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.

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.

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.

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.