MIL's vocabulary. Thus, I believe these facts point to MIL's roots going back long before European contact and probably having been used by various southeastern and Mississippian nations as a common trade language for centuries, along with Native American sign language.

While most pidgins and Creoles have come about through contact of indigenous languages with European colonial languages, I think it’s important to realize that not all of them have. In fact, Bickerton himself talks about Pidgin Hawaiian, not Pidgin English, having been in use in Hawai’i well before Pidgin English came about. This was because Hawai’i was already a long established progressive monarchy when Europeans and others first began arriving, and, well, if these immigrants wanted to communicate with Hawaiians, they needed to learn to communicate in Hawaiian the best they could. (Hawaiians, being in the dominant position at the time, were not about to learn English, Portuguese, Tagalog, or Japanese to communicate with these newcomers.) The result of this, before the American overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, was Pidgin Hawaiian, which looked something like this:

(Bickerton 2008: 211)
Wau no ku’ai kela kapiki. (Pidgin Hawaiian)
I NEG buy that cabbage.
A’ole au e ku’ai aku i kela kapiki. (Bickerton)2
’A’ole au e kū’ai aku i kēlā kāpiki. (Hawaiian)
NEG 1S sell that cabbage.
I won’t sell the cabbage.

Note that the positive sentence pattern in Hawaiian would be: Kū’ai aku au i kēlā kāpiki, "sell 1S that cabbage," which is VSO. (Negative sentence structure in Hawaiian mandates changing its usual VSO word order.) But note that the Pidgin form is SVO, in line with Bickerton’s contention.

NOTES:

1. I find this a far better name than Mobilian (Trade) Jargon, for it expresses what Mobilian actually was, an "international" language used among many southeastern Nations, including the Biloxis, as a mode of communication for trade, joint ceremonial rituals, and politics in the context of intertribal regional alliances. It is important to note that, while most pidgins have negative connotations and are not highly regarded, the opposite was true of MIL. Southeastern nations had no negative attitude about using the pidgin, and, in fact, it is believed they often used the language among themselves in order to confuse or hinder communication with encroaching Europeans, who often thought MIL was actually Choctaw, Chickasaw, or some other language.

2. Why Bickerton or his editors did not employ the crucial macrons of Hawaiian orthography is a mystery to me, especially since he has lived and taught in Hawai'i and is writing about Hawaiian pidgin languages. Thus, I have included the macrons as they should appear underneath the macronless transcription appearing in his book.

References:

Bickerton, Derek. 2008. Bastard tongues: a trailblazing linguist finds clues to our common humanity in the world's lowliest languages. New York: Hill and Wang.

Drechsel, Emanuel. 1997. Mobilian Jargon: linguistic and sociohistorical aspects of a Native American pidgin. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

2007-12-29T15:19:00.000-06:00

"These languages ... were just sleeping"

The following is a condensed version of an article that recently appeared in the San José Mercury News. I was briefly involved with this project for a few months before I left California to pursue my doctorate in Kansas. I transcribed about 50 pages (a mere drop in a very large bucket) worth of Rumsen Ohlone notes that Harrington had gathered back in the 1930s. This is how my interest in the Ohlone languages, native languages of central coastal California, came to be. Thankfully the microfiche version of Harrington's notes are accessible here at KU, and I continue working with the notes when brief bouts of spare time permit. I'm hoping to get three Rumsen stories published in the Journal of Folklore Research in the near future, which, to the best of my knowledge, would be the first time that the actual tales will have been published in the Rumsen language as well as with English translations.

Here is the article:

Bringing voices from the grave, volunteers at the University of California-Davis are working to decipher nearly a million pages of notes from conversations with long-gone Native Californians, reviving more than 100 languages from the distant past. Word by word, they type the scribbled and cryptic notes left by John Peabody Harrington, an eccentric and tireless linguist who in the early 1900s traveled throughout California interviewing the last surviving speakers of many native tongues, including the local Muwekma Ohlone tribe. Their effort to organize a database of Harrington's vast material will build a Rosetta Stone for these languages and their dialects, creating dictionaries of words, phrases and tribal tales and customs that were destined to disappear.

"It is an enormous amount, and it is incredibly difficult to read," said Martha Macri, director of the UC-Davis Native American Language Center and co-director of the effort to computerize Harrington's papers.

"He was totally obsessive. We've become a bit obsessive ourselves."

San Jose native Margaret Cayward is using his notes to study native music as part of her doctoral thesis at UC-Davis. "It's helping us rediscover old knowledge and values in the music," she said. "Music was a major part of life for Californians, with ritual or sacred significance."

In Fremont, descendants of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe used his notes to create Chochenyo flash cards, puzzles and bingo games for their children. In Macri's office, eight large file cabinets are filled with 182 reels of microfilmed images of Harrington's work, copied from his original papers that are stored at the Smithsonian Institution's warehouse in Silver Hill, Md. Each reel, costing $1,000, contains 500 to 2,000 pages of material. Seven years into the Harrington project, funded by the National Science Foundation, it is about two-thirds complete.

"They have changed my life," said Linda Yamane of Seaside, who based her book of Ohlone tales, called "The Snake That Lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains," on his notes. "Along with a lot of hard work and perseverance, they've made it possible to bring back my Rumsien (Monterey area) Ohlone language and other cultural traditions from the brink of extinction."

Hired in 1915 by the Smithsonian Institution, Harrington spent four decades wandering California with unbounded freedom to document languages before they disappeared. It was a time when Native Californians faced fierce discrimination. Few elders spoke the languages to children, so little information was passed on for future generations.

"They trusted him," said Bev Ortiz, an anthropologist at California State University-East Bay. "The tribal elders had the wisdom and courage to see that the time would come when it would not be bad to be an Indian - and the language would be there for their descendants."

Harrington traveled by car and on foot to find surviving speakers, collecting maps, photographs, and plant and animal specimens along the way. One camping trip, on horseback, took him through the rugged Santa Lucia Mountains. Gifted in phonetics and lexicography, "he spent more of his waking hours, week in and week out, transcribing Indian languages than doing any other conscious thing," said Victor Golla of Humboldt State University. "No linguist, before or since, ever spent so much time engaged in the field collection of primary data." Yet Harrington published little of his work. Although he sent back reports to the Smithsonian, many of his notes seem to have been deliberately hidden from colleagues.

After his death in 1961, as Smithsonian curators began cataloging his papers, they discovered stockpiles of boxes stored in warehouses, garages and even chicken coops throughout the West. Six tons of material - among them Indian-made flutes, Kachina dolls, dead birds and tarantulas, baskets, rocks, empty soup cans, half-eaten sandwiches, dirty laundry and two shrunken heads from the Amazon - eventually arrived at the Smithsonian, filling two warehouses. His translations of native words are littered with puzzling abbreviations. And his notations do not represent a standardized phonology, just impressionistic phonetics. Also troubling is his practice of shifting, over the years, the symbols used when transcribing sounds into words. The bilingual Harrington wrote many translations in old California Spanish, with idiosyncratic spelling. And much of his material is disorganized, with notes about one language interspersed with those of another.

"There was a method in his madness. He was trying to get as much down as fast as could," Klar said. "But reading it takes endless patience."

Despite the frustrations, the Harrington project team says its efforts are slowly shedding light on a long-lost way of life - and educating a proud new generation of Native Californians about the ways of their ancestors.

"We're learning not only about the languages, but day-to-day life - the culture and customs, the politics. A language is a universe; it's family, society, religious practices. When you start pulling it out, you start to understand."

"These languages never died," she said. "They were just sleeping."

2007-12-20T13:43:00.000-06:00

Culture, anthropology, and what it means to be human

OK, I realize it has been far too long since my last blog entry, but the constant demands of grad school sort of made this, along with many other things, lesser priority. The crazy semester is now over, thank goodness. Now the wait to see how I did on finals and term papers and what my ultimate grades are.

One of my planned winter break activities is to catch up on some non-course-related reading. One of these readings is by a KU professor, Robert Minor, titled, Scared Straight. The subtitle is: "Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People And Why It’s So Hard to Be Human." I’ve only just started it, but I’m already enthralled with his writing and teaching about why LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender) people are so feared in our culture that there is an average of one gay man killed every two weeks in America just for being gay. Minor states: "I still see a nation obsessed with maintaining gender roles … I see men’s groups struggling to know why they exist and where to go next. I see therapists who are still trying to help people cope with a system that is profit-oriented and coping-oriented, not human-oriented or healing oriented" (Minor 2001: 4).

In his own words, Minor’s purpose for writing this book is to argue "that none of us, regardless of sexual orientation, will be able to live as human beings until we are able to fully accept transgendered and bisexual people and lesbians and gay men as invaluable gifts of our common humanity. The fact is, getting in touch with our humanity, no matter what our sexual orientation, is tied to doing the fear work we all need to do so that all of us can embrace gay people. And that means that, by doing their own fear work, gay people themselves will find a greater self-acceptance" (ibid.: 1, my italics).

On a personal level, I am working on that last italicized sentence. After doing my own self-exploration in therapy this past long summer, I came to accept what deep down I’m sure I’ve always known: I’m gay or at least somewhere on that end of the continuum between gaydom and bisexuality. And, as I explore (although not physically yet) and learn more about myself and accept who I am, I’m also exploring our predominant cultural views and prejudices against homosexuality and bisexuality. At least Minor’s book is helping to explain why there is so much fear about homosexuality. And, as a Religious Studies professor, Minor also explains that the Bible does not in itself claim homosexuality a sin, but rather that it has been reinterpreted by Christians to match our predominant cultural views of "normal" vs. "aberrant" behaviors just as it was once "reinterpreted" to allow the continuance of slavery and the gross mistreatment of indigenous peoples not only here in the US but worldwide.

Perhaps this is why I’ve become an anthropologist. (As an anthropologist, I’m in good company, by the way, since Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were both bisexual.) Perhaps this is why I became interested in other cultures and peoples at an early age—not just out of mere interest but because somehow I knew there was something about myself I would eventually have to face and explore from "outside looking in" in order to gain some measure of self-acceptance, to realize that what our culture proclaims is "normal" is by no means universal and unchanging.

As an anthropologist, I see different cultures on their own terms of what is acceptable vs. not acceptable. Minor states that we "live on the basis of the definitions and ideas about reality our culture gives us. And we do so without much reflection about them" (ibid. 27). He uses the apt metaphor that we’re like fish in water: the water surrounds us without calling attention to itself, and most of us never live in an alternative to the "wetness against our scales."

Drawing of heart-taking ritual from Aztec codex, ca. 1500 A.D.

Anthropologists are often asked: How could such amazingly advanced and sophisticated civilizations as those of the Mayas and Aztecs have committed such "atrocious" acts like blood-letting from tongues and genitals, the ripping out of still-beating human hearts, ritual decapitation, and human sacrifice? The answer is easy. They grew up in their own cultures, their own water against their scales, their own beliefs of right vs. wrong, their own need to ritually appease their own gods (1), living with the taboos and fears of their own culture that happened to be different from ours. (By the way, lest one think that 500-1,000 years later we are so much more advanced and less brutal, think about it: we still kill and maim in war [look at Iraq] and in the streets of our cities, and many in our own culture [including sports heroes] take pleasure in organizing and watching boxing, street-fighting, dog-fighting and other such forms of "ritual blood-letting".)

Yet, living in our own prescribed culture of right vs. wrong passed down to us through our families and constantly reinforced through symbolism, the media, and religion among many other things, we resent anything that threatens to shake those foundations of our reality, such as love and marriage being only between man and woman. Hence the fear, the often violent reactions toward those of us who break that mold of reality that provides us with that deep sense of who we think we are—that hodgepodge of beliefs, rituals, morals, and behaviors we call our "culture."

As an anthropologist, I explore not only the contemporary and historic "realities" of other peoples and cultures, but also my own deep-rooted sense of "reality," its origins and foundations. And exploring and breaking through the boundaries of one’s own culture, one’s own deep-seated prescribed sense of reality, is scary. It’s part of that "fear work" Minor discusses that each of us must do if we truly want to be human. Truly living and being human, I’m coming to realize, means separating myself to some degree from what my culture "expects" of me as a man, a human being, and that takes courage and guts.

(1) Olmecs, Mayas, and Aztecs believed human sacrifice was necessary--the shedding and offering of blood in death was believed equated with the shedding of blood in childbirth and was considered a means of rebirth, to continue the life-giving and life-sustaining forces of sun and rain, necessary for agriculture and food production. It is believed many in the Mayan and Aztec civilizations considered giving their lives in this way as a god-given honor.

Reference:

Minor, Robert. 2001. Scared Straight. St. Louis: HumanityWorks!

2007-10-31T22:48:00.000-05:00

When Religion Is An Addiction

I went to a talk given last night by Dr. Robert Minor of the KU Religious Studies Department. He has just published a new book titled, When Religion Is An Addiction. In 2001, he published another book, Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human.

His talk was quite interesting. Basically, his main arguments are:

Religion is an addiction. Many people seek religion (especially Christianity) because they feel so bad about themselves and who they are. His point was, Why else would someone join a religion that promises the punishment of Eternal Child Abuse (Hell) by a supposedly loving Father?

Religion gives people an excuse not to confront their own feelings, fears, and prejudices. "It’s not me who hates homosexuals (or Jews or Muslims); God does, so I do." It’s a way to avoid confrontation with our darkest selves, which can make us feel so bad we need to change ourselves. This is something many of us are unwilling to do—change ourselves—so religion gives us the excuse that it’s okay to go on being our wretched selves and not have to change our thinking or our ways and take responsibility for our own beliefs and lives. Christianity tells us that’s just the way we are—we’re born sinners and evil-doers.

Minor feels that, when someone tells him that human beings are evil, that’s telling him something about the person saying it (how they feel about themselves). That’s the same as saying, "I think I’m a bad person. I think I’m evil, so I need God or Jesus or Somebody or Something to tell me I was born in sin and evil, but that’s okay because everyone else is too, so that makes me not feel so bad about myself and the disgusting person I really think I am."

Many fundamentalist Christians cannot see past their own addiction, as addicts of any type cannot, and it’s unnecessary and useless to try and argue with them; in fact, doing so only encourages their addiction (and makes those who argue with them enablers) since they’re enabling the addictive thought process by validating the addict’s beliefs and behaviors.

Perhaps this may seem a bit extreme, but he makes some very valid points, and it’s all definitely food for thought. Of course with me he’s basically preaching to the choir (no pun intended) since I’m already somewhere on the continuum between agnosticism and atheism anyway.

2007-10-16T23:40:00.000-05:00

Learning an almost lost language

The few Mono Indians remaining who speak their tongue are passing it down to children to preserve culture. (A condensed version of an article in the Fresno Bee.)

This piece is particularly poignant:

As late as the 1970s, Native American children in Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools were punished for speaking their native languages.... (And this is in the supposed land of the free?)

By Charles McCarthy / The Fresno Bee 10/14/07
Source: Barbara Burrough

NORTH FORK -- Just uphill from an authentic cedar tepee -- or "nobi" in Mono -- four children sat down for a lesson in a language on the cusp of being lost.Volunteer teacher Barbara Burrough, one of the few people left who still speaks Mono, held up a cue card with the word "kah-why-you.""Horse," the youngsters said.Next was "moo-nah.""Mule," they said.Burrough's mother, 81-year-old Gertrude Davis, smiled as she watched the recent lesson unfold."I speak it, and I have no one to talk to, because no one knows how to speak the language or understand it," she said.In classrooms, Mono cultural sites and private homes in the North Fork area, Burrough and a few others are working hard to change that, one child at a time.Before contact with Spanish and English-speaking cultures in the 1800s, an estimated 5,000 spoke Mono in a territory that stretched from the San Joaquin River south to the Kern River.

Today, Burrough estimates that no more than 17 Mono around North Fork can converse in the native tongue -- and not all of them are fluent.It's unclear how many others outside the North Fork area might still know the language.North Fork Mono Rancheria Tribal Council Treasurer Maryann McGovran's son Cody, 13, has been one of Burrough's pupils for about two years. She said she isn't fluent in Mono, but she knows a few words.

Preserving the language is important, she said at tribal headquarters, because the language reflects the culture."It's the heart of our tribe," she said. "It shows who we are and what our people are about."

Mono is among 50 Native American languages in California that are considered endangered, said Leanne Hinton, professor emeritus in the linguistics department at the University of California at Berkeley. Another 50 already have disappeared since the early 1800s, she said."When you lose a language, it's a symptom of losing a whole culture," said Hinton, who has written three books devoted to endangered languages.But saving a language is no easy task -- especially when so few people still speak it.

Mono tribal officials say the decline of the language -- and traditional culture -- began as early as the 1810s with the arrival of outside cultures and languages.A series of broken treaties, land grabs and the integration of much North Fork Mono tribal land into the Sierra National Forest left the native residents little choice other than to join mining, lumber and agricultural economies.

In school, children were discouraged from speaking Mono. As late as the 1970s, Native American children in Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools were punished for speaking their native languages, said Andre Cramblit, Northern California Indian Development Council operations director and chairman of the Karuk tribal language restoration committee.Burrough said that her family escaped boarding school because her grandmother told her children to hide whenever a car came up their driveway."That's why we were able to hang on to our language," Burrough said.

Cox has invited parents to a series of Mono classes starting in November."It's important to know where you came from ... to have that sense of self," said Cox, 29, who learned Mono language and culture from her grandmother and others in North Fork but said she still is learning. She claims Chukchansi as well as Mono ancestors.For Burrough, the effort is a labor of love."With learning the language, you learn the culture," the 57-year-old Burrough said. "And with the culture, you learn respect. With respect, you learn to love the land and each other."

Burrough often holds outdoor classes on the rural property of Kendrick Sherman, a tribal elder who died in late September. The Sherman family has dedicated the property to the future of the Mono nation, Burrough said.Nine-year-old Antonio Beihn, a North Fork Elementary School student, said he signed up for the off-campus program because he is half-Mono and it's his culture."If it was lost, we wouldn't have what we have right now," he said.

2007-10-03T11:05:00.000-05:00

Čaačakiy Maččan 'inn Paysen 'Ačyankw
Coyote and the Pregnant Girl

A Rumsen Fable

Another Rumsen Ohlone Coyote story. I suspect that this is merely a fragment of a larger story due to its rather odd ending and the fact that the text itself seems a little disjointed. But it is nevertheless entertaining.

Neku kayy Čaačakiy Maččan: “MiSix a tsorkost pirre. ‘Ot ‘aiwis watčorta!” “’Inta rottey watčorta?” “Imxala ‘ačyankw misix.” “Me ku xawwan Sa ‘ačyankw.” “’Ann ku rott ka ‘iswin?” “Xuya me tuuls.” Was kayy siirx: “Kuuwe kuuwe miSix. Kulusta.” “Kuuwe miSix.” “Simpurta.” “Kuuwe miSix.” “Ritčiysta.” “Kuuwe miSix.” Neku kayy ‘Ummun: “Kuuwe miSix. Ne miSix pitinta.” Neku kayy Sa ‘ačyankw: “’Ink ku ka ‘anamii? ‘Ink ku ‘anamii ka ‘iswin?” “’Ot me xawwesp! Me ku xawwan Sa ‘ačyankw.” Neku wattin xuya Sa ‘ačyankw. Kayy Čaačakiy Maččan: “Kas kaxiy!” Neku was tonney pakkeliuwx. Neku šoxlon. Neku ‘aččep pakkeliuwx. Neku was ‘urru Caačakiy Maččan. “Nenney! Ooyonk! Katt! ‘Amxay ka kaxx!” Neku was Sa ‘ačyankw. “Xork! Xork!” Neku paysen Sa ‘ačyankw. Neku šoxlon. Neku ‘uuwin Sa ‘ačyankw. Neku xič misix ‘innx. “Kuu ka ‘iwsen Sa ‘innx.”

Then Coyote said: "A dry earth is good. Go see what’s in the river!" "What’s in the river?" "One pretty girl." "That girl will be your wife." "Where will my children be?" "In your knee." The eagle said to him: "No, no good. In your elbow." "No good." "In your eyebrow." "No good." "In your back." "No good." Then Hummingbird declared: "No good. Here is good in your belly." Then the girl said: "How will I do it? How will I make children?" "Go, get married! This girl will be your wife." Then the girl left. Howling Coyote said: "Delouse me!" Then a wood tick was found on him. Then he got scared. Then he threw down the wood tick. Then the Howling Coyote grabbed (the tick) again. "Look! Look! Eat (it)! Eat my louse (tick)." Then the girl (ate) it. "Swallow! Swallow!" Then the girl became pregnant. Then she got scared. The girl ran. Then she made a pretty road. "I don’t like this road."

Neku kayy Čaačakiy Maččan: “MiSix a tsorkost pirre. ‘Ot ‘aiwis watčor-ta!”
then say Wild Dog: good ? dry earth go.look river-LOC
“’Inta rottey watčor-ta?”
what be river-LOC
“Imxala ‘ačyankw misix.”
one girl pretty
“Me ku xawwan Sa ‘ačyankw.”
2S-POSS IRREAL wife DEF girl
"’Ann ku rott ka ‘iswin?"
where IRREAL be 1S-POSS children
"Xuya me tuuls."
in 2S-POSS knee
Was kayy siirx: "Kuuwe kuuwe miSix. Kulus-ta."
3S-ACC say eagle no no good elbow-LOC
"Kuuwe miSix."
no good
"Simpur-ta."
eyebrow-LOC
"Kuuwe miSix."
no good
“Ritčiys-ta.”
back-LOC
"Kuuwe miSix."
no good
Neku kayy ‘Ummun: "Kuuwe miSix. Ne miSix pitin-ta."
then say Hummingbird no good here good belly-LOC
Neku kayy Sa ‘ačyankw: “’Ink ku ka ‘anamii? ‘Ink ku ‘anamii ka ‘iswin?”
then say DEF girl how IRREAL 1S do how IRREAL make 1S-POSS children
“’Ot me xawwesp! Me ku xawwan Sa ‘ačyankw.”
go 2S marry 2S IRREAL wife DEF girl
Neku wattin xuya Sa ‘ačyankw. Kayy Čaačakiy Maččan: “Ka-s kaxiy!”
then go-PAST away DEF girl say Wild Dog 1S-ACC delouse
Neku wa-s tonney pakkeliuwx. Neku šoxlon. Neku ‘aččep pakkeliuwx.
then 3S-ACC find wood tick then fear then throw.down wood.tick
Neku wa-s ‘urru Caačakiy Maččan. “Nenney! Ooyonk! Katt! ‘Amxay ka kaxx!”
then 3S-ACC grab Wild Dog search search eat (it) eat 1S-POSS louse
Neku wa-s Sa ‘ačyankw. “Xork! Xork!” Neku paysen Sa ‘ačyankw.
then 3S-ACC DEF girl swallow swallow then pregnant DEF girl
Neku šoxlon. Neku ‘uuwin Sa ‘ačyankw. Neku xič misix ‘innx. “Kuu ka ‘iwsen Sa ‘innx.”
then fear then run-PAST DEF girl then make pretty road no 1S like DEF road

This story appears in:
Kroeber, A. 1904. The Languages of the coast of California south of San Francisco. Berkeley: The University Press. (page 79)

IRREAL = past or future (i.e., not present). Irrealis particles seem fairly common in Amerindian languages. Irrealis particles also occur in Biloxi and Soke (Zoque).

2007-09-22T00:15:00.000-05:00

Cusco, An Imperial Capital

As part of the course I’m taking on central Andean cultures, we’ve been studying Inkas and their once vast empire that was even greater in size than the Roman. Extending from southern Colombia down the Andes Mountains and along the Pacific coast to what is now Santiago, Chile, the Inka Empire had over 11,000 miles of roads. Inkas had no wheeled vehicles, and horses were unknown until the Spanish conquistadors arrived, but they did have native llamas and alpacas, which were adept at climbing up and down their steep mountain roads laden with up to 50 lbs. each of supplies or trade goods. Since there was a shortage of croplands in the steep mountainous terrain, Inkas became adept at terracing fields up steep hillsides and mountain slopes. Inkas did not use money, and they didn’t even have markets. Instead, men and women were employed on an as-needed basis by Inka overlords for community projects often involving the manufacture of goods or intense manual labor. In this marketless economy, workers were "paid" for their labor by receiving clothing, food, and other necessities and goods. Feasts of copious amounts of food and drink (including chicha, Inka corn beer) were often lavished upon these workers during and after projects. Inka emperors and overlords were very adept at distributing food, clothing, and other items to their populace and nobody wanted for anything.

Cusco, at a literally breathtaking elevation of 11,500 feet, was the capital city of the Inka Empire. It contained monumental edifices and architecture, grand palaces and temples trimmed in gold and silver, making it a fantastic sight to the Spanish invaders (à la Tenochtitlan of the Aztec Empire—how ironic that the Spanish were so impressed with these New World cities, saying there was nothing like them in Europe, before they laid them to waste!). Nobody could visit the city empty-handed, and anyone who visited had better have a sack of goods or materials strapped to their backs. The city was clean and well-kept with large areas of green parkland surrounding its massive imperial architecture.

What’s perhaps most interesting about this Native American capital, however, is that it appears to have been planned and laid out in the shape of a running puma, or cougar, viewed from above. (I can already foresee you UFO and extraterrestrial enthusiasts thinking alien intervention à la Nazca lines!) Look at the city plan above and see if you can spot the animal’s outline in Cusco's overall design.

Okay, if you missed it, take a look at this:

The Sacsayhuaman, or Imperial Palace, is the puma's head while the confluence of the two rivers is its tail. While jaguars roamed the other side of the Andes toward the Amazon, pumas or cougars roamed the Andes themselves.

2007-08-27T23:37:00.000-05:00

Biloxi shaman-kings*?

As I’ve been working on my ethnographic sketch of the Biloxi nation to eventually accompany the Biloxi dictionary as my thesis, I’ve been synthesizing the works of various authors over the past century, pulling together some of the bits and pieces that have been written. Also, while in Washington DC to do research at the National Anthropological Archives this past summer, I ordered copies of all of Albert Gatschet’s notes, which finally arrived the other day. Gatschet was the first linguist to do fieldwork on Biloxi in 1886, and he determined that it was indeed a Siouan language, not Muskogean as previously assumed.

During my research, I’m finding mounting, primarily linguistic, clues as to the political make-up of pre-contact Biloxis. The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), which incorporates many of the peoples and cultures traditionally associated with Mississippian or "mound-building" cultures, of which Biloxis were apparently a part, was largely agricultural and, as has happened to many agricultural economies through history, became socially non-egalitarian and stratified, including an elite class of ruling nobles. (This was nowhere better represented in the SECC than by Biloxis’ neighbors, Natchez, whose society was divided into an elite ruling nobility carried around on litters who referred to the "common" folks as "Stinkards.") There is mounting evidence that these ruling nobles were also members of an elite priesthood, which makes them quite similar to what we've learned about Mayan societies of ancient Mesoamerica. There is some linguistic evidence that Biloxis may have shared a similar system of nobles vs. commoners.

The evidence? In Gatschet’s materials, there is a term yaaxi (also ąyaaxi), literally 'mysterious' or 'sacred' person, which Gatschet states meant ‘conjurer’ but was also sometimes used for ‘chief.’ Traditional Native American shamans, usually referred to as medicine men or women, could be either beneficent healers of the sick and injured, or they could be malevolent "sorcerers" or "witches" who could cause illness or injury with the help of evil spirits. The term ‘conjurer’ of course is usually associated with the malevolent sorcerer. It thus appears in the data that Biloxi conjurer = chief. In Biloxi oral tradition, there is also reference to their chief being seated in an elevated position, perhaps on a raised chair, platform, or throne. Thus, I think it seems reasonable to hypothesize a Biloxi "shaman-king" who was not only ruler of his people but also the head healer and sorcerer.

As stated before, this would put the Biloxi chief in line with what anthropologists are learning of other SECC societies AND with ancient Mesoamerican societies. Imagine the power wielded by these kings, who could control their citizenry through its manipulation of its citizenry's fear of the unknown spirit world that the chief could control, and who, in line with typical shamanism, could "transform" into powerful animal spirits such as a panther (or jaguar in Mesoamerica) or a raptorial bird such as the eagle. What better way to "earn" the respect, obedience, and worship of your populace!

Anyway, this is what I've come up with through my research so far.

UPDATE: Please be aware that I employ the term "shaman-king" loosely as it is still very much debated as to whether the priests or sorcerers of Native America, or anywhere outside of Siberia where the term shaman originated (a Tungus term), should be called "shamans". They technically do not fit the specifications of the term as applied in Siberia. My colleague and friend, Alice Beck Kehoe, is adamantly opposed to this term being employed by anthropologists outside of the confines of Siberia.

2007-08-18T14:21:00.001-05:00

Watson Brake
Oldest pyramidal complex in North America

The dates of Mississippian or "moundbuilding" culture seem to be getting pushed back further in time. While Poverty Point was previously considered the oldest "mound" site in North America, that distinguished honor now apparently belongs to Watson Brake, discovered about 30 years ago, also in Louisiana, near Monroe. While Poverty Point dates back to about 1500 BC, Watson Brake apparently dates back to about 3400 BC. Watson Brake is a collection of 11 pyramidal mounds arranged into a large oval apparently surrounding a large central plaza.

Watson Brake mound site

Unlike Poverty Point, as yet there are no signs of residential sites at Watson Brake. Anthropologists currently speculate that Watson Brake may have been a constructed site for a band or bands of hunter-gatherers to conglomerate, perhaps for ritual or ceremonial purposes.

Interestingly, Watson Brake seems to predate the Olmec civilization by almost 2,000 years. The Olmecs also erected "mounds," or earthen pyramids, thought to be the forerunners of later Mayan and Mexica (Aztec) stone pyramids. (Mounds, or pyramids, were also built in the Andes region of South America.) This leads me to wonder if these Watson Brake "moundbuilders" may have been related to Olmecs, perhaps their forebears who decided to travel farther south into southern Mexico and became the "mother culture" of the later Mayas and Aztecs. Or perhaps much of Native America descends from a common culture that began erecting pyramidal and other monumental structures as terrestrial representations of their view of the cosmos and spiritual beliefs.

More food for thought!

2007-07-01T22:49:00.000-05:00

The Lady of Cofitachequi

I’ve been doing some research and reading on the pre-Columbian southeast (US), partially in trying to piece together more of possible Biloxi sociopolitical history in an overall geopolitical and geocultural context. I’ve discovered some interesting tidbits brought down to us via the journals of the De Soto expeditions of the sixteenth century.

Among these tidbits is evidence of definite social stratification and class structure, including reverence for high chiefs or kings (and, at least in one case, a queen). One of these “paramount chiefs” who commanded a number of chiefdoms distributed over an area of at least one thousand square kilometers (Smith & Hally 1992) was named by the Spaniards “The Lady of Cofitachequi.” She was carried in a litter on the shoulders of some of her subordinates to meet the De Soto expedition. She was not treated very well by her Spanish visitors, however, and in fact was kidnapped by De Soto’s men after they pillaged her primary village and supplies. They apparently took her captive to use as a guide in locating another chiefdom at Coosa. At one point on the journey, she and one of her female slaves escaped, apparently never to be seen again by De Soto (luckily for her!).

Such encounters with Native American chiefs or kings (or queens) being carried on litters was apparently rather frequent, as the paramount chief at Coosa was also carried on a litter by his subordinates, and Natchez chiefs were also carried about on litters.

Natchez chief carried on litter

I find this particularly interesting in regards to the Native southeastern US, as there seems to be mounting evidence that the pre-Columbian Southeastern Cultural Complex (SECC) may have had more in common sociopolitically with Mesoamerica (Olmec and Maya) than we may have ever thought given the evidence of class distinction, high reverence for the ruling elite, and the layouts and monumental architecture of Mississippian and SECC cities (e.g., Cahokia, Moundville, Poverty Point).

Reference:

Smith, M. and D. Hally. 1992. Chiefly Behavior: Evidence from Sixteenth Century Spanish Accounts. In Lords of the southeast: social inequality and the native elites of southeastern North America, 1992 Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, No. 3. Barker, A. and T. Pauketat, eds.

2007-06-24T00:58:00.000-05:00

Easter Island: From Paradise to Purgatory

I have been reading parts of Jared Diamond’s latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I was intrigued by one chapter in which he talks about Easter Island (natively called Rapanui, cf. Hawaiian lapa nui, ‘big ridge or slope’). I’d known about EI’s large statues (moai) and its platforms (ahu) supporting the moai. I did not realize, however, until reading Diamond’s chapter, how much of an ecological disaster EI is. As Diamond puts it, "...whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct" (2005:107). EI was once a "diverse subtropical forest of tall trees and woody bushes" including among its native species perhaps the largest palm in the world, even larger than the now current largest palm, the Chilean palm. These palms measured about seven feet in circumference. EI was home to at least six native land birds, including heron, two species of parrot, and a barn owl. It was once the richest breeding ground in Polynesia and perhaps all of the Pacific.

Once Polynesians arrived on this remotest of the world’s islands from western Polynesia (most likely from Mangareva), deforestation began, apparently reaching its peak around 1400 AD. This total deforestation was due to various factors, not the least of which was to have wood for heating (EI is subtropical and drops to around 50° F in winter), rope-making (for pulling the huge moai), and canoe-building for transoceanic voyages. EI had had a strong civilization divided into territories ruled by chiefs who erected larger and larger moai, representing high-ranking ancestors, to assert their egoistic sense of power and dominance. There were 887 moai carved, averaging 12 tons each, often pulled for a distance of up to nine miles to be erected on an ahu. The largest moai built was 32 feet tall and weighed a mere 75 tons. (This apparently occurred just before deforestation reached its peak.) EI’s huge statues, by the way, although often touted as mysterious or even the products of "alien contact," had provenance in native Polynesia, as large statues were also found on Mangareva, the supposed origin of Easter Islanders, and large stone monuments were also constructed on Tonga, as Polynesians eventually sailed their way to all corners of the Pacific.

The irony of what EI was and what it soon became is exemplified by this cruel metaphor: after the construction of hundreds of massive multi-ton statues, there was a proliferation of little statues called moai kavakava "depicting starving people with hollow cheeks and protruding ribs. Captain Cook in 1774 described the islanders as ‘small, lean, timid, and miserable’" (Diamond 2005:109). The population declined by about 70% between 1400-1600, partly because the islanders turned to cannibalism for survival. Diamond states, "Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was ‘The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth’" (2005:109).

I was frankly shocked by the details of Diamond’s investigation into EI’s ecological and sociocultural history. It is rather easy to equate EI’s downfall with what is happening now on a global scale, and Diamond makes this point loud and clear. If you’re curious to learn more, I highly recommend this book.

2007-06-15T11:45:00.000-05:00

Maččan, Wa Xawwan, 'inn Makkeweks

Coyote, His Wife, and Makkeweks

A Rumsen Story

The following is another Rumsen Ohlone story. Makkeweks, by the way, is the name of a Rumsen mythological "sea monster." I just completed a draft of a paper with this text and a review of the grammar incorporated in it. I have not included the grammatical notes in this post.

Neeyink ku wattin kaawtak maččan. Neeyink ku was kayy wa xawwan. Kuu ku me koyypon. Neeyinkmur Makkeweks ku was koyypomp. Neeyink ku was maččan koyypomp. Neeyinkmur ku was Makkeweks koyypomp maySantopin. Neeyinkmur ‘innay Sa lačyankw maččan xawwa. Neeyinkmur lakkuy wa koyyponin. Maččan was kayy: tommins me ‘etten, xakkaw, ‘immey me ‘ettenakay 'išku kuu koyypon kuumur was monsemiki Makkeweks wamur ‘etten. Tanmur lakkuy, neey ku was liiw maččan, neey ku was wattis ‘ewwey, xuyyamur kuu tonn was sakkes lattap Makkeweks Sa lačyankw. Neeyink ku ‘ummap maččan, neeyinkmur naterimp xuya sottow, xuya saanay xuya sottow ‘išku muSSen neeyink ku muSSey. Neeyink ku xaal maččan wa ‘oxšenin, neeyink ku čunnuy, neeyink ku čitt. Neeyink ku puSSep(iki) wa xawwan neeyink ku kappes ‘attap xallu rottey mur wa čunn maččan, tanmur čitt.

1. Neey-ink ku watt-in kaaw-tak maččan.
then-? IRREAL come-PAST beach-LOC coyote

2. Neey-ink ku was kayy wa xawwan.
then-? IRREAL 3S-ACC say 3S-POSS wife

3. Kuu ku me koyypon.
NEG IRREAL 2S be.afraid

4. Neey-ink-mur Makkeweks ku was koyypo(n)-mp
then-?-? IRREAL 3S-ACC be.afraid-CAUS

5. Neey-ink ku was maččan koyypo(n)-mp.
then-? IRREAL 3S-ACC coyote be.afraid-CAUS

6. Neey-ink-mur ku was Makkeweks koyypo(n)-mp maySantop-in.
then-?-? IRREAL 3S-ACC be.afraid-CAUS rise.up-PAST

7. Neey-ink-mur ‘innay Sa lačyankw maččan xawwan
then-?-? fall DEF woman coyote wife

8. Neey-ink-mur lakkuy wa koyypon-in.
then-?-? die 3S be.afraid-PAST

9. Maččan was kayy: tommins me ‘etten, xakkaw, ‘immey me ‘etten-akay
coyote 3S-ACC say ? 2S-POSS uncle ? ? 2S-POSS uncle-PL

10. ‘išku kuu koyypon
in.order.to NEG be.afraid

11. kuu-mur was monsem-iki Makkeweks wa-mur ‘etten.
NEG-? 3S-ACC advise-PAST 3S-POSS-? uncle

12. Tan-mur lakkuy, neey ku was liiw maččan, neey ku was watt-is
when-? die then IRREAL 3S-ACC ? coyote then NEG 3S-ACC come-?

13. ‘ewwey, xuyya-mur kuu tonn was sakkes lattap Makkeweks Sa lačyankw.
far down-? NEG ? 3S-ACC look.at ? DEF woman

14. Neey-ink ku ‘ummap maččan, neey-ink-mur nateri-mp
then-? IRREAL ? coyote then-?-? ?-CAUS

15. xuya sottow, xuya saanay xuya sottow ‘išku muSSen neey-ink ku muSSey.
down fire down side down fire in.order.to get.warm then-? IRREAL warmed

16. Neey-ink ku xaal maččan wa ‘oxšen-in,
then-? IRREAL jump coyote 3S do.magic-PAST

17. neey-ink ku čunnuy, neey-ink ku čitt.
then-? IRREAL sing then-? IRREAL dance

18. Neey-ink ku puSSep-(iki) wa xawwan neey-ink ku kappeS ‘attap xallu
then-? IRREAL revive-(PAST) 3S-POSS wife then-? IRREAL three times jump

19. rottey mur wa čunn maččan, tan-mur čitt.
be ? 3S-POSS song coyote when-? dance

The coyotes went to the beach. Coyote told his wife not be afraid. But then she became afraid when Makkeweks rose up from the water, and she fell dead from fright. Coyote had told her that the sea lion, mussel, and crab were her uncles and not to be afraid, but he did not tell her that Makkeweks was her uncle. When she died, Coyote carried her on his back and laid her down on her side next to the fire so she could get warm. She got warm. Then Coyote jumped while performing a shamanic ritual, sang, and danced. His wife came back to life then Coyote jumped three times and sang and danced.

Pronunciation:
' = glottal stop (before all words beginning with vowel)
č = English ch
S = retroflex s (with tongue curled back in mouth)
š = English sh
x = no equivalent in English, but like an exaggerated h sound or like ch in German Bach

2007-06-11T23:33:00.000-05:00

Biloxis and Aztecs

I recently came across an online version of a paper, apparently part of a book published in 1896 titled, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land by Charles Skinner. Skinner apparently wandered around the southeastern US in the late 1800s visiting various Amerindian tribes and collecting what he could of their stories and mythologies.

He briefly speaks of some Biloxi legends, although as far as I can tell, he doesn’t specify from whom these stories came. But there was an intriguing line in one of these stories:

The southern part of this country was once occupied by a people called the Biloxi, who had kept pace with the Aztecs in civilization.

This is particularly intriguing not only because I work on the Biloxi language and culture, but also because it may have broader implications for the civilizations of the entire native southeast and the Mississippian Culture, or what has often been termed the "Moundbuilder" culture.

Could Biloxis have had a civilization as advanced as that of Aztecs, assumedly including the building of monumental architecture such as pyramids, temples, and ceremonial plazas?

If you’ve looked at my earlier postings, you’ll find that I’ve talked about the Mississippian culture before, including their supposed primary centers, or cities, called Cahokia (in modern Illinois), Aztalan (in modern Wisconsin), and Poverty Point (in modern Louisiana), all more or less located close to the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

While Biloxis are a Siouan tribe who are thought to have migrated south from the Ohio Valley region at some point in ancient history, they did settle in the southeast in what is modern Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They were close neighbors of Amerindian groups known to have had large settlements, social stratification (i.e., economic disparity), and a high reverence for their chiefs or ruling class, among these the Natchez and Caddo. It is known from post-contact written records that Biloxis had temples in which they placed the preserved skeletons of their chiefs. Interestingly, Biloxis referred to their chiefs and shamans with the same term, ąyaa xi, literally meaning ‘sacred’ or ‘mysterious’ person.

This tempts me to think that Biloxi chiefs may have often been shamans or a priestly class of rulers who could have been on a par with the Olmec and Maya "shaman-kings" of those Mesoamerican civilizations. This would certainly bode well with the idea of the Biloxi civilization having been on a par with the Aztec or even the earlier civilizations of Olmecs and Mayas.

There are theories out there that the Mississippian culture and its cities may have been influenced by those of Mesoamerica, or that there was at least contact between them and dissemination of knowledge. The fact that the cities of Mississippian culture share common traits with those of Mesoamerica, such as the building of pyramids (often referred to as "mounds" in regards to North America*), temples, and monumental plazas certainly makes these theories very plausible and intriguing.

This is all speculative at this point, of course, but it is definitely food for thought in trying to discern what Native America really looked like prior to 1492.

* I was recently reading a paper that discussed Olmec "mounds." It seems the first pyramids in Mesoamerica, in the ancient Mixe-Zoquean or Olmec world of the Isthmus, were also made of earth, just as those in the ancient cities of North America discussed above. It seems that, unless these pyramids are made of stone, they are habitually referred to as "mounds" by many archaeologists. Any archaeologists out there want to chime in on the use of this terminology?

2007-06-05T22:16:00.000-05:00

Hawai’i
What does it mean, anyway?

I was looking into the name "Hawai’i" to try and find its meaning, if there was one. I checked the Hawaiian Dictionary by Pukui and Elbert (1986). This is what they say:

Elsewhere in Polynesia, Hawai’i or a cognate is the name of the underworld or of the ancestral home, but in Hawai’i the name has no meaning.

However, in an interesting little book by Leinani Melville titled, Children of the Rainbow, Melville states that he was told by a Hawaiian elder fisherwoman named Ta Ruahine the following (almost oddly scientific) creation story which may give some clue to the name’s actual origin and meaning:

At commencement of the earth’s history this blazing globe, a rumbling, quivering, ball of fire, sprouted from the sun, containing all of its fertilizing elements. The spinning orb, screaming and crackling, raced through space whistling among the spheres, roaring in the wind, radiating light as it flashed through the night of its creation. It was directed to this dark abyss in the vast emptiness of space by the mind, the will, and the energy of [ke Akua] God. The fireball gradually slowed down, found anchorage in this pit of heaven which was destined to become its permanent home, and began revolving slowly in unending circular movements.

When the flaming globe found its orbit, lava, seething within the pumping bowels of its raging surface, attracted from the colder realms of outer space a blanket of clouds laden with moisture. The earth’s electrical magnetism caused a downpour of nectar from the firmament. Thus rain was born. Crystal raindrops cascaded in glistening sheets upon this jagged, treeless crater, drenched its raw plains and quenced its flames. The rains swept tempestuously on to bathe the expansive depths of the earth’s sizzling cradle. Thus the ocean was born from the water that washed clean this crater of heaven. And thus Havai’i received its name from the moisture which mercifully cooled the steaming terrain.

This apparently relates to the word hāwai, which literally means “to generate steam in an earth oven by pouring on water; to purify with water" (Pukui & Elbert 1986:62). The little particle i at the end means, among other things, "by means of." Thus, according to this story, the name Hawai’i apparently originates from hāwai + i = Hawai’i, or "by means of purifying with [rain] water." (With shortening of the long vowel, which can happen with compounds in Hawaiian, e.g., 'ōlelo, speak; mo’olelo, story).

By the way, as it's about time for me to get Kansas registration and license (since my California one expires next month), I'm hoping to get a personalized license plate, which in Kansas has a picture of a bison on it, and I want to put KAOLELO on it. This means "the language" in Hawaiian, ka + 'ōlelo. (Can't do the glottal stop or macron signs, but oh well.) I'm hoping nobody else in Kansas will have Hawaiian words on a bison license plate! (And, since front license plates are not required in Kansas, I'll leave my old California plate on it, lest anyone forget where I'm from!)

Citations:

Melville, Leinani (1969). Children of the Rainbow: The Religion, Legends, and Gods of Pre-Christian Hawaii. Wheaton: The Theosophical Publishing House.

Pukui, M. and S. Elbert (1986). Hawaiian Dictionary. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

2007-06-02T13:25:00.000-05:00

Archaeology, terminology, and racism

I’ve been reading another interesting book titled, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians by Timothy Pauketat (2004). There is one section that raises some key points regarding the terminology we employ for describing the archaeology of ancient Native North American civilizations, and particularly that of Cahokia.

Following are a few quotes from this book:

… the legacy of this nineteenth-century "Moundbuilder Myth" still lurks in the dark corners of archaeology, shrouded in some of the well-meaning interpretive schemes used by archaeologists and laypersons alike (see Kehoe 1998; Patterson 1995). In plain words, that legacy is racist. But it lives wherever archaeologists [or laypeople] understate the cultural achievements or de-emphasize the historical importance of First Nations peoples. It is hidden in words. For instance, Cahokia has been called a "mound center," a "town and mound" complex, or the "ceremonial center" of a "chiefdom." Few North American archaeologists call it a city. Fewer still would think of it as a kingdom or a state. Even the term "pyramid" is thought too immodest by many eastern North American archaeologists. They prefer to call these four-sided and flat-topped equivalents of stone pyramids in Mexico … mounds.

However, if Cahokia, Cahokians, and Cahokia’s mounds had been in ancient Mesopotamia, China, or Africa, archaeologists might not hesitate to identify [Cahokian] pyramids in a city at the center of an early state….

…many North American archaeologists are "downsizers" (Yoffee et al. 1999:267). We have inherited the conservative and subtly racist terminology of the nineteenth century (Kehoe 1998).

…cultural biases have crept into our interpretations of New World people, and the Moundbuilder Myth lives.

May I also proffer that some of this "subtly racist" terminology in regards to the New World, and particularly to the ancient civilizations of North America, arises from our own sense of guilt? I mean, the idea that our government attempted and performed veritable genocide on peoples who may have built Old World-type city-states does not sit well with most Euro-Americans today. Thus, "downsizing" their accomplishments (such as making a "pyramid" into a mere "mound" reminiscent of something a gopher can make) serves to somewhat assuage said guilt. Amazing how a manipulation of terminology can so subtly affect all aspects of society, from government right down to science. Linguistics can indeed turn ugly!

Citation references:

Kehoe, Alice B. 1998 The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology. Routledge, London.

Patterson, Thomas C. 1995 Toward A Social History of Archaeology in the United States. Harcourt Brace and Company, Orlando, Florida.

Yoffee, Norman, Suzanne K. Fish, and George R. Milner 1999 Communidades, Ritualities, Chiefdoms: Social Evolution in the American Southwest and Southeast. In Great Towns and Regional Polities in the Prehistoric American Southwest and Southeast, edited by J.E. Neitzel, pp. 261-71. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

2007-05-26T00:36:00.000-05:00

Rumsen wordlist

For the gentleman who commented (and anyone else) who is interested in a Rumsen (Ohlone) wordlist, here it goes. It is far from complete, and I can add more later, but this is at least a start.

Pronunciation:

1. Doubled vowels are pronounced longer than short (single) ones.
2. Doubled consonants are pronounced longer than short (single) ones.
3. Words almost always stressed on first syllable.
4. ‘ represents a glottal stop, or closure of the vocal cords (always when a word begins with a vowel).
5. č = ch as in church.
6. r seems to represent a trill or tap, as in Spanish.
7. š = sh as in ship.
8. S = retroflex s with the tongue curled back.
9. T = retroflex t with the tongue curled back.
10. x = guttural kh sound as in German Bach.

abalone, ‘awlon
American, Mirkan
ant, ottowx
arm, ‘iS or ‘iss (also hand)
arrow, tepS
arroyo, rumme
bad, yečemest (cf. devil)
basket, čiiwin
beach, kaaw
bead, piSmin
bear, ‘orreS
big, ‘issak
blackberry, ‘ennen
blackbird, kulyan
boat, waarko (<>barco)
bow, lawwan
bread, šetxel
butterfly, siililkw
candy, tommoy
cheese, kiiSo
chicken, puyyito
chief, kayaramk/čiš
cloud, meč
clover, muuren
coyote, (čačakiiy) maččan
crab, ‘ičaw
crazy, ixsist
crow, kakiriwx
dance, čitts
day, Tuuxs
deer, (čačakiiy) tooT (lit. 'wild meat')
devil, yečem
dog, maččan or šoošo
door, ‘inx (also road)
eagle, siirix
earth, pirre
eel, očrowx
egg, motx
elk, čerič
evening, ‘uuyakaw
father, ‘appa
fire, sottow
fish, kinnir
flea, poor
flower, tiwis
fog, mačar
food, ‘amxayin
foot, korro (also leg)
forehead, ‘urri
friend, ‘ukx
frog, kolyoč or wakatsem
good, miSix
hair (head), ‘utt
hair (body), Taap
hand, ‘iS or ‘iss (also arm)
hawk, siwker
head, ‘utt (also hair on head)
hello! inkaté!
hill, čippil
horse, kawwayo
house, rukk
hummingbird, ‘ummun
husband, ‘uurin
knee, toolS
lake, čaapur
land, pirre (also year)
leg, korro (also foot)
man, mukiamk
medicine man, ‘utten
medicine woman, čaačas
Monterey, ‘Aččis(ta)
moon, ‘ismen*
mosquito, palakans
mother, ‘aan
mountain, huT
mushroom, ‘aasakwa
night, ‘orpetewx or muur
no, kuuwe
otter, šuušč
owl, tukkun
pelican, yeyexem
person, ‘amma or kata
pine, ‘ixx
pipe (smoking), kunuš
pretty, miššix (cf. good)
puma, xoom
raccoon, šašran
rain, ‘innam
rattlesnake, ‘ipx
redwood, xoop
river, waččor
rock, ‘irrek
road, ‘inx
salmon, ‘uurak
seagull, sawran or puuk
skunk, tixsin
sky, tapper or čarax
small, puSSut
smoke, kaar
snake, lisan
Spanish, kaSteyano
splitstick, tarran
squirrel, ‘eex
star, pak(a)rar
sun, 'ismen
thank you, šururu
tree, pookonin or tiš (cf. wood)
water, siiy
wife, xawwan
wild, čačakiiy
wind, teer(x)
wolf, ‘umx or ‘umux
woman, ačyamk
wood, tiš (also tree)
year, pirre
yes, ‘ee

To form plurals, add -kay to a noun ending in a vowel, and -akay to a noun ending in a consonant (e.g., 'appa-kay 'fathers' and tiš-akay 'trees').

Here are the numbers:

1. 'imxala
2. 'uttis
3. kappes
4. 'uutitim
5. xala'iss
6. xali-šakken
7. ('u)čumai-šakken
8. kapxamai-šakken
9. pak
10. tantsarkt

These data come from Harrington's microfiche files containing his notes from his work with the last native speaker of Rumsen, Isabel Meadows, in the 1930s. The modern spelling is derived from not only Harrington but from other academicians (Catherine Callaghan, Marc Okrand)who've worked on the language over the years and have done comparative analysis of the phonetics of other Ohlonean languages.

I will of course try and answer any questions as best I can based on my own research and what I know of the language so far.

šururu

* The noun 'ismen is best translated as something like "glowing orb." It doubles for both "sun" and "moon" although one can specify by: tuuxisiy 'ismen 'sun' ("daytime orb") and 'orpetewxiy 'ismen 'moon' ("nighttime orb").

The bear bites the moon

Rumsens referred to a lunar eclipse as "the bear biting the moon," e.g., "Čarwayink ku murrem ‘ismen, was ‘orreS kaas," 'Tomorrow the moon will darken; the bear will bite it."

THIS POST LAST UPDATED: 01/06/08

2007-02-19T23:19:00.000-06:00

Ayihįdi Ąyaa Tukpe
The Wolf that Became A Man

A Biloxi story

Ąyaadi wax ni yuke hą uxte yuke hą thao. Eyą kįhį yuke dixyį Ayihįdi tukanitu tukpe eyąhį. Ekeką tukanituyą wo yihi hą “Tukani ko eyą nąx ką nyidohi ąkahi ąkihi na,” hetu ką, “Ąkįksu wadi kawak yo mąki nani ąkihi utohohiye daha ąkux nedi,” edi. Ekehą petuxte wataye wax ade. Tukanituyą yihi hą wax ade o thao kįx ką ahįske wa ande tha duxke ande dehedhą ayukuni ti sahiye ti haitha duti ande ką, “Kô! Tukani kô tha ayukuni ti sahiye duti hande. Tukani ko haitha hande ko kadohoni hano,” kiyetu ką “E’ede cikuyixti,” hedi. Etike handa hi kiye hą kiya waxa ade. Ekehą itha kiyowo o kix ką ahįske wadi, cana duxke nedi. Eke hande ką cipuxi cupą įxkiyaduye ande ką etike tha duxke ne ką sidiyą kihanetu. “Xooxoo, tukani ko sidi oni wo,” kiyetu ką, “Xoxo, xoxo,” ex dedi. Ekehą Ayihį įcyoxti dedi. Ekeonidi ąyaa wax ni yuke oxtetu dixyį acka wohe ande xya, etu xa. Exa.

Some persons who were going hunting, having camped, shot a deer. As they were returning to camp with the game a wolf who had assumed the form of their mother’s brother reached there. They thought that he was indeed their mother’s brother, so they said, "As you, our mother’s brother, live yonder, we thought that we would be coming to see you." The supposed uncle replied, "I have a strong craving for fresh meat, and thinking that perhaps you had shot some animal and that its body was lying here, I have been following your trail until I got here."

Then the men made him watch the camp while they went hunting again. They thought that he was their mother’s brother, and while they were walking along in search of game they shot a deer and returned to camp. The Wolf was very greedy, so after flaying the deer he roasted the meat and was eating some of it while it was raw and bloody all over.

Observing this the men said: "Oh! mother’s brother, oh! he is eating the venison that is still raw, though it has been put on to roast. Perhaps he does not see that it is all bloody." But the wolf-man replied, "This way it is very sweet."

They said to him that he should remain, and they went hunting again. They shot more deer, carried them home on their backs, and found that the wolf-man was very greedy. Again he stood flaying the bodies. While he was doing this he had an old blanket wrapped around himself, and as he stood flaying the men discovered his tail. "Oh! Does mother’s brother have a tail?" said they to him. On hearing this, he said "Oh, oh!" and departed. Behold he departed as a very aged male wolf. Therefore when men go hunting and camp there is usually the barking of wolves nearby they say. That is all.

2006-12-31T19:48:00.000-06:00

Heb’ Kab’nal
The Lacandones

A Q'anjob'al Maya story

Ay jun ab’ix chiyal intxutx yet heb’ jichmam tzet maxyun pitz’oj heb’ a heb’ anima yet payxa. K’am chi pitzk’oj heb’ yuj no’ tiltik chijayi chi chiontoq no’ chiyab’en no’ b’ay chiajteq heb’ unin okoq. Maxb’et chalayayteq a no’ chib’et chaonayteq. Chi pitzk’oj jun jun unin chi chionaytoq no’ k’am chipitzk’oj heb’ anima. Axa P’elixh maxnaoni tzet oq-yun pitzk’oj heb’ anima kaq ti’ ta kak’alti’. Maxpitzk’oj heb’ maxsayon rason. Maxb’et sayonteq te’ q’olal taj maxtoj b’ay nanlaq ak’al. Maxb’et chikon chib’ej. Maxyab’en no’ tiltik tu’ jab’ chib’ej tu’ maxayk’ay no’ kaq chiyun yayk’ay no’ ostok. Maxb’et maxayk’ay no’. Chikon P’elixh tu’ te’ q’olal taj tu’. "Echinb’el wuxhtaq oqachlowoq ti’ chiwat’nej alob’ej." Maxyi’onaj te’ q’olal taj tu’ lanan yuqi te’ maxq’anwontoq yul nuq’ no’ tiltik tu’ kax chikamel no’. A b’ay chib’etek’ jun junel chib’et ya’kan kam, otaqk’on waqtaqk’on lajlajonk’on tiltik. Kay tu’ maxyun kami. Kay tu’ maxyun pitzk’ojkan heb’. Axkatu k’amxa maqtxel oqchiontoq heb’ kax maxpitzk’ojkan heb’. Axkatu maxyun pitzk’ojkan heb’ anima yet antiwo ley yet heb’ jichmam.

There is a story my mother tells about our ancestors, how it happened they grew [progressed] those people from long ago. They do not progress because of the lacandon. They [the lacandones] come, they eat, they hear where they [children] go up, the children enter [the steambath]. [And they] go to receive, those animals go receiving to themselves. Each child is born, the animal eats him up, the people do not progress. And so Vírvez [P’elixh] was thinking: How will it happen the people grow, thus if it is [to be] they grow [and he] looked for a way. He went looking for pine resin, he went in among the valleys. He went to cook meat. Those lacandon smelled the meat [and] they fell as it happens the buzzard falls. They went, they fell down. That Vírvez was cooking that pine tree sap. "Wait, my brother, you will eat, here I am preparing your meal." And he raised up that pine tree resin—it was boiling—[and he] threw it down the throats of those lacandones and they died. There he went by every time he went to leave them dead—five, six, ten animal lacandones. Thus it happened that they died. Thus it happened the people continued to grow. Thus no more will anyone eat them up and they progressed. So it happened the people grew in the old law of our ancestors.

This story is about a group of Ch'ol-speaking Maya people called the Lacandon, or Lacandones, who were never conquered by the Europeans and who were apparently not on good terms with the Q'anjob'al at this point in history. Note that the story-teller (see below) uses the term no' tiltik for the Lacandon, instead of the usual Q'anjob'al term naq kab'nal. The no'(1) is a classifier for animals (most Q'anjob'al nouns take some type of classifier usually translated 'the' in English), and the tiltik was described by informants as an inhuman, vampire-like creature with deep red eyes and long black clothes over a skeleton. There is one occurrence of lajlajonk'on tiltik, with lajlajon (ten) and k'on the numerical version of the no' classifier for animals. The word naq is a human classifier used with kab'nal, the actual term for the Lacandon, but her repeated use of no' tiltik seems to indicate her equation of them with something less than human probably due to their behavior.

Note the Spanish borrowings: anima (borrowed into most Mayan languages and in Q'anjob'al means 'person' or 'people'), rason (razón, reason), antiwo (antiguo, old), and ley (law).

This story was told by Eulalia Garcia M., a native speaker of Q'anjob'al, as it appears in an International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL) article of 1980 by Laura Martin.

The article's English translation is not too smooth, but it gets the basic idea across.

(1) In Q'anjob'al, you cannot simply say "I have a dog" or "There is a house." You must use the appropriate classifiers for dog or house: Ay jun no' hintx'i' (exists-one-[animal]-my-dog) or Ay jun te' na (exists-one-[wood]-house; te' the classifier for houses, wooden objects, etc.). There is no verb 'to have' in Q'anjob'al.

2006-12-29T12:11:00.000-06:00

A real Yukatek Maya perspective on the movie Apocalypto

I especially liked his ending sentence:

"Perhaps Gibson could make a movie showing how the Mayas still are suffering discrimination, even to the point of being cheated out of our lands and displaced, because of the ships he showed arriving as the finale of 'Apocalypto.'"

Not to mention his remarks on the Yukatek language as spoken by non-Maya actors!

Who were the Maya?

Not the people in 'Apocalypto'

By PATRICIO G. BALONA
Staff Writer

The Mayas were savages and needed to be straightened out.

That is the message Mel Gibson's movie "Apocalypto" conveyed to me when it contrasted savage bloodthirsty pagans meeting with arriving Europeans carrying the symbol of the cross.
But we are not savages.

Spanish invaders who arrived among the Maya in the 16th century depicted natives as barbaric people dedicated to devil worship in order to justify brutality and conquest. We all know native peoples didn't fare well under Christianity; some cultures were completely lost. Coincidentally, Christianity is the foundation of Gibson's belief and spirituality.

But a more serious massacre -- that of the Yukatek language -- begins early in the movie. The non-Maya actors of North American Indian heritage pronouncing their rehearsed Yukatek lines sounded like Hollywood Western stereotypes saying: "How! Me Tonto, this Painted Horse."
Although I was born a Yukatek Maya and raised in a Yukatek village, speaking Yukatek as the first of four languages I know, I had to glance at the subtitles to figure out what the actors were trying to say.

It was slightly refreshing that Gibson cast an elder, a storyteller, who spoke the language without pauses, with such musical flow and accuracy that for a moment I thought I was in my village listening to my own elders. But, sad to say, the only other significant part in the movie where the power of the Yukatek language was genuinely demonstrated is when the tiny village girl talks about the prophecy of the jaguar ending the evil and vile ways of the devil people.

The film is full of violence, floods of blood, throat-slitting, beheadings, heads rolling down the steps of temples and hearts being wrenched out of gaping holes in upper abdomens.

I had to turn to my friend, Robert Sitler, a Latin American studies professor at Stetson University, to ask for his reaction.

"Sadly, 'Apocalypto' will leave mainstream American moviegoers seeing Maya as heartless savages," Sitler said after the movie. He said the movie "unwittingly reinforces a long-standing tradition of virulent racism against the Maya among white Europeans and their Spanish-speaking descendents."

The film falls short of Gibson's intention -- which, remotely, appears to be telling the story of Jaguar Paw, the hero played by Rudy Youngblood, and the prophecy of his rise to power. The film fails for two reasons.

First, Gibson bogs down the plot with his craze for blood and death. Second, just as Jaguar Paw appears to be achieving success, he runs into ships anchored in the bay with boats rowing ashore carrying grim-faced conquistadors bearing the symbols of the cross.

I am not certain which Jaguar Paw Gibson tried to portray in his movie. There were several famous Jaguar Paws in Maya hieroglyphics, including one who became king of the great Maya city of Calakmul in 686 and was long gone when the Spaniards arrived 806 years later. There were no glorious Maya cities, simply small communities scattered throughout the Maya world.
And Mr. Gibson, that world is not only Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras, as you defined it in promoting your movie. It also includes what is now Belize and El Salvador.

Unlike the sadistic and violent caricatures of Maya in "Apocalypto," real Maya intensely nurture their children and honor both their elders and ancestors, embracing human mortality in the context of a cultural heritage going back more than a hundred generations.

My only hope is that moviegoers would take the movie as a misleading and distorted Hollywood drama designed to entertain.

Perhaps Gibson could make a movie showing how the Mayas still are suffering discrimination, even to the point of being cheated out of our lands and displaced, because of the ships he showed arriving as the finale of "Apocalypto."

2006-12-26T23:28:00.000-06:00

Makahiki Hou

I was looking through some of my old notes and handouts from when I took a Hawaiian class a few years ago and came across some seasonally appropriate material:

Makahiki is the traditional Hawaiian version of New Year. The Makahiki season begins with the first sighting of the constellation Pleiades, Makali’i, in late October or November and ends about four months later with the rising of the fourth new moon. It is the time when the god Lono-i-ka-makahiki reigns over the ancient god of war Kū, and the people enjoy peace and harmony. It is also the time for tax collection, thanksgiving, and feasting. There are various rites of purification and celebrations during the Makahiki season.

Once the Makahiki season ends, Lono(1) returns to Kahiki (Tahiti) and the time of Kū begins again, which is symbolic of the ali’i (chief) reasserting his power and imposing kapu (taboo) to be observed for the rest of the year.

Here is an ancient chant from the Makahiki season:

Nā ‘Aumākua

Nā ‘Aumākua mai ka lā hiki a ka lā ‘ākau
Mai ka ho’okui a ka hālawai
Nā ‘Aumākua ia Kahinakua ia Kahina’alo
Ia ka ‘ākau i ka lani
O kīhā i ka lani, ‘owē i ka lani
Nunulu i ka lani, kāholo i ka lani
Eia ka pulapula a ‘oukou, nā po’e o ka Pakipika
E mālama ‘oukou ia mākou
E ulu i ka lani, e ulu i ka honua, e ulu i ka pae ‘āina o ka Pakipika
E homai ka ‘ike
E homai ka ‘ikaika
E homai ka ‘akamai
E homai ka maopopo pono
E homai ka ‘ike pāpālua
E homai ka mana
‘Āmama ua noa.

To the ancestral deities from the rising to the setting sun
From the zenith to the horizon
The ancestral deities who stand at our back and at our front
You who stand at the right side
A breathing in the heavens
An utterance in the heavens
Here are your descendants, the people of the Pacific(2)
Safeguard us
That we may flourish in the heavens
That we may flourish on the earth
That we may flourish on the islands of the Pacific
Grant us knowledge
Grant us strength
Grant us intelligence
Grant us the understanding
Grant us the spiritual insight
Grant us the power.
The prayer is lifted, it is free.(3)

The translation of the chant above is not my own, and as I was thumbing through the dictionary to find some unfamiliar words, it seems some poetic liberties were taken by the translator. For instance, although kīhā is translated as 'breathing' by this translator, the only dictionary entry I found defines it as 'belch.' A belch in the heavens?! Well, I guess breathing sounds better than belching, so I'll go along with this more poetic translation!

1. Lono is one of the four ancient gods brought from Tahiti and is associated with peace, fertility, and agriculture, the clustering of dark clouds, thunder, whirlwinds, waterspouts, earthquakes, and the Kona rain. This same god is known as Rongo on Rapanui (Easter Island; Hawaiian l = Rapanui and Tahitian r) and is the namesake of the Rongorongo hieroglyphic script of that island, which has not been deciphered.
2. I suspect this is altered from the traditional chant, since Pakipika for 'Pacific' was obviously borrowed from English in post-missionary times. Perhaps the original was simply moana or kai, 'ocean' or 'sea.'
3. This is a pre-missionary, or pre-Christian, ending of a traditional prayer.

Hau'oli Makahiki Hou! Happy New Year!

2006-12-20T21:38:00.000-06:00

Native Language Bill Signed Into Law

Finally, some good news from the pen of the president. This bill was signed into law on December 14. I hope it hails a new era in indigenous language preservation and revitalization!

"This innovative and timely legislation helps stem an impending tragedy for our nation; the rapid decline and potential loss of Native American languages" -- Rep. Steve Pearce

WASHINGTON - The New Mexico Congressional Delegation today announced that President Bush has signed into law the Esther Martinez Native Languages Preservation Act. The new law helps prevent the loss of an important part of New Mexico's heritage, the Native American languages that are rapidly disappearing.

The bill, written and introduced by Congresswoman Heather Wilson in February, was passed by the House in September and the Senate earlier this month with the support of the entire New Mexico delegation. "These languages will be preserved with attention and effort. Once lost, they will never be recovered," Wilson said. "The native languages were precious to Esther Martinez, and this bill is designed to help preserve them. It is a fitting tribute to her life's work." "This bill is a tremendous way to honor the memory of Esther Martinez. It aims to preserve the unique linguistic heritage of Native Americans, and I'm pleased to see it become law," said U.S. Senator Pete Domenici, who worked to ensure passage in the Senate. "For many years, tribes were discouraged from speaking their native languages and now many languages have disappeared."

This legislation will help ensure native languages are preserved, and passed on to future generations," U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman said. "Considering Esther's dedication to preserving her native language, it is a fitting tribute that this legislation be named after her," said Rep. Tom Udall. "The urgent need to protect and preserve Native American languages is clear. We must invest in their preservation by implementing immersion programs. This legislation is an important step toward reversing the trend of disappearing native languages. I would like to congratulate Congresswoman Wilson on this legislation being signed into law, and thank her for her efforts on this important issue." "This innovative and timely legislation helps stem an impending tragedy for our nation; the rapid decline and potential loss of Native American languages," said Rep. Steve Pearce, also a co-sponsor of the legislation. "I commend Rep. Wilson for her leadership in reconnecting younger generations of Native Americans to the language and culture of their ancestors while preserving an irreplaceable treasure for every American."

The bill was designated in honor of Esther Martinez of New Mexico, following her death in September. On September 14, Esther Martinez of Ohkay Owingeh was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship in Washington, DC. She died at 94 years of age in Espanola en route home after attending a ceremony at the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sadly, only an estimated 20 of more than 300 pre-colonial indigenous languages will remain by the year 2050. In 1996, 175 of these languages remained, but now we're losing them at a rate of 12 languages every 3 years. New Mexico is home to 19 different pueblos and 3 tribes. Among the tribes and pueblos, there are six major languages, plus varying dialects. Language is a key element of each community's identity. A recent survey of Native languages found that among the Lipan Apache on the Mescalero reservation in southern New Mexico there are just ten speakers of the native language remaining. At the Sandia Pueblo, north of Albuquerque, most of their Native speakers are middle aged or older. Even Navajo, spoken more than any other Native Language in the U.S., is spoken fluently by less than half of the Navajo children entering kindergarten.

The bill authorizes competitive grants through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to establish Native American language "nests" for students under the age of seven and their families. It supports Native American language survival schools. It will help to preserve all the indigenous languages that are still being spoken, and increase the support for Native American language immersion programs to create fluent speakers, and allow tribes and pueblos to develop their own immersion programs.

2006-11-11T14:06:00.000-06:00

Is 1491 a more accurate version of American history prior to the arrival of Columbus?

If any of you who are interested in American history before the cataclysmic arrival of Columbus in 1492 hasn’t already done so, I’d highly suggest reading 1491 by Charles Mann. It is a thought-provoking book based on up-to-date anthropological and archeological evidence of what the Americas really looked like before the European arrival and the mass assault on the indigenous peoples who welcomed him began.

In what little free time I have these days, I’ve been reading a couple of articles* about Poverty Point**, an archeological site in northeastern Louisiana. I’d heard of Cahokia in western Illinois (in what’s now East St. Louis) and Aztalan in Wisconsin, but I hadn’t heard of this massive site in Louisiana until now.

The site was first reported in 1873 by archeologist Samuel Lockett. But its unusual nature didn’t become evident until excavations were conducted by the American Museum of Natural History in the 1950s. An examination of an aerial photograph revealed that Poverty Point was an earthen enclosure built on such a huge scale that it couldn’t be recognized from the ground.

Carbon dating has placed the age of the main site at about 1700 BC. Villages apparently interconnected by waterways branching off the Mississippi River are thought to have contained permanent residences and these sites often contained artificial earthen mounds and C-shaped embankments which likely contained the houses of the residents. (The only house pattern so far discovered is small and circular, about 13-15 feet or 4-4.6 m in diameter.) Mounds were often dome-shaped, but at least two mounds at the main Poverty Point site were in the shape of flying birds. Excavations have not determined how the mounds were used.

The geometric layout of Poverty Point suggests that the site was built according to a master plan that indicates the home of a large resident population and a magnet for visitors and traders. In addition to the concentric C-shaped residential embankments, Poverty Point contains a large plaza, a flat open area of about 37 acres. On one side of the plaza some unusually large and deep pits were discovered that are thought to have contained huge posts as calendar markers to mark equinoxes and solstices.

There are several mounds, the largest of which represents a flying bird and stands 70 feet (21 m) high. While the majority of Poverty Point’s inhabitants lived on the embankments in the central enclosure, there’s evidence that people also lived and worked outside the enclosure perhaps as much as up to 25 miles distant.

Among the artifacts so far discovered at the site are simple pottery, stone vessels, and chipped stone and polished stone tools. Polished stone ornaments such as beads, pendants, and animal figurines are also characteristic. Among the more interesting of the artifacts are balls made from silt fashioned in dozens of different styles that were used for cooking. Archeologists have tried cooking in earth ovens made like those at Poverty Point. Using different shaped balls or objects was apparently the ancient cook’s way of regulating cooking temperature, just like setting time and power level on a modern microwave oven. These types of implements appeared to have been made up until about 1350 BC.

Obviously, reading about the Poverty Point site and its similarities to Cahokia and Aztalan (not to mention sites in Mesoamerica) made me realize that perhaps Mann’s view of the ancient Americas as consisting of large settlements, even metropolises, containing huge ceremonial centers and connected by a large network of terrestrial and aquatic trade routes is closer to the real scenario than that which we’re normally taught in high school and even college textbooks of the noble savage.

Gone are the days of seeing Native America as a simple, largely disconnected hodgepodge of hunter-gatherer temporary villages!

* Info from Gibson, J. (1996) Poverty Point, A Terminal Archaic Culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley, 2nd edition by the (Louisiana) Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism.

** Named for a plantation that once occupied the site.

For yet more info on Poverty Point, see the Moundbuilders/Ancient Southwest link on the sidebar.

2006-11-05T23:07:00.000-06:00

Amerindian End of World Mythology

As promised in a much earlier posting, here are two stories, one from Biloxi with gloss and one from Rumsen Ohlone (without gloss, since I don't have the original Rumsen text--only an Old California Spanish translation*) both being "end of the world" stories:

AMĄ KIDUNAHI
THE EARTH ROLLED

Amą kidunahix ką ąyaa de ca oNni etu xa. Ekeką
earth roll DS people this die PAST they say always. DS

ąxti soNsa ątatka noNpa ye dą ayąk atowe nąk oNni.
woman one child two CAUS ? tree-? she lodge sit PAST

Nąx kide aniyą xepi kacidike de tidupi hi niki nąx
sat until water-DEF low ? go alight FUT none sit

ką exkanaskena ką “Tidu wiyakate,” kiye ką, “eke
DS Red-headed Buzzard DS "help me get down" she said to him DS " so

ko ątatka soNsa ikhu hi ni,” kiyedi. Kiye ką tiduwiye
? child one I give you" DECL-FEM she say. she say DS he help her down

xeni ką ątatkayą khuni oNni etu xa. Kadeska nącįyą
though DS child-DEF she give-NEG PAST they say. bird cloud-DEF

dustuki nąk oNni, sįdipa kiduspe nąk oNnidi sįdipadi
grasp sit PAST tail-all sink sit PAST tail-all-FOC

padi soNsoNti yuke xya etu xa. Omayina etike nąk
only-FOC? sharp ? always they say always. Yellowhammer there sit

oNni eke oNni sįdipa soNsoNti. Pukayi he etike nącįk
PAST so PAST tail-all sharp. Redheaded Woodpecker too there cloud-?

dustuki nąk oNni e he sįdip soNsoNti. Teįkayi ehetike
grasp sit PAST he too tail-all sharp Ivory-billed Woodpecker there

nąk oNnidi sįdip soNsoNti etu xa.
sit PAST tail-all sharp they say always.

The Earth rolled over and people died, they say always. A woman with two children was lodged in a tree waiting for the water to subside. She said to Redheaded Buzzard, "Help me get down," she said, "and I will give you one child," she said. Redheaded Buzzard helped her down but she did not give him a child. The bird [Redheaded Buzzard] clung to a cloud while his tail sank into the water. This is why his tail is all sharp at the ends, they say always. Yellowhammer was there too and his tail is also all sharp. Redheaded Woodpecker was also there clinging to a cloud and his tail is also sharp. Ivory-billed Woodpecker was there too and his tail is also sharp. This they say always.

This is a Biloxi flood myth similar to many others of different cultures all around the world. If we lop off all the frills of this story, the woman and the children and the birds, could this perhaps refer to an actual historic event, a natural cataclysm perhaps involving an earthquake (the earth rolled?) and a subsequent deluge?

WA-LAKUNIN ŞA PIRRE**
THE EARTH ENDED

Men and women were standing lined up on a small hill. They saw Hummingbird coming toward them. This hill was the only place that had light after the world ended, and the people did not want to give the light to Hummingbird. This was the only dry land, there in Salinas in Gabilan, as they called it, and they covered the light with the clothing they had. But there was an arrow hole in the clothing and Hummingbird got in through it. He carried the light away. Since then there has been light in the world, it is said. Eagle sent Sparrow Hawk to see if the sea was drying up yet. He didn’t trust Hummingbird. Sparrow Hawk brought up a rock from the bottom of the sea. Eagle then sent Crow to see if it was true that the sea was drying up. Crow went and saw many dead people and Crow, they say, started eating the flesh of the dead. That’s why Crow is black. Because Crow spent so much time eating the flesh of the dead, the sea was already drying up. Sparrow Hawk cursed Crow and that’s why Crow is black. Then the sea dried up and there began to be ranches, houses, and there were people again. Hummingbird is Eagle’s nephew. This is why the old people no longer pity Eagle, because he made the world again. That is the story of the Indians, how the world ended.

The Rumsen story seems to share some commonality with the Biloxi story. The Rumsen myth also appears to incorporate a deluge or rising sea. Some survivors are left over to begin again.

Being that both these languages were of the oral tradition with stories passed down from one generation to the next over perhaps thousands of years, it seems logical to assume that these "myths" may be based on actual fact(s) or occurrences of ancient history. Of course the actual fact of the catastrophe has been embellished possibly for purposes of entertainment or ease of memorization, but the stories may have been based on actual disasters kept alive through the ancient memories of multiple generations.

Vine Deloria, in his book, Red Earth White Lies, encourages looking seriously at Amerindian myths and legends to find evidence of the true history of our American continent. These myths were more than just stories to entertain the kids; they were also the oral passing down of history.

* I guess one of my future challenges is to re-translate this story back into Rumsen from the Spanish and English translations once I'm acquainted enough with the Rumsen language!

** The actual title here is The Earth Died, since I don't yet know the word for "end" or "finish" in Rumsen!

2006-10-24T23:52:00.000-05:00

Tenochtitlán in 360º

Here is an absolutely incredible web site:

http://www.mexicomaxico.org/Tenoch/qtvr.htm

It is all in Spanish, but it shouldn't matter to non-Spanish speakers for the visual impact. This is an artist's conception based on ancient maps of Tenochtitlán, the ancient capital of the Aztec Empire, which you can manipulate for a 360º view of the ancient city and its surroundings. Once the site loads, and you may need to give it a few minutes (it's worth the wait!), you can center your mouse over any part of the image and left-click to change the angle of view.

You'll notice Lake Texcoco, the lake on which the island city was built, and the several causeways which connected it with various parts of the mainland.

This is probably as close as we can come now to experiencing Tenochtitlán the way Cortez did for the first time in 1521. Awesome! And the background music done by a Mexican Aztec musician is nice too!

Keep in mind that everything you see in the picture is now called México City.

2006-10-22T14:05:00.000-05:00

Yab'ixal Ix Xajaw
Story of the Moon

A Q'anjob'al Maya story

A yet payxatu,
? at time-DEM

ix ko tx'utx' Xajaw chi tz'eq'eq'i ix yet aqb'alil axka cham ko man k’u ti nani.
CLAS 3P-POSS mother moon INCOM bright CLAS at night ? CLAS 3P-POSS ? sun ? now

Palta ix tx'utx' wojb'atz'
but CLAS mother howler-monkey

k'am chi je way yuninal ix,
there-no-exist INCOM ? sleep E3S-children-3S-POSS

yujtol k'am aq'b'alil.
that-why there-no-exist night

Axa yetoq jelanil ix
? with intelligence-3S-POSS

max k'uon ix yunetu wayi.
COM teach? E3S 3S-POSS-children sleep-SUFF

Palta eb' unin tu k'am
but 3P children here there-no-exist

chi je way eb' yuj
INCOM ? sleep 3P-for

tzeqeqial xal Xajaw tu.
shine CLAS moon there

Axa naq b'ab'el unin max
? CLAS first child COM

q'umlej ay b'a naq yetoq
converse there-is oldest CLAS with

yuxhtaq naq.
3S-POSS-brother CLAS

A nani oqon
? now ?

mulnajoq masanil k'u.
work-PART all day

Oqkowajb'aoq'oq masanil xaq' an ak'un k'al masanil
PART-?-gather-PART? all leaf PART bush and all

xaq' te' te'.
leaf CLAS wood (tree)?

Axa yet oqonwayoq, k'ojank'ulal
? there-exist ?-sleep (time)-? slow

oqtoqkomaqcheloq sat
?-?-?-cover-? face

ix Xajaw tu.
CLAS moon there

Kajtu oqjejiloni yet k'ualil k'al yet aq'b'alil. Kaytu max yun kankan ix ko tx'utx' Xajaw
So ?-?-see at on the day and so at night. So COM 3S-make? become CLAS 3S-POSS mother moon

tu yin q'eqq'inal.
there in darkness.

Once upon a time, our mother moon was as bright in the night as the sun in the day all the night long. But the howler monkey's children could not sleep because there was no night. Then the mother of the monkeys taught the children to sleep thanks to her intelligence. But the children could not see their dreams due to the light of mother moon. Then the oldest child made an agreement with his brothers. Now they would gather leaves and at the time to sleep they would slowly cover the face of mother moon. That would make difference between day and night. And so our mother moon only shines with a weak light in the darkness of the night.

Traducción en español

Una vez, nuestra madre luna alumbraba toda la noche igual que el sol en el día. Pero los niños del mono aullador no podían dormir, ya que no hubo noche. Entonces la madre de los monos les hizo dormir através de su inteligencia. Pero los niños no podían ver sus sueños por la claridad de la luna. Entonces el hermano mayor de los monitos hizo un acuerdo con sus hermanitos. Ahora iban a trabajar todo el día. Iban a juntar todas las hojas de monte y de los árboles y en la hora de dormir iban a cubrir la cara de la madre luna despacio. Asi iban a poder ver la diferencia entre el día y la noche. Y así quedó alumbrado suave nuestra madre luna en la oscuridad.

As many of you know, I’m taking a class called The Structure of Mayan. In this class we’ve had to select one Mayan language (out of 31 total, both living and extinct) on which to work, researching and doing papers on different aspects of it such as phonetics, morphology, and syntax. I partnered with a classmate and friend of mine to work on Q’anjob’al, one of the highland Mayan languages spoken near the border area of Mexico and Guatemala. In the process of doing some online research, I came across this short story. I tried to gloss it as best I could with my current knowledge of the language*, which is not much as you can tell from all the ? scattered throughout the gloss. But it’s a beginning to helping me to understand the word order and syntax a little better.

Just for a little background on Q’anjob’al and Mayan in general:

Mayan languages are ergative-absolutive, meaning that they treat the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs.

Those ‘ you see after certain consonants are the markers for an ejective stop. The ejective is one of the primary characteristics of Mayan languages. It is pronounced by holding back air then letting it go with a sudden burst after the consonant sound. The letter j is pronounced h, q is a uvular stop, tx is pronounced ch (not sure of exact difference between ch and tx), and x is a retroflex sh sound (tongue bent backward toward rear of the mouth). While b' is implosive in some Mayan languages, it is not in Q'anjob'al. ' after a vowel indicates a glottal stop.

Mayan languages have many particles, several of which are in this text. Mayan nouns take various classifiers. For example, in the above text, there is ix, referring to females. Naq refers to males. Cham refers to older males, volcanoes, stars and planets, among other things. Te' is for wood or things made of wood. No’ refers to animals, so that ‘a cat’ in Q’anjob’al is jun no’ mis (one CLAS cat).

Verbs, as you can see, pose great challenges in the number of aspectual and various other markers they may take.

There is, of course, much more for me to learn!

* Some of this may change once I speak to my Q'anjob'al-speaking friend!
** Note that, in the text, COM refers to completive aspect, INCOM to incompletive, CLAS to classifier.

Tayxin.

2006-10-14T12:23:00.000-05:00

More Hawaiian

In case you haven’t realized by now, I’m a big fan of the fascinating Hawaiian language. As with the Amerindian languages, the more I study Hawaiian the more intriguing it gets! No language deserves to die, and Hawaiian is a good example of a language whose many nuances of thought and expression would be lost to us forever if it went extinct. I’m very glad that Hawaiian (and its close cousin Māori of New Zealand) has a strong, successful revitalization program that serves as a poster-child for indigenous language revitalization efforts everywhere.

I’ll here give an example of a typical "professional" attitude expressed not all that long ago toward Hawaiian (and I could add other indigenous [Amerindian] languages) based on old European superiority and ethnocentrism:

"There is a great want of generic terms in the language. This is a peculiarity that distinguishes it from the English, but not from other uncultivated languages. No people have use for general terms until they begin to reason, and the language of the Hawaiians shows that they have never been a thinking people…." (italics mine)

Now how’s that for a dose of ethnocentrism?!

That was written by a missionary reverend, Lorrin Andrews, in 1838 while studying and composing a grammar of the language. He was definitely a product of his times, in that anything non-European was essentially "savage" and "barbaric." (It was not, after all, Latin or Greek.)

Anyway, I was reviewing some Hawaiian grammar and thought I’d blog about a few of the more interesting aspects of this intriguing language.

First, there’s an interesting syntactic change between positive and negative statements:

a. Ua hele ‘oia.
PERF go HON-3S
He went.

but

Negative

b. A’ole ‘oia i hele.
NEG HON-3S PERF go
He did not go.

Note that, in a negative sentence, the subject pronoun comes before the verb instead of after (the usual) with a particle inserted. (Hawaiian is a VSO language, by the way. Particles form an important part of Hawaiian grammar [the ‘glue’ that holds the language together], and they often cannot be translated into English.) Notice that the perfective particle ua becomes i in the negative.

Semi-passive Construction

I also came across an interesting example of a type of "semi-passive construction" (for lack of a better term), i.e., the sentence appears to be both passive and active at the same time!

Ua aloha ‘ia au iā Ka-lalau.
PERF love PASS 1S to Ka-lalau.
I love Ka-lalau.

This is instead of the full active form:

Ua* aloha au iā Ka-lalau.

I’m really not sure what the semantic difference is here between the active and this “semi-passive” form. If there are perchance any native speakers out there reading this, e kōkua mai! (help!)

Particle ai

This particle has been called a linking particle, anaphoric particle, or resumptive pronoun:

a. Ua holo mākou i laila.
PERF ride 1P-EXC to there
We rode there.

b. I laila mākou i holo ai.
to there 1P-EXC PERF ride AI
It was there that we rode to.

In sentence b, in order to topicalize the location ‘there’, the anaphoric or resumptive ai is used to refer back to the fronted topic i laila.

ka wā a Paka’a i ha’alele aku ai iā Waipi’o.
DET time of Paka’a PERF leave thither AI Waipi’o
The moment when Paka’a left Waipi’o.

There is a cognate ai in Tongan, another Polynesian language:

Ko e fefine na’e tokoni ‘a Sione ki ai.
PRED DEF woman PAST help ABS John to AI
It is the woman John helped (to her).

According to Christopher Baker (no date),

"Resumptive pronouns normally occur in ‘logical’ positions. For example, [the example above] from Tongan has the resumptive pronoun ai following the preposition ki ‘to’. In Hawaiian, though, the resumptive pronoun does not occur in its ‘logical’ position; it occurs after the verb in the post-verbal aspect marker position. The resumptive pronoun of Tongan and Hawaiian are indeed cognates. The positions in which they occur are simply not the same. The ai in Hawaiian is only found in one position, i.e., the same position as the post-verbal aspect marker; it is never found in nominal position as in Tongan."

Finally, here’s an example of a long, complex Hawaiian sentence:

Ā loa’a nā wa’a, he mau kaulua,
when get DEF-PL canoe, INDEF group double-outrigger
ho’i maila lākou ā pae ma Wai-kīkī
return here-then 3P and land at Wai-kīkī
ho’omākaukau ka holo ā holo nō ia lā;
prepare DEF sailing and sail indeed this day
ia wā ho’olā’au mai ‘o Kou, kekahi wahine
this time urge here HON Kou another woman
a Ka-welo e holo pū i Kaua’i
of Ka-welo to sail together to Kaua’i
hō’ole aku-la ‘o Ka-welo.
refuse there-then HON Ka-welo

‘When [they] had gotten the canoes, double-outriggers, they returned and landed at Wai-kīkī, made preparations for sailing, and sailed on this day; at this time Kou, another wife of Ka-welo, urged that she sail also to Kaua’i; Ka-welo refused [her].’

Pau hana.

* Ua is glossed as perfective. Hawaiian is largely an aspectual language, often making no clear and definite distinction between present and past tense, though it does distinguish between whether an action is complete or incomplete.

Examples above from (1) Hawaiian Grammar by Elbert & Pukui, 1979 and (2) a paper titled Hawaiian Relative Clause Structure by Christopher Baker (online; no date).

2006-09-30T16:18:00.000-05:00

Ąckana Paxexkana hą

The Crow and the Hawk

A Biloxi story

ĄckahoNna tandoyą Paxexkana yįkati. Eke hande ką thedi yįkati. EkeoNni ką Ąckana acodoNta hande oNni Paxexkana. EkeoNnidi hane dixyį wahe dusi de oNni. Etu xa. Eke xya ką hane dixyį awahe yuke xya. Etu xa.

ĄckahoNna tandoyą Paxexkana yįkati.
crow-?-DEF younger brother-DEF hawk-DEF marry

Eke hande ką thedi yįkati.
this doing DS die-FOC married (one)

EkeoNni ką Ąckana acodoNta hande oNni Paxexkana.
this done DS crow-DEF mourn PROG PAST hawk-DEF

EkeoNnidi hane dixyį wahe dusi de oNni.
this done-FOC find when cry catch go PAST

Etu xa.
3PL-say always

Eke xya ką hane dixyį awahe yuke xya.
this always DS find when HAB-cry move always

Etu xa.
3PL-say always

Crow married Hawk’s younger brother. Then the younger brother died. Crow mourned. Now you’ll find Crow (trying to) catch her lost husband. This they say. This is why Crow is always crying out as it moves. This they say.

Switch Reference in Biloxi

There is some debate about whether switch reference is at work in Biloxi. According to Randy Graczyk (1999)*, there is indeed a switch reference system evident in Biloxi through the particles that I’ve labeled above as SS (same subject) or DS (different subject). Actually, this short myth is not ideal for representing this possible switch reference pattern in Biloxi, and I hope to post larger stories later (in my plentiful spare time!) with both SS and DS evident. See what you think from the above. The particle ką, the (proposed) different subject (DS) particle, certainly seems to consistently conform to a subject change in the story line.

Imąkiyą phi ąkte.

* Graczyk, R. (1999). Switch Reference in Biloxi. Unpublished manuscript.

2006-09-24T22:43:00.000-05:00

Maččan ‘inn ‘Ummun
Coyote and Hummingbird

A Rumsen story

Maččanmur pessoy ‘exxemur ‘ixxest. ‘Ummuninkmur was-kannew. Maččaninkmur ‘iwsen nimm ‘ummuniy. Maččaninkmur ‘urrun ‘ummuniy. Neeyink was-čacc. Neeyink ku-wattin.

Neeyink ku-pussep sa ‘ummun. Neeyink ku-‘ummuy tapper, ‘ayyken "lakkun, lakkun,” ‘ooyostinkmur. Neeyinkmur maččan ‘ummap neeyinkmur ‘urru ‘attap ‘ummuniy. Neeyinkmur was-‘otč xuyya sottow. Neeyink ku-wattiy kuumur ‘ewwey wattiy, tanmur pessepiki. Saanaymur ‘aawaaten, tanmur pussepiki ‘ayken ka-lakkun ka-lakkun. Neeyinkmur kayy maččan: "‘Ink kuka’anami was-nimm?"

Neeyink kuwas-‘uti-kayy mee ku-‘aa-xiče katakumewas-‘ammay, katti-‘aa-ink kumewas-nimm. Tannayinkmur was-‘amxayiki ‘ummuniy. Tannayinkmur kuuy was-waxč, waxč, xuywa-pittin. Neeyink ku-kayy maččan: "‘Ink kuka-xičiy? Ka-lakkun, yete ka-lakkun, kayymur maččan." Neeyink kuwas-‘uti-kayy: mee kuwas-čallap. "Čallapink!" Neeyink ku-xiče, neeyink ku ‘ummuy ‘ummun tapper. Aayekmur "lakkun, lakkun."

Okay, if you persisted in looking through all that and are wondering what it is, it's a Rumsen Ohlone myth. This is one of the myths recorded by Harrington when he interviewed Isabelle Meadows, the last speaker of Rumsen, in the 1930s. I just finished typing it into my computer from microfilm copy. The English translation below is mine, since Harrington's translation is in old California Spanish, which, even for a Spanish speaker, can be difficult to decipher. So I hope I at least got the gist of it down. I hope to put more of these myths up on this blog as time and energy permit.

Coyote, by the way, is a popular mythological figure especially among western Amerindian tribes. Coyote is often a trickster and sometimes is at the receiving end of jokes or pranks, as in this particular myth. Just a warning that it is a bit graphic, but in an all around humorous way.

Here is my English translation:

Coyote thought he knew a lot. But Hummingbird beat him. Coyote wanted to kill Hummingbird, so Coyote grabbed Hummingbird and shredded him to pieces. Then Coyote left.

Hummingbird revived himself. Then Hummingbird flew up, jokingly yelling "I’m dying! I’m dying!" Coyote poked the [camp] fire and grabbed Hummingbird again. Then he threw him into the fire. Then he left. Coyote didn’t go far before Hummingbird revived himself, shouting "I’m dying! I’m dying!" Then Coyote asked: "How am I going to kill him?"

They* told him: You must eat him to kill him. So Coyote ate Hummingbird. But then Hummingbird was scratching (?) Coyote’s stomach. Then Coyote said "What am I going to do? I’m dying! I’m dying!" said Coyote. Then they told Coyote he must shit Hummingbird out. "Shit him out!" So Coyote did so, then Hummingbird flew up yelling "I’m dying! I’m dying!" (mockingly).

* I'm not sure here who this "they" refers to that are speaking to Coyote.

(By the way, I'd like to dedicate this post to the memories of Isabel Meadows, John Harrington, and to all the remaining Rumsen Ohlone tribal members who still struggle for federal recognition in their coastal California homeland. I hope for their eventual successful revitalization of their language and culture.) - Shururu.

2006-09-18T22:19:00.000-05:00

What Ainu about I know

Oh! That should be: What I know about Ainu. Heh.

Before I start on Ainu, I wanted to point everyone over to Jabal Al-Lughat where Lameen has a link to an article about the discovery of the most ancient writing yet found in the Americas, probably Olmec in origin, dating back to 900 BC. Needless to say, this is the most exciting linguistic news to hit the Americas since the discovery of Mayan hieroglyphs, previously thought to be the oldest writing system in the Americas (dating back to around 200 BC).

Anyway, Ainu. (Aynu means 'person' in Ainu.) I just wrote a paper for my Ethnolinguistics class titled, Ainu: A Grammatical Sketch. It was a very short summary of simple Ainu grammar that did not touch on its rich complexities. Ainu was once spoken on the island of Hokkaido, Japan, as well as on the Sakhalin Peninsula and Kurile Islands of Russia. Ainu is what we call a "language isolate," like Basque, not known to be related to any other language.

Ainu now has few or no speakers, most of the remaining Ainu having intermarried with the Japanese. In fact, the origin of the Ainu remains the biggest mystery of northeast Asia. Some have tried to link them to Polynesians, Amerindians, and, yes, even the Basques. Cultural and anthropological evidence, however, seems to point to southeast Asia as the likely origin of the Ainu, since they share many material and cultural traits with the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

Here is a brief partial text in Classical Ainu followed by the English translation:

I-resu yupi i-resu sapo i-res-pa hine oka-an ike:- Kamuy kat casi casi upsor a-i-o-resu. Tapan inuma ran-pes kunne cirikinka, enkasike nispa-mut-pe out-santuka o-uka-uyru out-pusa-kur suypa kane asso-kotor mike kane anramasu auwesuye.

My foster brother and foster sister raising me, we lived then. The god-built mountain castle, inside the mountain castle, I was raised. The pile of treasure was heaped like a cliff, and above it the master’s swords were crossing their hilts,
and when the shadows of the sword knots swayed, the walls glittered in gold.
How beautiful and how interesting!

On other linguistic issues, I hope to type up five Rumsen* Ohlone texts from Harrington's notes, three occurring in Rumsen with Spanish translations, one occurring in Spanish only, and one occurring in Rumsen only (this will be the biggest challenge having no translation).

On the Biloxi front, I have a Committee selected for my MA thesis beginning next semester, which will focus on some aspect of Biloxi, perhaps dealing with morphological issues.

My colleague and I will be meeting with our native K'anjob'al speaker later this week to work on our next class assignment: Mayan verb paradigms.

Also, I'm in email correspondence with a member of the Tutelo-Saponi tribe of North Carolina who is trying to revitalize his heritage language, a close cousin of Biloxi. I'm excited to see what steps he'll take in revitalizing the language, especially with rather scant and spotty data. Perhaps we'll learn more about this process together.

All for now.

* BTW--Notice I'm writing Rumsen, not 'Rumsien.' This is because I came across a section of Harrington's notes where he specifically asked the native speaker the name of her language. Nowhere did the name ever occur with an extra -i-. Thus, from now on, Rumsen it is!