Chanting for fallen comrades

Tags

chant, endangered languages, indigenous, languages, Maori, New Zealand, ritual

A video appeared on youtube this week that displays the raw power of language, dance, and collective ritual, and though it commemorates a sad event, I thought it would be a good way to end the week.

Last week three soldiers from New Zealand were killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.  When their bodies were returned home, their comrades greeted their hearse with a huge haka.  If you’ve ever heard of the haka, it’s probably from watching the traditional dance performed by the All Blacks before each rugby match.  But as the video description explains, “Haka is used by Māori (indigenous people of New Zealand) for a myriad of reasons; to challenge or express defiance or contempt, to demonstrate approval or appreciation, to encourage or to discourage, to acknowledge feats and achievements, to welcome, to farewell, as an expression of pride, happiness or sorrow. There is almost no inappropriate occasion for haka; it is an outward display of inner thoughts and emotions.”

Each unit within the New Zealand army has its own special haka that they perform together.  Though it is a Māori tradition, and is performed entirely in the Māori language, every soldier, indigenous or not, participates.  It is a very interesting (and, as far as I know, very rare) example of a modern nation collectively and demonstratively identifying with its indigenous heritage.  As one youtube commenter said, “Not many countries show such respect to the indigenous people and adopt some of the culture into the mainstream.”

And it is a powerful way for these Kiwis to observe this tragic occasion.  I think it’s safe to say that all of our hearts go out to them.

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The temple of writing

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archaeology, British Museum, cuneiform, Egyptian, hieroglyphs, history, languages, writing

I’m back from visiting the other side of the Atlantic!  The festival was fantastic, the weather actually was gorgeous, sunny and blue skies, and to cap off the trip, I spent the entire last day at the British Museum!  I know that there is so much in the British Museum that even in several hours you can barely scratch the surface, but I was lost in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, so I didn’t even notice anything else.  In these halls are some of the most important artifacts from the history of writing, and I was completely enthralled.

I got the feeling that these ancient scribes were just as worshipful as I was.  One Assyrian statue, an “attendant” in the temple of the god of writing, tells readers “Do not trust in another god.” 

The Assyrian artifacts don’t inspire awe through artistry alone; their works are covered in cuneiform inscriptions.

Cuneiform was originally developed by the Sumerians; the characters get their shape from a reed stylus pressed into soft clay.  My husband pointed out that it must have been much more difficult to carve this shape into stone, and indeed if you look closely you can imagine the extraordinary care it must have taken to create the shape with a chisel on a hard surface.

And then there are the Egyptians.

I’m reading a book right now called Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization.  In a section titled “Writing and Beauty,” the author says:

Writing has a reader (information is communicated) while art has an observer (form is enjoyed), so they are different things, but art and writing are close nonetheless.  You observe the form of writing too, and art can tell you something.  In Egypt, where one of the earliest writings flourished, one can scarcely separate the illustrator from the scribe.
(pg. 56)

I could see how that would be true, but I had never really appreciated that until I looked closely at the inscriptions.  Look at the detail from that piece above:

Those aren’t just written characters.  That owl has eyes!  On a different piece I noticed the character that looks like a duck, and the duck has fuzzy little feathers on his head and nostrils on his beak.  These are very early examples, and as Egyptian writing progressed it became more streamlined and stylized; by the time of the Middle Kingdom it seems all of the characters had been standardized and simplified (up to a point, of course.)  But even so, it was clear that art, writing, and worship were interwoven in the scribal culture of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

I have far too many pictures and far too many things to share for one blog post.  If you find this stuff as hypnotic as I do, the British Museum’s website is really fantastic; you can browse their major exhibits without ever leaving your house, and they have themes that you can explore, including this excellent one on the history of writing.

Vacation – all I ever wanted

Tags

Beautiful Days, England, vacation

This blog won’t be getting any updates for a few days, because this blogger is going on vacation!  Eighteen hours from now I’ll be sitting in a plane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean!

I’m spending this coming weekend at the Beautiful Days Festival in lovely rural southwestern England!  My husband and I went a few years ago and have been wanting to get back very badly, and since this is the festival’s 10th anniversary (and the 100th birthday of Woodie Guthrie) we figured it was time to trek back out there.

If you’ve never been to an English music festival, you might be thinking to yourself, “But doesn’t it rain all the time there?”  To which I would answer, “yes, yes it does”

This year I am hopefully better prepared both mentally and materially for the stunning amount of mud that several days of rain and hundreds of dancing people can create.  But besides the mud, there’s the music, and the dancing, and the lovely people, and the English festival food.  It’ll totally be worth it!

And then we’ll spend a couple of days in lovely London, where I plan to spend several hours worshipping ancient inscriptions at the British Museum.

My brand-spanking newly renewed passport got to me a few weeks ago, my raincoat is ready to go, and it’s been far too long since I’ve taken some time off.  I can’t wait.

Au revoir, до встречи, and مع السلامة!

“Fear and negativity are foreign to our vocabulary.”

Tags

diversity, inspiration, language diversity, languages, Punjabi, religion, Sikh, Sikhism

Today, friends and family members will hold a collective funeral at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.  I’m sure most of you have heard by now of the shooting at this temple that killed six people.  It is a crime that is shocking and horrifying, even more so because it seems clear now that it was motivated by ignorance, intolerance, and blind hatred.

There is some hope that something good might come out of this irredeemable tragedy.  Suddenly this week, most Americans have started to think about and learn about their neighbors who identify as Sikhs, and have started to learn something about the Sikh religion and Sikh culture.  So perhaps this can dissipate some of the benign ignorance we all live with.

Even more importantly, perhaps this can dissipate some of the malign mistrust and hatred of “different” people we might feel.  Initial news reports about the shootings repeatedly pointed out that Sikhs are not Muslims, which disturbingly implies that shooting several innocent Muslim worshippers might be more understandable.  But everyone I know reacted strongly and immediately against that idea.  The point is not that they’re the wrong kind of different.  And as people are learning more about what Sikhism is all about, and about the hardships that Sikhs have had to endure in recent years, I hope very much that we are all learning to think more carefully about the ways that both Sikhs and Muslims are unfairly mistreated, judged, and, occasionally, viciously attacked.  As the Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America said, “It is my hope that this is more than a time to express personal sorrows.”

I realize that this post doesn’t seem to have much to do with language, but I hope you’ll forgive me.  And it’s not exactly unrelated – language is yet another way we notice and mark difference between communities.  It is far too easy, sometimes, for difference to take on negative connotations; those-not-like-us are easy targets for frustrations and malice.  But it is my firm belief that diversity – cultural, religious, and of course linguistic – is what gives color and contour to our experience of being human.  As Wade Davis says, it makes the world polychromatic.

So, here is my small attempt at solidarity with my unknown brothers and sisters in the Sikh community.  Maybe we can honor the memory of the victims by reading a little bit about Punjabi, the language in which the Sikh scriptures were written.  Or by watching this video, sung in Punjabi, demonstrating some of the Sikh ritual practices.

 

And please take a moment to read this short but beautiful piece titled “As a Sikh-American I Refuse to Live in Fear and Negativity.”  It’s in English, but I’ll blog more about languages some other day.

Happy IDWIP!

Tags

endangered languages, indigenous, language, language revitalization, languages, UNESCO

Today is UNESCO’s International Day of the World’s Indigenous People.  This is an annual event, and it’s also a mouthful, so I’ve taken the liberty of making it a handy acronym.  Happy IDWIP, everyone!

The theme of this year’s IDWIP is “Indigenous Media, Empowering Indigenous Voices.”  The indigenous people of the world speak in millions of voices – UNESCO puts the estimate at 370-500 million – and in thousands of different languages.  Over the past several years many communities and organizations have embraced the power of grassroots media to discuss indigenous issues, to speak out for indigenous rights, and, of course, to preserve and promote their heritage tongues.

And even mainstream media is starting to take notice.  The New York Times ran an article last week on the talking dictionary of the Siletz language of Oregon.  National Geographic has created the Enduring Voices Project to promote indigenous language preservation, and published a major article about endangered languages last month (which I found very inspirational).  And Al-Jazeera English produced the fantastic “Living the Language” mini-series.  One of their episodes focuses specifically on the use of modern media to promote ancestral languages:

 

I hope you take a look at the UNESCO page dedicated to this day and read about some of the projects in indigenous media that they support.  You can also click around at some resources they’ve developed, including this “Environmental wiki” on the reef and rainforest of the Solomon Islands – in an indigenous language of the Solomon Islands!

We need to talk about grammar.

Tags

grammar, language, language learning, languages, linguistics

Poor grammar.

Grammar is that part of language learning that everybody loves to hate.  A lot of new-fangled language learning systems like to pretend they won’t even teach you any grammar at all – things sell better that way.

There are lots of problems with this.  For one thing, we tend to think that all of the meaning to be found in language is in its words, and the grammar is just the fiddly useless stuff that gives us headaches.  But actually grammar has tremendous communicative value.  Languages like Russian and Greek, with more flexible word orders than English, play with syntax to emphasize parts of a sentence.  Some languages, classical Greek for instance, have different verb tenses for things that happened in the past, things that happened in the past and may or may not be continuing today, things that happened in the past and totally stopped happening before I said this…etc.  Many languages have different pronoun forms and different verb conjugations for dual (i.e. specifically two people) as opposed to the plural (more than two), which I imagine makes love letters and friendly quarrels much more intimate.

These are just examples I can think of off the top of my head.  And then there’s the simple fact that grammar does exist, and it is used by the language’s speakers, meaning that if you ever hope to be able to listen to or read something in the language with any real comprehension, you’re going to have to know this stuff.  And also meaning that if you ever want to stop sounding like a perpetual novice, you’re going to have learn to use the grammar correctly.

I think the problem boils down to the fact that people tend to conflate the category of “learning grammar in a foreign language” with two experiences:
1. the pain of rote memorization, and
2. the inefficiency of meaningless learning.

Rote memorization is, unfortunately, how most grammar is taught in most contexts.  If you ever chanted all 27,000 forms of a verb conjugation or noun declension, you know what I’m talking about.  Personally, I sometimes find this kind of activity kind of pleasant, but in a mind-numbing way 🙂  No, it’s not a good way to learn.

Meaningless learning is closely related.  Various grammatical forms floating freely in space, with no meaning or context attached to them, are very hard to acquire.  The consensus among second language acquisition researchers is that there has to be some meaning, some way for us to subsume the form into our memories, for any of that information to ever stick.  Unfortunately, grammar is not often taught in a meaningful way, which means that “studying grammar” becomes equated for most people with the sensation of bashing one’s forehead into a brick wall.

Poor grammar!  Don’t blame grammar!  This pain and frustration is not a necessary part of studying grammar.  And grammar itself is an essential part of language; if vocabulary is the bricks, grammar is the mortar.  We need the mortar if we’re going to build this monument!

Monday Inspiration: Lost Words documentary

Tags

endangered languages, inspiration, language death, language revitalization, languages, Lost Words, Native American

Filmmaker Brian McDermott is currently putting the finishing touches on a documentary called Lost Words.

 

<goosebumps>

The filmmaker is still seeking small donations to complete the production, so please check out the film’s website and consider supporting this very worthy project!

P.S. I also wrote about the role of boarding schools and Native American language extinction in my guest post for the Living Tongues Institute.  Please check it out, and then keep your eyes peeled for this full-length documentary which will cover the topic in much more depth!

Friday’s Featured Language: Irish

Tags

endangered languages, Gaelic, Ireland, Irish, language revitalization, languages, speakers

I’m really excited about today’s language!  My passion is for endangered languages, and I’m excited by stories of languages that have not only been saved but have been revitalized (you can see some examples of this in my Green Book posts).  And my guest today is sharing one of those languages!

Professor Ronan Connolly grew up in Monaghan, Ireland, and now lives in Washington, DC where he teaches Irish language classes (if you live in the DC area, here is his website!  He offers classes frequently and they look like a lot of fun!)  He grew up monolingual in English, but has since learned Irish and says his life is bilingual whenever he goes back to Ireland.

Ronan says he loves “the richness, the history and culture associated with the Irish language.”  Irish (sometimes called “Gaelic,” or Gaelige in Irish) is a very old language, he explains, older than English, with “the oldest written literature of all the surviving Celtic languages… [it] was first written 2,000 years ago.”

“Irish was the language of the vast majority of the population until the early 19th century, when the devastating effects of English colonialism started taking their toll on the native tongue,” he notes. “The development of Ireland as a free country during the early 20th century brought with it a cultural revival. The Irish language made major gains in the 20th century due largely to a combination of public, private and government efforts.”

Ronan is hopeful about the state of his language.  “Currently, the language is going through a major renaissance and more people are able to speak and write Irish today than have been able to for over 150 years,” he says. “The great increase in learning Irish by children, as well as adults in non-Gaeltacht areas and abroad, is also very encouraging.”

The Gaeltachts are areas of Ireland where Irish is the dominant language, and the vernacular spoken in the home.  The three areas – Ulster, Connacht, and Munster – are fairly isolated from each other geographically, meaning that each area has its own distinct dialect.  Ronan speaks primarily with an Ulster accent.  In this clip, he says: “I wanted to communicate with the listener – tell them who I am, what I do and also a little bit about the Irish language!”

Dia dhiaoibh a chairde, caidé mar atá sibh?

Is mise Ronan Connolly agus faoi láthair táim i mo chónaí anseo i Washington DC, príomhchathair na Stáit Aontaithe.

Bíonn ranganna Gaeilge ar bun agam anseo – bím ag teagasc in Ollscoil Chaitliceach Mheiriceá sa chathair, agus chomh maith le sin bím ag teagasc mo ranganna féin, Learn Irish With Me.com, I dtuaisceart na cathrach.

Anois, cad is brí le Gaeilge?  Cén sort teanga í? Ar chuala tú í riamh? Bhuel, cinnte gur chuala tú an Ghaeilge cheana féin! Tagann focail ar nós dude, smashing, phony, galore, whiskey, baloney, shamrock, in cahoots, hooligan, uilig ón nGaeilge. Agus cinnte gur chuala sibh faoin gcathair Baltimore – sin ainm eile a thagann ón nGaeilge! An ndeir tú ‘so long’ le duine agus tú ag fágáil? Deirtear go dtagann an frása sin ón nGaeilge chomh maith, mar deir muidne ‘slán’ in ionad ‘goodbye’. Slan / so long – feiceann tú an chosúlacht!

Tá an teanga thart fá 3,000 bliana d’aois – b’fhéidir níos mó, b’fhéidir níos lú –agus is í ceann de na teangacha is sine san Eoraip, níos sine ná  an Bhéarla, Fraincis nó Spáinis.

Faoi láthair tá thart fá 80,000 ag caint na Gaeilge in Eirinn gach lá, ach tá an uimhir sin ag méadú an t-am uilig. Le raidio, teilifís agus na meáin trí mhean na Gaeilge, táim féin an-dóchasach don teanga! Bhuel, sin mo phíosa anois – má tá suim agat I bhfoghlaim na Gaeilge, cuir scairt orm!

Go dtí sin, slán!

English translation:
Hello friends, how are you?

I am Ronan Connolly, and I am presently living in Washington DC, the capital city of the USA. I teach Irish classes here – at Catholic University of America in the city, and also my own classes, Learn Irish With Me.com, in the north of the city.

Now, what exactly is Irish? What sort of language is it? Have you heard it before? Well, most certainly you have heard it before! Words such as dude, smashing, phony, galore, whiskey, shamrock, hooligan, all come from Irish. And surely you have heard of the city of Baltimore – that’s another name that comes from Irish! Do you say ‘so long’ when you are saying goodbye to someone? It’s said that that phrase comes from Irish too, because we say ‘slán’ for ‘goodbye’. Slán / so long – you can see the similarity!

The language is about 3,000 years old – maybe more, maybe less – and it’s one of the oldest languages in Europe, older than English, French or Spanish.

There are presently 80,000 people speaking Irish in Ireland everyday, but the number is rising. With radio, television and media in Irish, I am very optimistic for the language! Well, that’s my piece for now – if you are interested in learning Irish, just call me!

Until then, goodbye!

Thank you very much, Ronan, for sharing your lovely living language with us!

Saudade

Tags

creole, language, languages, music, Portugese, saudade, words

I think my favorite “untranslatable” word is the word Saudade, from Portugese.  This word is so unique, so important to Lusophone culture, and describes such a specific and complex emotion, that it has its own 3,500+ word wikipedia article.

Saudade, by José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior

One of the briefer definitions of this word says that it is “…vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist … a turning towards the past or towards the future.”  It is related to the English word nostalgia, but it is stronger and perhaps sadder than that, and also to the English verb to pine, but notice how we don’t have a noun to describe the emotion we feel when we are pining.  It is yearning and longing, and missing, but it’s not necessarily all sadness: another description says that it is “the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again.”  It’s a bittersweet emotion, perhaps a bit fatalistic, perhaps a bit melancholic, perhaps a bit hopeful.

Of course, I’m just an English speaker trying to grasp a word that I’m not actually familiar with.  This word, and the emotion underlying it, are regarded as somehow particularly Portugese, and Brazil even recognizes Saudade Day as an official national holiday.  I wonder, have I ever felt saudade?  What would I have called it at the time?

I think perhaps music can hit upon this emotion a little better than my poor writing skills.  What could be more perfect for songs than an emotion that combines nostalgia, love, loss, hope, and despair?  Here is the great Cesária Évora performing one of her most famous songs at the age of 63 (Sodade is the Cape Verdean Creole version of the word)

 

When you think of musicians who tap into the more melancholic emotions, does Nick Cave immediately come to mind?  He actually spent several years living in São Paulo, and he once said that the only way he could describe the emotion behind his album The Good Son was to call it saudade.

 

“The Ship Song” is one of the most romantic, beautiful, haunting songs I’ve ever heard, and it makes me very happy to hear it, and also somehow makes me want to weep.  It’s not the words, necessarily.  Do you know what I mean?  Perhaps listening to Nick Cave is as close as this English speaker will ever get to true saudade.