They could have taught the little girl a useful second language instead of this mummified half-understood nonsense. I don't approve of children being made into cultural or linguistic museum-pieces. Has anybody more than a rough idea of how this language was pronounced? How badly distorted was its syntax etc. by the effort of translating a book which is the product of an utterly alien culture? It's sad that languages die out but they do and once they're dead they're dead.

Aw, shucks, david. Let's wait till Mae Alice is grown up and then ask her what she thinks about it.

Given the passage of time and the distortions that probably occurred during the reconstruction process, is this really the revival of a dead language or the birth of a new language inspired by historical antecedents? I guess I could see arguments either way, since we have no way to guess how the language would have changed over time if it'd survived.

See, this is why I don't regret staying up till after half past 2 at night.

As for "useful second language", she'll most likely find Klingon easier than most of the rest of us! (Well, and French -- nasal vowels.)

SnowyLeopard: the same might be said of Israeli Hebrew.

Or of Cornish.

John Cowan: I was thinking about that. And since we have no facts supporting either view, suggesting the language isn't "authentic", whatever that means, would probably just rile people unnecessarily.

@david waugh, any complaints about hebrew while you're at it?

@david waugh:

furthermore, if you took the time to read the article you might have noticed:

And Baird is raising her three-year-old daughter, Mae Alice, to be bilingual, making her the first native speaker of Wôpanâak for seven generations. Teaching her people to speak and read Wôpanâak, she says, "is like taking care of your family."

nique ta mére, david waugh.

Soyez sages, les enfants! David didn't say anything to warrant that kind of insult. Please try to argue civilly.

The article cited links to another article that explains the process Prof. Richards and the project are following for the dictionary a little more carefully.

Ms. Baird's Masters thesis gives a sense of the reconstructed grammar. Ken Hale's principle of training native speakers as linguists will have to wait for Mae Alice or her peers (a primary school is in the works) to grow up and show an interest. But as for dedication to the enterprise, keep in mind that it is 15 years old already.

As well as EEBO, which is mentioned in the second article (which truthfully explains that the rare Bible is only consulted when the scan is imperfect), the Eliot Bible and the Logick Primer and several other works are in Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (1639-1800). For instance, if you have a BPL card, you have online access.

Note that textual sources are not limited to the Bible, which being a translation might indeed have odd characteristics. Eliot really did start a tradition of native literacy. Goddard and Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett gathers over 150 documents of various sorts from the 1660's through the 1750's.

As for the pronunciation, one of the clues is spelling variation among literate native speakers, who perceived it according to their own phonemes, rather than in terms of English like Eliot. Some example are given in "Native Writing Systems" in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 17: Languages

Here is a longer bibliography of New England Algonquian languages.

Just as an American or Indian Chinese restaurant may not serve food like any restaurant in China, but is no more different from them than they are from one another, I suspect the reconstructed language, though not the same as was ever spoken or what it would have become if native speaking had not ceased in the 19th century, is still a form of Wôpanâak.

A recent book written by two Native Americans discusses many aspects of Wampanoag language. A Cultural History of the Native Peoples of Southern New England: Voices from Past and Present contains three appendices on the language - all from a Native perspective. Very informative.

Very interesting indeed—thanks, Wr!

I am grateful to Madame l for adding a word to my French vocabulary. You don't revive a language by teaching it to one child. We each learnt our native language from the community we live in, not just from our mothers. What happens to the children of immigrants? Most have only a poor knowledge of their parents' language.
Hebrew is, so far, the only example of a successfully revived dead language and is likely to remain unique. Cornish is very much the affair of a small bunch of enthusiasts and the vocabulary etc. is completely inauthentic, having had to be extrapolated from even more exiguous remains than Wampanoag.

There is nothing sad about the demise of a language. Rather, it's speakers take up another language which often opens the doors to greater social and economic advancement. That said, I am sure some worthy is working on reviving the English of Chaucer's day, before it became so horribly mangled by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other scriveners of their ilk.

lirelou, that may be true if the only (or at least overwhelming) concern is money and "social advancement".
Those whose priorities differ would probably disagree.

"There is nothing sad about the demise of a language. Rather, its speakers take up another language which often opens the doors to greater social and economic advancement."

If this is true, why doesn't the whole world just learn Chinese and forget the rest?

I would agree that in general, when a culture forgets the old language spoken by a few, and picks up a new, more widely spoken language, the new language generally opens doors to economic advancement. (Social advancement, I'm not sure what that is).

But certainly something, a great deal, is lost whenever a language is lost, and that's sad. If we all just learned Chinese, all of the world's non-Chinese literature would "enjoyed" in translation only. That example seems absurd, but that's what happens on a small scale when any language is lost.

In the U.S., for the sake of economic, and I suppose "social" development, it was official policy to eradicate Native American languages by mandating education in English only on reservations, and that policy succeeded in wiping out many languages.

By contrast, today in Papua New Guinea, which hosts more languages (some 830) than any other nation, children are schooled exclusively in their native language in the early grades, and only later begin to learn Tok Pisin, the lingua franca, and English. This policy has succeeded in stopping the loss of language diversity--only 10 of the country's languages are extinct, according to Ethnologue--while offering opportunities for economic advancement.

The enlightened goal should be to encourage multilingualism among speakers of threatened languages, not a complete switch to a more broadly-spoken language.

@l.h.: sorry if i offended the rules of civility here, politesse not being my strong point.

but the Fact remains that dw did not read the article, as is further illustrated by his later comment:

I am grateful to Madame l for adding a word to my French vocabulary. You don't revive a language by teaching it to one child. We each learnt our native language from the community we live in, not just from our mothers.

no problem with the french, mon vieux, there's plenty more where that came from. and most of that came from latin.

you do revive a language by teaching it to a child, that is exactly how it has been done. a cursory internet search on eliezer ben-yehuda might be a good place to start.

if you take the time to actually read the article you may notice that the community is interested in it and some are learning it.

i happen to have been born to a 15 year old wampanoag girl from gay head and raised by jews in the boston area, so excuse me if i find your cavalier attitude ill-informed, pompous and tinged with racism, but i do. and the very idea that you haven't even read the article in question infuriates me. how much did ya pay for your fancy schooling? you got robbed.

don't even get me started on irish. and if you want to call it gaelic, fine, but the irish call it irish.

ayn farkuckt kleinigkeit.

Madame:

Last person to carry on in this joint after a warning ended up in the alley with broken thumbs. Word to the wise. ;-)

To elaborate on Martin's point:

There is nothing sad about the demise of a language.

Funny how you always hear that from people who speak a language which is under no threat of extinction whatsoever. I'm not sure how lirelou would feel should - God forbid! - his mother tongue find itself under threat from Chinese, Sorbian, Lojban, whatever.

Has anybody more than a rough idea of how this language was pronounced? How badly distorted was its syntax etc. by the effort of translating a book which is the product of an utterly alien culture?

Actually, yes Mike, we do.

Collector: Gordon M. Day
Date: May 3 1961
Location: New Bedford, Mass
Speaker: Chief Wild Horse
Nation/language: Wampanoag
Description: Recording of the last speaker of Wampanoag dialect, a medicine man of the Mashpee Division, Sagamore of the New England Federation of Indians, and a representative of the League of North American Indians.

-the product of an utterly alien culture, where broken thumbs are not even commented on. BTW, the country club called, they want your brooks brothers whale pants back.

my apologies, meant David, not Mike, not Evelyn nor Civil. your utterly alien white man names all sound the same, culturally, to me. you don't know how sorry i am.

i suppose i should be thanking you for rekindling my interest in the wampanoag language. do not hesitate to contact me if you need anymore nasty french.

(nique ta mère, BTW, is a french rap group, but i doubt you'd understand them because they've made up a kind of new language utilizing a combination of verlan and different arabic dialects precisely so You can't understand it. ta race may have been a better phrase choice in that instance. bof. the difference between living in the real world and the world of theory is vast.)

Madame, I am at a loss to understand your hostility. No one here is attacking you or your ancestry. Surely we can have a discussion on the value of reviving languages without people getting treated like axe murderers for disagreeing with you.

Yeah, I was just trying to inject a little levity, since the tone seemed way out of step with the content. I guarantee you, madame, your thumbs are perfectly safe.

Since the Europeans arrived in North America, we have tried to wipe out the original inhabitants with slavery,outright genocide,disease,ethnic cleansing,forced assimilation etc. So maybe every child in New england should learn some Wampanoag. And if you don't like it, go back where you came from.

bulbul: "I'm not sure how lirelou would feel should - God forbid! - his mother tongue find itself under threat from Chinese, Sorbian, Lojban, whatever."

In fact, in some parts in the United States, the very presence of Spanish has triggered among the Anglos a hysterical reaction and the very absurd allegation that English is being endangered by Spanish.

ta race may have been a better phrase choice in that instance.

Clarification: On les nique tous! On nique leur race, with r pronounced [ʁ], means "we'll wipe the football field with the other team, no matter what that team's composition" in the proche banlieue.

(And "football" means "soccer" of course.)

As for "useful second language", she'll most likely find Klingon easier than most of the rest of us!

As far as I know, Klingon is based on the Miwok and Costanoan families, which are native languages from California, usually included within the larger Penutian group, which includes languages spoken along the Pacific Coast. Wampanoag I understand to be an Algonquian language from the Atlantic Coast. The two groups have nothing in common and Wampanoag-speaking Mae Alice would have no more of an advantage in learning Klingon than any random sample of speakers of other non-Algonquian languages.

It is true that Algonquian languages have some distant relatives on the West Coast, where a wide variety of language families were once spoken, but Klingon is not linked in any way to those distant relatives of Wampanoag.

Dick Grune's article explores the possibility of a connection between Mutsun (the language Okrand did for his thesis) and Klingon, and rejects it. Klingon is definitely Californian in style, but specific links with Castanoan aren't really there. In particular, the dauntingly arbitrary table of verb agreement suffixes, where subjects and objects are fused, is much more Uralic than anything in North America.

Indivisible affixes that indicate subject and object are found in SAmerica (Aymara and I assume some others).

The two groups have nothing in common

In terms of grammar typology, from the point of view of Standard Average European, they aren't all that dissimilar as far as I know. I didn't mean to imply any deeper similarities, let alone phylogenetic relations.

I didn't mean that Klingon was based exclusively on Miwok and Costanoan. Also, it was not meant to be too foreign and difficult, as it would have been with fused subject-object affixes. Note that the Yokuts language, which is now considered to be closely related to Miwok and Costanoan, lacks the affixes in question and has independent pronouns.