I hadn’t really planned on writing anything today about the 10th anniversary of 9/11, but after seeing some Conspiracy Theorist posts by some friends on Facebook, I couldn’t help but say something.
Ten years ago today, I believe that 19 terrorists (whether they were Al-Qaeda or not) boarded planes and flew them into the World Trade Center Towers 1 and 2, the Pentagon, as well as one failed attack that was brought down in Pennsylvania. Subsequently, the Twin Towers collapsed because of the circumstances that resulted from planes being driven into them. After sustaining critical damage to it’s south side from the collapse of the north tower and after multiple fires broke out on multiple floors, the World Trade Center 7 building collapsed later that day.
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Recently, through Google+, I came across a site created and maintained by Sai of www.saizai.com. The website is called www.gayhomophobe.com. On this site, Sai lists the number of “days since the last prominent homophobe was caught in a gay sex scandal”. When he mentions “prominent homophobe” he means a politician, leader, pastor, etc. that in the past, has been vocal about being anti-homosexual. Many times the politicians have voted down anything that would give homosexuals in the US equal rights or they have been vocal in denouncing the homosexual lifestyle and calling it “sin”. To the right is Ex-Senator, Larry Craig who was arrested in the Minneapolis St-Paul International Airport for trying to elicit sex in a men’s bathroom back in 2007, which many of you I am sure are aware. His story is one of the most publicized, but there are been many others like him and I am sure there are many like him who still hold a “prominent” role somewhere and continue to spew out their self-hatred rhetoric.
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Well, summer is coming to a close and it’s been a pretty productive one. I thought I was going to get a break this summer but I was wrong. I did get some sort of break, meaning I was not inundated with homework, papers, and readings all summer, but instead I was able to work with a great group of people. I continued working at the Center for American Indian Languages this summer on the Shoshone Project. The project hosted the Shoshone/Goshute Youth Language Apprenticeship Program, otherwise known as SYLAP (sigh-lap). I was able to work with a great group of high school and post-high school students from the Shoshone and Goshute tribes of the western United States. It was a great program and I’m glad I was able to be part of it. If you are interested in knowing more about SYLAP you can see my previous post on it here, or you can visit the Shoshone Project Website here.
Other than SYLAP, the other really big thing I did was go to Phoenix. A friend of mine, Joy, lives in Phoenix. I met Joy while I was living in Spain. She was an au pair for a German family living in Mallorca and had a car and used to drive me all around the island. Out mutual friend, Hana, from Croatia, whom we also met in Spain, through the website couchsurfing.com, was coming to stay with Joy for a week after having been studying in Cleveland, Ohio and taking a short vacation out west before returning home to Spain (and then Croatia).
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So unless you live under a rock and don’t EVER use the internet and when you do you use bling, don’t read the news, don’t have gmail or use any other google products, then you probably have heard of Google’s new project, Google+. Google+ takes your social life and makes it easier to integrate it online. Many are comparing it to Facebook because Facebook is about the closest thing to Google+, but I think that Google+ may just be the NEXT BIG THING and will have people leaving Facebook or at least frequenting it less frequently.
A high school friend of mine is currently working at google and had some invitations when Google opened up the first round of invitations to be sent out, this past Wednesday. I was lucky to be online and get mine from my friend to join Google+. An hour or so later, Google closed the invitations. I’m guessing the next round of invites will open sometime next week after everyone gets back from the long weekend and has time to discuss the feedback that they have been receiving from us initial users of Google+.
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If you are a member of the Linguistics Society of America, you probably already received the e-mail below, if not, please read and do what that e-mail is asking you! Even if your field falls out of the domain of Behavioral and Economic Sciences, you should support your fellow scientists and researchers in contacting your representatives against this proposal!
Dear Colleagues,
The House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice & Science (CJS) is considering changing the 2012 appropriation to eliminate the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) directorate at the NSF, which includes the Linguistics Program. The Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), a coalition to which the LSA belongs supporting Federal funding for the social sciences, is encouraging its members to write to their House Representatives and Senators, urging the House to continue to support the human sciences at NSF. Having had the privilege of serving recently as one of the Assistant Directors of the NSF, heading up the SBE directorate, I want to endorse COSSA’s request, believing that eliminating SBE would be disastrous for the human sciences in the US and for linguistics in particular.
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If you thought that the word to finish the title was “indians”, then you were wrong. Though this post is about cultural sensitivity and racist icons, the finish to the title is actually “taibo”, or as it is known in English, white man.
(Sung to the tune of “1 little, 2 little, 3 little Indians”)
Semme, wahatte’, pahaitte’ taiponee
wattsewitte’ manaikitte’, naahpaitte’ taiponee
taattsewitte’, woosewitte’, swemihankante’ taiponee
sewaahte taipottsinee!!
The lyrics above are from the Shoshone language. Shoshone is spoken by about 3,000 people all over the western United States in the states of Utah, California, Nevada, Wyoming, and Idaho. The lyrics roughly translate as “One, two, three white people, four, five, six white people, seven, eight, nine white people, ten little white people.” This song was made up by a Native Shoshone speaking linguist, to turn the tables on those who take it for granted that we are disrespectfully counting a large group of people, native to the United States, in a children’s song.
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One would think that since this post is titled, “Madame Egbert”, that it would include a photo of Madame Egbert. Unfortunately, the only photo I have of her here in Salt Lake City is one that is about 8 years old and is a scanned image of her, which is pasted to one of the pages of my scrap book from my year abroad in Belgium. The photo to the right encompasses so much meaning and is directly linked to Mme (Madame) Egbert.
Mme Egbert was my high school French teacher. The thing is, she was more than a teacher to me. She was a mentor, an inspiration, and guide for so many things that have happened in my life. In the photo to the right, I’m wearing my “Cercle Français” t-shirt, which was the t-shirt for the French club, of which I was president my senior year. The photo was taken at the Rotary Youth Exchange Program Orientation at Otterbein College in July of 2002, the year I graduated. A month after this photo was taken, I was on a plane to spend a year abroad in Belgium where I learned to improve the French I had learned from Mme Egbert during my high school years. It is because of her encouragement and advice that I even was able to be empowered to start the Rotary application in the first place and complete it, encouraging my parents to let me do this.
Mme Egbert recently retired this year from my high school, Logan Elm, which is located in the cornfields (literally) of Pickaway County, Ohio. I knew she was planning on retiring soon as I had just visited her this past Christmas. I didn’t think that soon meant at the end of the school year. I got the news from a family friend that lives in Circleville and I had extremely mixed emotions about Mme Egbert’s deciding to retire!
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This past semester as part of my work hours at the Center for American Indian Languages at the University of Utah, I’ve been helping plan and coordinate the Shoshone-Goshute Youth Language Apprenticeship Program, or SYLAP for short. I work at C.A.I.L as the Laboratory Manager on the Shoshone Language Preservation Project, which is ran by Dr. Marianna Di Paolo. The project began when recordings and other materials from Dr. Wick R. Miller were passed onto Dr. Di Paolo. She and Dr. Mauricio Mixco applied for an NSF grant to help preserve and enhance accessibility to the Shoshone/Goshute materials that were collected by Dr. Miller, who passed away due to injuries in a biking accident in 1994. From this, the Shoshone Project was born and since 2004 the project has worked closely with the Shoshone and Goshute communities throughout Utah, Nevada, and Idaho to help preserve, conserve, and revitalize the Shoshone and Goshute languages, through curriculum development, creating dictionaries, disseminating recordings from the Wick R. Miller collection, as well as conducting teacher training workshops and the Shoshone-Goshute Youth Language Apprenticeship Program.
Newe taikwappeh, or ‘Shoshoni and Goshute’ are dialects of Central Numic, which is a part of the Uto-Aztecan family, spoken by around 3,000 people today. It is highly endangered as very few children are learning it to fluency and most of the fluent speakers are over the age of 50 years old.
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I’ve been part of the World Wide Web for a long time. At least since I was 12 years old. Back in the day, I felt like the only person in the world who liked languages as much as I did. That was until I started high school French, my freshman year of high school. In 1998 I found Jennifer Wagner’s (of http://www.ielanguages.com) AOL site for learning French. I believe the web address was http://www.aol.com/chicolynn or something of the sort. She posted French lessons on her website. Her lessons came from what she was learning in her French courses in high school. As a language enthusiast, I wanted to learn as much as possible about the language I was taking in high school, French. I used Jennie’s web sources extensively and used to print out her guides and would take them home and study them! I was always well ahead of everyone else in my French class.
At that time I never in my wildest dreams would have thought that I would be native-like in French nor would I be able to speak any other languages fluently. Did Jennifer Wagner get me there? No? Did she help? Yes. Was it her lessons that got me to that point? No, but they sure did help! I believe it was the simple fact of knowing that there was someone else out there that was just like me and that they were doing something about their goals and dreams. Jennifer has inspired me on many occasions and I have nothing but the highest respect for her and completely support her in her endeavors to inspire others and help them on their language learning journey!
Over the past few years I have followed many language learning blogs here and there, that I found were different from Jennie’s, which claim that their method is the best way to learn a language! I’m not going to be petty and name these blogs or say anything specific about them. I feel that the content, if read as a whole, speaks for itself and that the attitudes and demeanor of the bloggers behind the blogs speak loads as to their true goals.
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Yesterday a friend of mine who had lived in Spain for two years messaged me in frustration about dialect discrimination. This isn’t just any dialect discrimination, but the discrimination of a dialect acquired while learning (acquiring) a second language. My friends speaks Castillian (Castellano) Spanish, which is spoken in Spain. The most commented-on feature of the Castillian dialect is that ‘c’ (before ‘e’ and ‘i’) and ‘z’ are pronounced like [θ] (or “th” for you IPA depraved people). In the rest of the Spanish speaking world (the Carribean and South, Central, and North America) these two letters are pronounced as [s] (or “s” for you IPA depraved people). To non-linguists this knowledge may come about while taking Spanish classes or after living in one area of the Spanish speaking world and crossing over into another area of the Spanish speaking world. Basically it’s like the difference between American English and British English.
My friend’s supervisor informed my friend that she should begin pronouncing her ‘c’ and ‘z’ as they do in the Carribean/Americas. This is absolutely absurd! That would be like asking someone from Scotland who had a British accent to start talking like an American. First of all, there is no such thing as a “British” accent nor “American” accent. There are many dialects and accents within both Great Britain and the United States. Would it be fair for us to ask a French exchange student who lived in the heart of Brooklyn to speak like a Texan when visiting or living in Texas? Should Portuguese speakers ask Brazilian Portuguese speakers to speak like they do in Portugal?
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