North East Linguistics Society 51 - Indigenous Language Special Session

Dear SSILA members,

This year’s NELS at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), to be held online Nov. 6-8, 2002, will include a special session on Indigenous languages, including talks on Blackfoot (Algonquian), Crow (Siouan), Cheyenne (Algonquian), Inuktitut (Inuit-Yupik-Unangan), Washo (isolate), and Chuj (Mayan), as well as a keynote talk on Algonquian languages by Will Oxford (U. Manitoba). You can check out the programme here:

https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/linguistique/en/nels51/

Our registration model includes free options for both staff and students.

Best regards,

Richard Compton

Associate Professor, UQAM

CALL for SSILA EDITOR

The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) is seeking an Editor. SSILA works to keep their membership informed and connected through the SSILA website, and minimally through Facebook. The Editor is responsible for content on these platforms and works in close collaboration with the SSILA Secretary-Treasurer to keep the website updated. The editorship has a term of three years. It requires minimally requires 5-8 hours of work per month but may take more depending on the vision and commitment of the editor to develop content. The Editor receives a $500.00 stipend at the end of each calendar year, but compensation may be adjusted to reflect added vision and time.

Responsibilities 

  •  Check Editor email (editor@ssila.org) regularly and respond.

  • Post relevant content to the website and Facebook that is sent to the editor by members.

  • Post any official SSILA content requested by the EC and the in Memoriam Editor, and email it to membership.

  • Ensure consistency of style, formatting, and accessibility throughout the website.

  • Put some amount of effort into monitoring news for items of interest (using a weekly news search result or some such), as well as posting items they happen to come across in their own social networks.

  • Update and maintain Facebook page, in accordance with guidelines and with other members delegated to post on Facebook.

  • Create a yearly report of website activities and attend the Executive Committee meetings (in person or by video) each year at the SSILA Winter meeting in early January, attend quarterly video meetings as needed, and report to and advise the Executive Committee on website and technical matters as needed.

Preferred Skills

Familiarity with the following services:

  • SquareSpace (the website platform)

  • MailChimp

If interested please contact the current SSILA Secretary/Treasurer at secretary@ssila.org. Please provide a letter of interest that includes links to a website or websites contributed to, or highlighting other editing or content development roles and the name, and the name and contact information for one reference.

CoLang Presents 2020 Web Series Available Online

Dear SSILA community,


We're happy to share with you all that the recordings of the 3-day CoLang Presents 2020 Web Series, which was held in June over Zoom, are now available and are being hosted on the University of Montana ScholarWorks site. There you can view and download the videos from each day of the Series, and find the transcripts for each video as well. 


Follow the link below to check it out:
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/colang_2020_webseries/

Thanks again to everyone who participated and attended the first ever CoLang Web Series!

Best,

Carolyn O'Meara and Jean-Luc Pierite 

CoLang Co-conveners

Durbin Duran Feeling, Cherokee Linguist, 1946-2020

The community of Native language linguists and speakers is saddened to learn of the death of the pre-eminent Cherokee linguist, Durbin Feeling, who died August 19, 2020 at age 74.

 Durbin was one of the last remaining Cherokee speakers who spoke the language as his mother tongue, learning English when he went to school. 

Durbin earned an Associate of Arts at Bacone College in Muskogee, OK in 1966.  From 1968 to 1970 he served in Viet Nam as a helicopter machine gunner, earning several combat honors, including the Purple Heart.  During his service time, he wrote letters home to his mother written in the Cherokee syllabary.  In 1979 he earned a BA in Journalism at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah.

During this time, Durbin worked with linguist William Pulte to produce two of the most useful and influential Cherokee linguistic tools, the Cherokee English Dictionary and An Outline of Cherokee Grammar, published together as a single volume in 1975.  He began graduate work at UC Irvine in 1988, serving as an instructor at the Cherokee Institute, and earning his MA in Linguistics in 1992.

In 1992 Durbin began work as a tribal linguist for Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.  At the same time, he served as an adjunct professor of Cherokee at the University of Tulsa. 

In 1999 Durbin was an Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern State.  He taught the Cherokee language at the University of Oklahoma for several years before returning to consult for Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

In 2004, Durbin was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by The Ohio State University.

Durbin was given many honors by Cherokee Nation. In 2011, he was named a Cherokee National Treasure.  The Nation also honored him by naming their language preservation bill and their language center after him.

Besides his influential dictionary and grammar, Durbin also published A Handbook of the Cherokee Verb in 2003 with Craig Kopris, Jordan Lachler, and Charles van Tuyl.  in 2018, he published Cherokee Narratives with former collaborator William Pulte and son Gregory Pulte.  This book represents a decades-long ambition:  to provide morpheme-level glossing and tone marking on original Cherokee texts.  He served as a language consultant for many linguistics papers and data bases.

Durbin had more collaborators than can be accurately named, since he was often the anchor of both academic and community Cherokee language projects.  Some of his NSF/DEL collaborators were Marcia Haag and Keith Johnson (Cherokee language sound description and analysis) and Dylan Herrick, Tracy Hirata-Eddy, Lizette Peter, Marcellino Berardo, and Brad Montgomery-Anderson (Documenting Cherokee tone and vowel length). He was also a member of the VW Foundation-sponsored Prosody of the Wider World workshop in 2012 and of the working group "ToPIQQ: Tonal Placement – Interaction of Qualitative and Quantitative factors.”

Other collaborators were Hiroto Uchihara, Chris Koops, Wyman Kirk, and Ryan Mackey.

Durbin was always immersed in developing technology that would help speakers and students gain access to the syllabary.  He was instrumental in getting the syllabary onto word processor keyboards and developing a unicode for it.

 Durbin was on the first Board of Directors of the Endangered Language Fund, where he served as a proposal reviewer for many years.   

Apart from his importance to Cherokee language and linguistics, Durbin was a kind and respectful man, always wishing to minimize credit to himself and always saying yes to demands for his time and expertise.  He cannot be replaced.

Submitted by Marcia Haag

 



 

AILLA Launches Free Online Course on Archiving/AILLA Lanza un Curso Gratuito y en Línea sobre Archivado

AILLA Launches Free Online Course on Archiving

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is delighted to announce the launch of a free online course called Archiving for the Future: Simple Steps for Archiving Language Documentation Collections, available at https://archivingforthefuture.teachable.com/. The course is a resource to aid people of all backgrounds in organizing born-digital and digitized language materials and data for deposit into any digital repository (not just AILLA) for long-term preservation and accessibility. 

The course material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-1653380 (Susan S. Kung and Anthony C. Woodbury, PIs; September 1, 2016, to August 31, 2020). The course is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. At the moment, the course is available only in English; the next steps are to translate the curriculum into Spanish and Portuguese to make it more accessible to AILLA’s Latin American audience.

Read the full press release in English here: https://texlibris.lib.utexas.edu/2020/09/08/archiving-for-the-future-ailla-launches-free-online-course/

 

AILLA Lanza un Curso Gratuito y en Línea sobre Archivado

El Archivo de los Idiomas Indígenas de Latinoamérica (AILLA) se complace en anunciar el lanzamiento de un curso gratuito en línea llamado Archivar para el Futuro: Pasos Sencillos para Archivar Colecciones de Documentación de Lenguas, disponible en https://archivingforthefuture.teachable.com/. El curso es un recurso para ayudar a las personas de todos los orígenes a organizar materiales y datos lingüísticos digitalizados y de origen digital para depositarlos en cualquier depósito digital (no sólo AILLA) para su conservación y accesibilidad a largo plazo. 

El material del curso se basa en el trabajo apoyado por la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias con la subvención No. BCS-1653380 (Susan S. Kung y Anthony C. Woodbury, PIs; 1 de septiembre de 2016 a 31 de agosto de 2020). El curso está licenciado bajo una licencia internacional Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. Por el momento, el curso está disponible sólo en inglés; los próximos pasos son traducir el currículum al español y al portugués para hacerlo más accesible a la audiencia latinoamericana de AILLA.

Lea el comunicado de prensa en inglés aquí: https://texlibris.lib.utexas.edu/2020/09/08/archiving-for-the-future-ailla-launches-free-online-course/

 

SSILA Archiving Award - CALL EXTENDED

This award highlights the importance of creating long-term archived materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and source communities as well as scholarly communities. It is meant to encourage others in academia to value such work as more comparable to analytic research. 

Deadline: October 15, 2020 

The award is presented to one or more researchers (from any community) who have created an accessible documentary collection of materials relating to an Indigenous language of the Americas. Taking each collection’s context and ethical protocols into account, each collection so honored will be assessed on the following characteristics: 

  • It should be linguistically and/or ethnographically rich. 

  • It should include primary materials, including (but not limited to) field notes, audio or video recordings, and other items created in language documentation. It may also include secondary materials, including (but not limited to) educational materials, analysis of the language, or related media. 

  • It should be diverse in content, including some annotated or transcribed material.  

  • It should be well described through collection-level metadata, item-level metadata, and a finding aid or descriptive overview which includes how the language community’s priorities have been met. 

  • Its content should be potentially impactful for language learners, language maintenance, language teaching, and scholarly research. 

  • The collection, or a back-up of the collection, should be archived in an established and trusted repository, one that is created and maintained by an institution with a demonstrated commitment to permanence and the long-term preservation of archived resources with suitable rights management practices to allow access to as much of the collections as possible. 

  • Its content should be open and accessible to heritage and source communities as well as scholarly communities. Accessibility may include a dedicated website that repurposes primary archived material with added value, but a website cannot be nominated. 

This award may be shared by multiple creators of a single collection (including, for example, academic and non-academic researchers, primary language consultants, and collection curators).  The award is given to the creators of the collection, not the repository or archive. Nominations must be made by a member of SSILA. Self-nominations are permitted.  

The nominating package should include: 

  • a letter of nomination identifying the nominee(s) (with curriculum vitae as appropriate), describing the background of their work on the language in question, and the archival collection (with links to online content and metadata, and a finding aid or descriptive overview), and explaining its quality and significance, and  

  • one supporting letter also explaining the quality and significance of the archival collection. 

If you have questions about the award, please direct them to Mary Linn (secretary@ssila.org). To submit a nomination for the SSILA Archiving Award, send the nomination and letter of recommendation in PDF format by email to the SSILA Secretary. Please verify that it has in fact been received. 

Nominations should be submitted to Mary Linn (secretary@ssila.org) by October 15, 2020

Norman A. McQuown’s Coatepec Totonac Texts

IJAL Texts Online, vol. 3, number 1, September 2020

Paulette Levy, National Autonomous University of Mexico

This contribution presents three narratives in Coatepec Totonac written by Manuel Oropeza Castro in 1938 in Coatepec, Puebla, and recorded at an audio lab in Mexico City in 1950. They are part of a collection of 36 Coatepec Totonac texts curated by Norman A. McQuown from 1938 to 1968. McQuown’s graphic representation system is based on segmental sandhi phenomena at several levels of the prosodic hierarchy of Coatepec Totonac, so it is quite opaque to a modern reader. In this rendering of the texts, the first line is McQuown’s original phonological representation, followed by a line that shows the boundary segmental phenomena at three levels of the hierarchy, implicit in McQuown’s representation. I then give a modern rendering of the texts in terms of morphosyntactic words, morphologically analyzed and glossed, and a free translation. 

[http://www.americanlinguistics.org/?page_id=2658]

Meet the team behind your new SSILA website!

We would like to introduce you to the team who created the new SSILA website:

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Diego Frankel

Diego is an undergraduate computational linguistics major at the University of Southern California. He is a summer 2020 intern with Mary Linn, the SSILA Secretary/Treasurer, at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH).

He is responsible for the bulk of the work you see (and don’t see) on these pages, and in getting the membership transferred from the old site.

Diego also translated all of the content into Spanish.

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Hali Dardar

Hali is the Language Reclamation and Media Project Coordinator at CFCH. Some of you may have met her at the LSA/CELP closing event for the 2019 Year of Indigenous Languages at the winter meetings in New Orleans, where she was with the Houma Language Project presenting some of their language and culture learning activities.

Hali oversaw Diego in the technical aspects and financial linkings on the new platform.

She kept all of us on track.

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Cecelia Halle

Cecelia is the Strategic Communications Specialist of Cultural Sustainability at CFCH. She worked as an intern on the Smithsonian Mother Tongue Film Festival before joining the staff.

She refreshed our logo, and decided on colors, styles, and images for the new look.

As the granddaughter of Morris Halle, Cecelia is honored that her design skills could be used for SSILA.

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Danny Hieber

And a special thank you to Danny Hieber, former SSILA Webmaster and PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who designed and took care of the old site single-handedly for many years, and who was there for us to answer questions during this transition.

Mary Linn

SSILA Secretary/Treasurer

HELP for Endangered Legacy Collections

HELP for Endangered Legacy Collections is a new initiative from within the Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation (CELP) to assist in the digitization, archiving, and processing of endangered language data. This initiative attempts to tackle two concerns within our field: (1) the fact that many senior researchers nearing retirement need assistance in digitizing, archiving and processing their legacy collections of endangered language data and (2) the fact that there is an increasing number of graduate students who wish to undertake work on endangered languages but are not able to collect their own data due to a variety of reasons, e.g., travel restrictions (especially in the wake of the current global pandemic), lack of funding, family obligations, health concerns, and so on.

Call for Papers 2021 American Name Society

The American Name Society (ANS), a sister society of SSILA, is now inviting proposals for papers for its next annual conference. After serious deliberation of an official proposal made on the 8th of May 2020, the Executive Council of the American Name Society unanimously voted to hold the 2021 Annual Conference online. All presentation sessions will be held online during the four days of the conference. This means that our conference will NOT be held in conjunction with the LSA meeting, which is still slated to be held in January 2021 in San Francisco.

DELAMAN Award

The Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN) announces that the deadline for nominations for the DELAMAN Award has been extended to 15 July 2020.