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The Language of This Land, MI’KMA’KI
This week, there will be a book launch in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a new book co-authored by Saint Mary’s University anthropology professor Dr. Trudy Sable and Mi’kmaw linguist, Dr. Bernie Francis: The Language of this Land, MI’KMA’KI.
From the Saint Mary’s University press release:
“In The Language of this Land, Mi’kma’ki, Sable and Francis examine the role of language, legends, song and dance in sustaining the Mi’kmaq to the present day. Despite centuries of cultural disruption, Mi’kmaw traditions and spirituality have been preserved by Elders in the words they spoke, the dances they danced and the land they walked. With this book, Dr. Sable and Dr. Francis have taken the next step in this journey of preservation.”
According to the press release, a book launch for The Language of this Land MI’KMA’KI will be held on Thursday, March 29, 2012 in the Library, Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, NS), Room 135 at 4:00 p.m. The book will be available for purchase at the launch. The launch is hosted by the Gorsebrook Research Institute for Atlantic Canada Studies and Cape Breton University Press.
For more information about the book, click on the following: Cape Breton University Press.
Bilingualism and the brain
Check out today’s New York Times for an article titled “The Benefits of Bilingualism: Why Bilinguals are Smarter“.
What does this have to do with Mi’gmaq? Many endangered languages of the world––including languages of the Americas––have arrived at their current state because of education policies designed to “help” children assimilate to the dominate culture, whether this be English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, French-speaking, etc. The logic went (and often still goes…): if a child speaks Mi’gmaq at home, it will slow down her ability to learn English, putting her at a disadvantage later in life.
Work in recent decades, as discussed in this NYT article, points to a much different conclusion, but one that many people have suspected all along: bilingualism is good for kids! Not only from a cultural point of you, but also from a cognitive point of view. This is obviously good news for advocates of revitalizing indigenous languages. The issue is not a choice between maintaining one’s cultural heritage and linguistic identity versus being able to communicate in the dominant language. Rather, having access to two languages is not only a natural state, but one with clear benefits.
Question: Do you know of other work documenting the benefits––cognitive, cultural, political, etc.––of bilingualism? Please post to the comments!
Three days of Algonquian at McGill
This week the McGill linguistics department is very pleased to host two visitors: Mary Ann Metallic (Listuguj Education Directorate) and Conor Quinn (University of Southern Maine). In addition to smaller meetings and group meetings, we will have a couple of special events, below, and a colloquium at the end of the week by current McGill Post-doc, Tanya Slavin. More information will be available Monday on this week’s McLing digest.
Wednesday
3:00–4:00, room 117: Ling-Tea presentation – Conor Quinn “Applicative and antipassive: Algonquian transitive “stem-agreement” as differential object marking”
Thursday
10:00–11:30, room 117: Algonquian Reading Group – Conor Quinn “Deriving pronominal feature structures through asymmetrical dependencies: obviation, inverse, and antihierarchy effects in Algonquian languages”
4:00–7:30, room 002: Algonquian Mini Workshop – presentations by Michael Hamilton, Bethany Lochbihler, Jenny Loughrain, Elise McClay, Yuliya Manyakina, and Gretchen McCulloch
Friday
3:00–5:00, Leacock 14: Colloquium – Tanya Slavin “Deriving Object Experiencer verbs in Ojicree”
Mi’gmaq Research Updates
So far Mike has been working on how to represent the syntactic structure of Mi’gmaq, in particular, what arguments can be made for hierarchical structure by using diagnostics like scope, indefinites, weak cross-over, binding, ellipsis, etc… (See glossary of linguistics terms in side bar for definitions)
Yuliya has been working on obviation in Mi’gmaq (wikipedia definition of obviation here). There is an asymmetry in the way obviation is marked with respect to gender (animate/inanimate) and number. She is looking into whether there is in fact obviation in Mi’gmaq. Here is a paper from U of T that claims there is no obviation http://individual.utoronto.ca/nattaya/Nattaya_GP1.pdf. She is currently trying to find evidence for or against this in Mi’gmaq.
Gretchen is continuing her work on preverbs in Mi’gmaq. She has also been working on indefinite pronouns which she is presenting at the TOM 5 Semantics workshop.
I am working on cleaning up my section of negation that I did last semester for our field methods class.
Language Revitalization Conference
In addition to Yuliya’s post on Cornell’s Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in America Conference (SULA), the CUNY Graduate Center and the International Centre for Language Revitalisation of the Auckland University of Technology is hosting its Language Revitalization in the 21st Century Conference May 31st-June 1st in New York, NY.
Learn Mi’gmaq
The Jilaptoq Mi’kmaw Language Center has useful interactive Mi’gmaq talking language posters and sample audio files. Note that this orthography is different from the Listuguj orthography (the use of ‘k’) and some words may have slightly different meanings. For example in the verb conjugation poster the conjugated verb is mijisi- which means ‘to eat’, but this is not used in Listuguj because of its similarities with another verb. The word used in Listuguj meaning ‘to eat’ is miji-. Nevertheless, the posters give helpful lessons for those wishing to improve in Mi’gmaq. For a comparison of the Francis/Smith and Listuguj orthographies with their IPA equivalents check here. Here is an additional list of Mi’gmaq orthographies that include contemporary and prior orthographies from the Mi’kmaq Spirit website. Another dictionary for Mi’gmaq is the Rand Micmac Dictionary. Here are some basic phrases provided by Waycobah First Nation School in Nova Scotia.
Links of Interest
I recently attended a talk by a Rutgers alumni who has been studying Cheyenne, a Plains Algonquian language, for six years. Her dissertation was on evidentiality and gives a brief overview of the grammar, which I thought was interesting. It can be found right on her webpage: http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/sem/index.shtml
Also, this conference may be of interest! http://conf.ling.cornell.edu/SULA7/index.html
Presentation on Indefinite Pronouns in Mi’gmaq at LingTea
Tomorrow, February 29, I will be presenting some early work on the meanings of indefinite pronouns (words like “someone” and “anything”) in Mi’gmaq, and their relationship to patterns found in these types of words in other languages. The presentation is through LingTea and is at the McGill linguistics building, Room 117, from 3-4 pm. Everyone welcome! (Expect more updates on this topic over the next few months as I figure out more.)
Mi’gmaq Teaching Grammar
Here is a downloadable pdf file for the Micmac Teaching Grammar by Gilles L. Delisle and Manny L. Metallic. It’s divided into 20 lessons and has some resources about the Mi’gmaq people as well as some grammar and vocabulary lessons.