It's more than reasonable to ask why there should ever be government (a.k.a. taxpayer) support for revitalization of indigenous languages. After all, language shift is an individual choice, right? And what was done in the past isn't my current responsibility, right?
Well, all that would make more sense if not for two points. First is that more or less by logical definition, the currently threatened indigenous languages of this continent survived the early colonial period fairly well on their own: it's recent, no earlier than 20th-century policies that have helped push most languages over the brink.
Second is that I am pretty sure that for practically all of these languages, we can demonstrate that government power was brought to bear (directly or indirectly) down on and against the free choice of indigenous peoples to maintain their own languages in their own homes and communities. Since that is the case, denying governmental responsibility for a large part of why these languages are currently threatened is the same as, say, denying governmental responsibility for waging a past war which it now admits was wrongly motivated and/or unjustified. It is not fun for taxpayers, but nonetheless, reparations/restitution are a requirement in such cases for any government that wishes to be considered civilized and responsible.
Look at it this way: if the government came and burned down your house, especially the library you'd been building up your whole life, all the while telling you that they knew what was best for you in doing so, you would expect reparations from that government. Say, some credible amount at least towards rebuilding that library. And that government couldn't simply say, "Well, WE in particular didn't burn down your house and library. That was OTHER people who just used the power of this government to pull it off." Governments are responsible for the consequences of the actions of their predecessors. Otherwise we could totally just not worry about the national debt. So when you have a clear case of a government stepping in and actively infringing on the basic individual rights of a group, using their institutional power to coerce them into doing what the government wants and thinks is best for them, then I think you have an argument for more responsibility than just ceasing to carry out that illicit policy. There's a clear debt owed, due to the immoral and unconstitutional imposition on personal (and by extension, minority-group) rights.
Or to put it even more simply: if I burn down your house and library, my responsibilities to you don't end just because I promise not to do it again.
So this is, above all, a question of responsibility and accountability, like it or not.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
How a morphosyntactician teaches phonetics
I suppose this is sort of a disingenuous title, since I am a documentary linguist by profession. And that entails a fairly broad range of background training in all the subfields of linguistics, in order to ensure that we can do adequately comprehensive coverage of all the features of the languages we seek to document.
But the reason I choose this title is because even the ostensible morphologist and syntactician (proof, such as it is, of this allegiance: my dissertation is titled "Referential-Access Dependency in Penobscot") that I am is thoroughly distressed at how we tolerate thin to dismal training in practical phonetics for all but those who go on to specialize in that field.
One might argue that this is just the normal course of specialization: we syntacticians can slack on producing and perceiving uvular ejectives and retroflex vs. alveolar contrasts because, well, we can always call in a phonetician when the need arises.
But this is not really true, for at least two reasons. The first is the obvious fact that one cannot collect remotely accurate syntactic data without solid control of any and all phonological contrasts: if tone is how they mark relative clauses, one cannot beg off on the difficulty of hearing tone.
The second and more important is this: the deeper I go into the syntax, the more I see how much of the surface syntactic patterning that we attribute to abstracted and empty features might better be accounted for by attending to prosody.
Rank unawareness of how much the phonological form of morphemes, of phrases, and so on, contributes to the surface orderings and surface wellformedness of language, can lead to some needless formal floundering, positing features that do not really do anything except make the bits show up in the surface form they actually do. In short: any work in syntax that is going to deal with PF had better, well, deeply understand all that "P" can involve.
There's a case to be made in the opposite direction, i.e. for how phoneticians and phonologists would do well to attend deeper than they already do to morphology and syntax. This is largely because the latter domains set up and drive the environments of combination and interaction in which we identify the most illuminating phonetic and phonological phenomena. But the dependency is really quite asymmetrical: phonetics in particular does not radically depend on syntactic form for all its data---whereas there is no access to syntactic data at all except through the intermediary of phonetic-phonological form.
My suggestion: have every linguistics major master the full set of contrasts (and their phonetic details) in the White Hmong system. With that done, students will have command of a rich tonal system (including breathy and creaky phonation contrasts) and some of the more challenging segmental contrasts: preglottalization, prenasalization, aspiration, extensive coronal (dental, retroflex, palatal) and dorsal (velar, uvular) features, among others. Toss in some training in pharyngeals, ejectives, length contrasts, and some of the more baroque vowel systems of the world (English, Khmer, Scandinavian), and students should be well set to handle most of what the world's phonetic-phonological diversity can throw at them.
This seems an oddly specific choice, but it is grounded in the practical fact that White Hmong is rather well documented, and fairly accessible worldwide, as a major language of the Hmong diaspora, who are substantially represented at least in North America, Europe, Australia, and of course, China and Southeast Asia.
More in the next installment on exactly HOW to teach the (supposedly) "tin-eared" to approach the challenge of non-mother-tongue sound contrasts....
But the reason I choose this title is because even the ostensible morphologist and syntactician (proof, such as it is, of this allegiance: my dissertation is titled "Referential-Access Dependency in Penobscot") that I am is thoroughly distressed at how we tolerate thin to dismal training in practical phonetics for all but those who go on to specialize in that field.
One might argue that this is just the normal course of specialization: we syntacticians can slack on producing and perceiving uvular ejectives and retroflex vs. alveolar contrasts because, well, we can always call in a phonetician when the need arises.
But this is not really true, for at least two reasons. The first is the obvious fact that one cannot collect remotely accurate syntactic data without solid control of any and all phonological contrasts: if tone is how they mark relative clauses, one cannot beg off on the difficulty of hearing tone.
The second and more important is this: the deeper I go into the syntax, the more I see how much of the surface syntactic patterning that we attribute to abstracted and empty features might better be accounted for by attending to prosody.
Rank unawareness of how much the phonological form of morphemes, of phrases, and so on, contributes to the surface orderings and surface wellformedness of language, can lead to some needless formal floundering, positing features that do not really do anything except make the bits show up in the surface form they actually do. In short: any work in syntax that is going to deal with PF had better, well, deeply understand all that "P" can involve.
There's a case to be made in the opposite direction, i.e. for how phoneticians and phonologists would do well to attend deeper than they already do to morphology and syntax. This is largely because the latter domains set up and drive the environments of combination and interaction in which we identify the most illuminating phonetic and phonological phenomena. But the dependency is really quite asymmetrical: phonetics in particular does not radically depend on syntactic form for all its data---whereas there is no access to syntactic data at all except through the intermediary of phonetic-phonological form.
My suggestion: have every linguistics major master the full set of contrasts (and their phonetic details) in the White Hmong system. With that done, students will have command of a rich tonal system (including breathy and creaky phonation contrasts) and some of the more challenging segmental contrasts: preglottalization, prenasalization, aspiration, extensive coronal (dental, retroflex, palatal) and dorsal (velar, uvular) features, among others. Toss in some training in pharyngeals, ejectives, length contrasts, and some of the more baroque vowel systems of the world (English, Khmer, Scandinavian), and students should be well set to handle most of what the world's phonetic-phonological diversity can throw at them.
This seems an oddly specific choice, but it is grounded in the practical fact that White Hmong is rather well documented, and fairly accessible worldwide, as a major language of the Hmong diaspora, who are substantially represented at least in North America, Europe, Australia, and of course, China and Southeast Asia.
More in the next installment on exactly HOW to teach the (supposedly) "tin-eared" to approach the challenge of non-mother-tongue sound contrasts....
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