Reviving Lushootseed

June 29, 2014 8:18 PM

Zalmai Zahir (ʔǝswǝli) talks about learning Lushootseed, the native language of Puget sound, and it's history: Quoting the Ancestors

More from Zahir, talking about a play

Jill La Pointe talks about her grandmother, Vi Hilbert (taqʷšəblu)

A sample of Zalmai Zahir and Cassy George's learning videos:

No, you can't eat that!

Nutritious cereal!

Talking to a dog

Voices of the First People, the University of Washington's Vi Hilbert collection.

Lushootseed Research.

(via: I shamelessly stole this post from languagehat.)

posted by nangar (2 comments total)

This is fascinating and wonderful. As a layman with an interest in linguistics I really enjoyed seeing the phonetic transcription too because it was interesting to hear how "exotic" phones like "x with a superscript w" (labialized voiceless velar fricative) sounded in real life (answer in this case: "kind of like an 'f'").

I was going to snark about how a modern linguist is supposed to find all that "language affects your mind and changes the way you see the world" stuff laughable and silly, because we're now in the enlightened age of Chomsky (who mostly studied English...) and not the benighted and superstitious age of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (both of whom spent a shit ton of time learning Native American languages...) -- but that's probably not fair. It's a complicated issue, and I don't really know the state of scholarly opinion on it today.
posted by edheil at 8:55 PM on June 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

Skookum!
posted by humboldt32 at 9:27 AM on June 30, 2014 [1 favorite]