Luiseño on Nintendo under Development

The Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians has made a USD 50,000 grant to develop video games for Luiseño (lui). The purpose of the games is be to encourage people to learn and use the language.

The software will run on Nintendo game devices and is planned to be ready by fall. The cartridges for the devices are being created by Thorton Media, Inc. (See also blog post RezWorld Demo – Task-based Language Instruction.)

Information for this blog entry primarily from “San Marcos: Video games to help teach native language” on the North County Times website.

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Bill Bright, in Memoriam

On October 15, renown scholar Bill Bright passed away. Although known particularly for his work with Karuk (kyk, also known as Karok), Bill Bright published works dealing with a wide range of languages, including European and South Asian tongues.

For his curiosity at a young age, he was nicknamed uhyanapatánvaanich (little word asker) and was recently made the first ever honorary member of the Karuk tribe.

Last year, a dictionary was published on the Karuk language, incorporating Bill Bright’s 1957 dictionary. It appears that the earlier work might be available here (search for Bright) as ISBN 9-9999-0030-0, but the title is given as Karuk Language, whereas the title is supposed to Karok Language. The newer dictionary is ISBN 1933408030 given at Fetch Book Info, but does not appear to be available for purchase. An online version of the dictionary is available here.

His Luiseño (lui) dictionary is available at Amazon.

See his New York Times obituary on the Linguist List (having trouble locating it with the NYT search).