Inuttitut, a language shaped by humility, poetry, and the land
beside.media
beside.media
Skier’s learn a large number of words for different types of snow: everything from death cookies to boilerplate to corn snow. Vocabulary comes from interaction.
I am guessing different sports have wildly expanded vocabulary for certain elements of the relevant environment?
And it's not just sports. Meteorologists have many different words to describe clouds.
You're looking for the phrase "term of art"
https://www.lexico.com/definition/term_of_art
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/term-of-...
e.g. if I say I'm going to "bounce the box", I don't mean that I will throw a cardboard container at the floor, I mean that I will reboot a computer. And the sysadmins will know exactly what I mean.
Is there a systematic campaign to preserve the language and/or community? At the very least to set down the vocabulary/grammer/pronounciation/etc?
I asked a question on HN for a grant that was directed about using ML to aid in language preservation. I didn't get any responses. We were trying to expand the tools available.
If you approach the problem instead from the language preservation perspective and ask what is necessary to make it succeed, there are essentially two tasks: documentation (recording current speakers' knowledge of the language) and community maintenance (allowing people to keep using the language and teaching it to the next generation).
Documentation basically boils down to making a lot of recordings. Since text is usually nicer to work with, transcriptions are very useful, and in theory ML would be able to help with that, but to train a speech-to-text model, you first need transcribed training data, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem. Making the data easily available and easy to contribute to is more likely to be impactful.
For maintaining a community, ML can be useful by providing all the services that ML offers for speakers of more popular languages: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, predictive smartphone keyboards, machine translation, ... but all of those depend on the language being well-documented already. Otherwise, non-ML solutions are likely to be the only options (so formant-based speech synthesis e.g. with espeak-ng, dumb keyboards, rule-based translators, ...)
To give a specific example, I know of a community of Kabyle speakers who want to be able to use OpenStreetMap with voice navigation in Kabyle, so they've been making a lot of recordings (using https://tatoeba.org as a platform for the documentation part) and also have someone working on a speech-synthesis model (using Mozilla's DeepSpeech, I think). AFAIK, the project is coordinated by Muhend Beqasem, whom you might want to contact if you're interested in what they're doing: https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/profile/belkacem77
Well, like all people looking to get grants, I had a pot of money we could get but we had to use a tool to do it. Welcome to grants in 2020 where ML is one thing that gets funded and language preservation is not funded but actually needed as COVID seems to be removing a fair number of people who know the language.
I tried to get access to the Iñupiat Rosetta Stone at one point but failed even though I have the "unlimited" "all languages" Rosetta Stone subscription. It seems like the tribe manages registration and acts as a gatekeeper. [1] I'm sure it has to do with who funded the project or something, but you'd think for endangered languages you'd want to make it as easy as possible to access language learning resources.
[0] https://www.rosettastone.com/endangered/projects/ [1] http://www.north-slope.org/assets/images/uploads/RS_Request_...
For a lot of Native Americans/First Nations peoples, it's actually a highly contentious issue. Some of them don't want outsiders, with no connection to the culture or the group, coming in and learning it just to prove they can, especially when children of the group haven't had the opportunity to learn it because of colonialism and other, often horrible, things.
The Hopi are known for this, and actually decided to forego teaching the language at a school because they couldn't guarantee Navajo students wouldn't sign up for it.
So, really, there's a lot more involved than it just being an 'endangered language' that everyone should have the right to learn and that they should want everyone to learn. There's a lot of ethnolinguistic and postcolonial issues involved as well.
The very idea that it could be forbidden to learn a language seemed nonsensical to me at first, although upon reflection, it must have been a good way to keep foreign ears from prying too much (I believe China's ban on foreigners learning Chinese was more about counterintelligence and less about wanting Chinese speakers to have some deep, authentic connection with the culture).
I hate stuff like that hostility between Hopi and Navajo people though. If anything, learning a neighbor's language tends to bring people together!
I tend to agree, but I also respect the wishes of the various groups. They've undergone experiences at the hands of colonizers that I can't begin to imagine, and if they want to try to preserve something of their culture so that it stays in their culture, and not just let any outsider with a passing interest learn it, I support them in that. Though I do wish more were like the Cherokee Nation, which offers free online courses for anyone across various levels of Cherokee, also integrating culture and such.
It is actually illegal, as in there is a tribal resolution, for me to provide any demographic information to any entity without tribal permission.
The worst part is those folks who say they are Native American from a particular tribe and are NOT on that tribes enrollment rolls. They are always fun to deal with.
Inuktut is mostly stable, though "vulnerable," and strongest in Nunavik (the region in the article), I suspect because the somewhat-devolved region employs it as the primary language of instruction. [1]
[0] Excerpt from the Truth and Reconciliation commission's report: http://wordalive.wycliffe.ca/stories/what-residential-school..., also https://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/timeline-event/indian-resident...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/inuit-inuktitut-stats-c..., https://www.kativik.qc.ca/school-board/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy
If you admire or appreciate a culture, you might argue that the culture's values or history or distinctive outlook are directly reflected in grammatical features or vocabulary of an associated language. While this might be true in some ways and to some extent, it's something that's also very easy to deceive yourself about. You can easily make up a story about how distinctions that one language does (or doesn't) draw reflect the excellence or more appropriate priorities of its speakers' culture. Like "oh, this language makes distinctions that English doesn't -- because the people who speak it are so attuned to perceiving fine details!" or "oh, this language doesn't make distinctions that English does -- showing how its speakers are not distracted by the pointless minutia that occupy us in settled industrial civilization!".
A challenge to this kind of analysis is that studies of linguistic typology (deep structural features that languages do or don't have in common) show languages with, and without, particular characteristics all over the world, in languages spoken by people from all different kinds of cultures and societies. Most generalizations that might be given a higher significance just sort of fall flat when you look at typology data. Oh, that cool thing that we like in this language -- is also present in this other language from a different culture and part of the world! Oh, that thing we find annoying or irritating -- is present elsewhere too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology
A kind of counterexample that I learned from John McWhorter's books is that complicated irregularities in languages (e.g. a very large number of noun classes with distinctive classifiers and agreement rules, or a very large number of irregular verb forms) are likely a sign of smaller and more isolated speaker communities, whereas simplification that removes these irregularities is associated with circumstances in which more people have to use a language non-natively (and therefore have a harder time mastering these details), which could include migration, social disruptions, or the widespread use of a language as a lingua franca, trade language, language of imperial administration, etc. That does mean that indigenous languages (especially if they have almost exclusively been used by a native speaker community in a relatively small area) can often be harder to learn for non-native speakers.
But you still can't necessarily count on cultural generalizations based on those observations. One exercise you can try to do (maybe this is also an idea from McWhorter?) is pick a random set of characteristics that some language might have, and then try to come up with an essay explaining why those features show how awesome or admirable the speakers' culture must be. If it sounds deeply plausible, then maybe that's a sign that people aren't actually good at being objective about this. :-)
The submitted article doesn't talk about grammar and morphology or other typological features, so criticizing it on the grounds that there's no relationship between typology and geography is rather beside the point.
What it does talk about is specific vocabulary like amiraijaut for September, the "time when antlers lose their velvet". That's reflective of Inuttitut speakers insofar as that they must've been living close enough to animals with antlers to observe the loss of velvet at the time when that translation was coined.
That kind of connection between language and culture is rather uncontroversial. For example, it was inferred that proto-Austronesian speakers already had pigs, dogs and chickens based on the words for these animals across different branches of the language family being cognates that allowed reconstruction of those words in the proto-language. That hypothesis also squares with the archaeological evidence http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n2320/html/ch1...
Of course vocabulary can be learned (as the author herself demonstrates) and transmitted outside the original context (e.g. this comment), so the cultural link is rather weak. People who've never seen a velvet-covered antler can still talk about amiraijaut in the same way that people who do not worship a god of war can still talk about Mars and his month March.