for sanguinity

[sonia]

ETA: I got the two independent languages Cherokee and chinuk wawa mixed up, as sanguinity kindly pointed out. I will pay more careful attention in the future! /ETA

My job uses gmail, which places a link of its choosing above my mail. This morning I was surprised to see something I actually wanted to click on:

Gmail Blog - ᎭᎴᎾ ᏗᏓᏴᎳᏛᏍᎩ ᎬᏗ Gmail ᏣᎳᎩ (Get started with Gmail in Cherokee)

"So if you speak Cherokee (ᏣᎳᎩ) or know someone who does - or if you are just interested in learning more, you can switch to Cherokee in Settings."

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Woo-hoooo!

Not that I speak Cherokee or anything, but I love Other Languages on computers--the more the better!

[sonia]

Yup. I don't like a lot of what Google is doing with user data and advertising, but at least they're using some of their resources in good directions.

[sanguinity]

Google's search function has been supporting Cherokee for a while now -- a year, maybe? More? And I remember running into some hack somewhere about how, as a non-speaker, you could use Google search in Cherokee to help if you were trying to do... something... with the Cherokee syllabary.

I don't remember the details, however, which is probably not terribly surprising, as I neither speak nor read Cherokee. The most I've ever tried to do in Cherokee is to translate Thomas King's epigraphs to English, and Wikipedia's page on the Cherokee syllabary turned out to be more useful for that than Google Search's Cherokee support.

Of course, not speaking the language doesn't stop me from being an admiring fangirl of the Cherokee language community. Because they have been doing some seriously cool shit. :-)

DotSub (a video hosting site that focuses on subtitling) was the last place that truly impressed me with their indigenous language support. chinuk wawa is one of the supported languages there, and I almost *never* see chinuk on a supported languages list.

[sonia]

Oooops!! Sorry for getting the two languages mixed up. *embarrassed* I will pay more careful attention in the future.

It would be very cool to see chinuk more widely supported.

[sanguinity]

Haha! I had wondered. No worries, though: as I said, I fangirl the Cherokee language community, and it's always cool to see them getting more tools and support.

chinuk wawa is indigenous to here, btw. You already know a smattering of it from place names, I'd dare say. ;-)

[sonia]

Yeah, I even knew that chinuk wawa is local, and that the Cherokee nation is far from here. Just wasn't paying enough attention.

I looked up the difference between chinuk wawa and just chinuk. For anyone else who's curious, I found The Oregon Encyclopedia: Chinuk Jargon. The article doesn't seem too fail-y to my untutored eye.

Do you have other links to recommend?

[sanguinity]

"chinuk wawa" is the term and romanization used by Grand Ronde, and thus connotes a more native-centric pov on the speaker's part; "Chinook Jargon" is the term and spelling more commonly used by white society. (As with all shibboleths, exceptions exist, and there are always a few who will fight viciously about what either version "really" connotes.) chinuk wawa is a Chinookan/Nootkan/French/English creole (as in: it was more than a pidgin, as there was a generation or two of kids who were raised in it, although the arguments about that get truly nasty, believe me), and it shouldn't be confused with the Chinook language itself. As I understand it, chinuk wawa is currently spoken in the Chinook nation (not just at Grand Ronde), although I know very little about what is happening there re Chinookan and chinuk wawa.

...about halfway through the article, I got *very* curious as to who wrote it, because it is *exceptionally* non-faily. Henry Zenk! Who has been hugely helpful in Grand Ronde's revitalization efforts, and who is the didn't-claim-personal-credit author of Grand Ronde's chinuk wawa dictionary, Chinuk Wawa As Our Elders Teach Us To Speak It. (It is published by and credited to the tribe, as it should be, but everyone I know casually refers to it as "Henly's book." (There's no 'r' in chinuk wawa; I presume he was named such by the chinuk wawa speakers he worked with in the 1970s. Everyone I know who calls him such is actually an Anglophone, which means that he's not called "Henly" because the speaker can't say the 'r'; he's called "Henly" as a mark of respect for the work he has done for the language.))

Truth is, there's not a lot online that I'd recommend: I'm glad to have this link of Henry's encyclopedia entry, thank you. If one can negotiate flash, I'd recommend Grand Ronde's website: there's a link at the end of Henry's article. Where Are Your Keys? has some chinuk wawa lessons on video. Beyond that, there isn't much online that I'd recommend, but on the book side I would additionally recommend George Lang's Making Wawa. (Although it spends enough time discussing the words and language itself that you almost need a passing familiarity with the language first -- not a lot! but a little, yes -- to make it readable.)

[sonia]

Thanks for the info! The videos at the Grand Ronde site are great. Loved seeing the kids in the immersion school.

[sanguinity]

That video of the kids is great. :-D I watch it sometimes when I want a pick-me-up.

("nayka mukmuk mayka LATET!")