Cherokee and Technology: a Lecture at the University of Washington

As occasionally noted on this blog, great advances have been made for using Cherokee (chr) in computing, including mobile devices. Because of the unique syllabary (writing system) used in Cherokee, computing adaptation requires special

This upcoming Thursday, the Indigenous Information Research Group (Facebook page) is sponsoring a lecture by Roy Boney, Jr., a Cherokee Nation language preservationist. Titled “Cherokee Language Technology: The Syllabary and the Nation’s History of Technological Adoption,” the lecture will be about the design and development of Cherokee language apps for mobile devices.

When: Thursday, 27 September, 1:00-2:30 pm
Where: Room 416
Fourth Floor, Roosevelt Commons Building
4311 11th Ave NE
Seattle, WA

Hinton in Halifax

As per “Leanne Hinton: ‘Bringing the Language Home: Language Revitalization in the Family’” on the Burnaby Aboriginal Literacy Blog, Leanne Hinton will be speaking at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada at 7 p.m., on Tuesday, May 10, 2011.

Among her many accomplishments, Leanne Hinton is the co-author of the “The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice,” sometimes referred to as the Bible of language revitalization.

See also the poster for the talk.

Talk: riverine Ahtna

Two ways to give directions in English are in terms of the points of the compass (north, south, east and west) and in terms of the speaker’s body (frontward, backward, left and right). In Hawaiian (haw), the word mauka means “toward the mountain” and makai means “toward the sea.”

Other languages use directions according to the flow of a river (upriver, downriver). One such language is Ahtna (aht), spoken in the Copper River area of Alaska. Four stems showing this riverine system in Ahtna are found in the paper “A theory is only as good as the data: casting a wide net in Kabardian and Ahtna documentation” by Ayla B. Applebaum and Andrea L. Berez:

• nae’ — upriver, behind
• daa’ — downriver
• ngge’ — from water, upland
• tsen — toward water, lowland

Berez is giving a talk on this system on May 26, 2011, in Santa Barbara, California. The title of the talk is “Directional Reference in Ahtna: Endangered Language, Endangered Geographic Knowledge.”

The Ethnologue gives 35 speakers of Ahtna as of 2000 while Wikipedia gives 80 speakers spread over four dialects. To learn Ahtna words, see “Ahtna Noun Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide,” updated last month by John E. Smelcer.

Lecture Saturday in Singapore

This Saturday, Assistant Professors Alexander Coupe and František Kratochvíl will give a twenty-minute talk on endangered languages at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. It will be given along with five other talks on such topics as language identity, language and globalization and psycholinguistics. Read more here.

Workshops by CILO – US

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation provided a grant last year to bring together four language revitalization organizations in the US, forming the CILO partnership. (The grant is apparently through the Tides Center.) CILO stands for Consortium of Indigenous Language Organizations.

The four organizations are:

1. AICLS – Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival
2. AILDI – American Indian Language Development Institute
3. ONLA – Oklahoma Native Language Association
4. ILI – Indigenous Language Institute

The mission of CILO is to provide training for those involved in language revitalization. Their primary project is Language Immersion for Native Children (LINC) to focus in particular on language transmission to children up through age eight. Their diverse range of workshops are fee-based and open to all interested, including teachers, parents and other advocates.

CILO has created a catalog listing their workshops, and are open to expanding their offerings and locations. Currently planned workshops include:

• A three-day workshop for planning/starting an immersion program. Covers such situations as home immersion, day care center learning and Head Start education
• A two-day workshop on setting up a Master-Apprentice Programs (2008 presentation)
• A three-day workshop for parents, grandparents and other community people working with preschool and Head Start children
• A three-day workshop on computer and multimedia technology, including computing (typing in NA languages) and creating audio books
• A one-day seminar for administrators

A wide range of exciting options for training the trainers!

Pinker Lecture to Benefit ELF – Thursday

Steven Pinker will be lecturing at Harvard on Thursday, November 15, at 8:00 PM with the proceeds to benefit ELF, the Endangered Language Fund. The lecture will be on his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and will be in William James Hall. Admission is $20 ($10 for students).

This map shows Kirkland Street in the lower right quarter, where William James Hall is located. A schedule of lectures by Pinker may be found at Steven Pinker – Public Lectures. Nick Emlen’s Linguist List post that was the source for this entry may be found here.