Gary Holton
As a documentary linguist my work focuses on the documentation and description of indigenous languages, especially the Dene (Athabascan) languages of Alaska and the non-Austronesian (Papuan) languages of eastern Indonesia. Most of these languages are in danger of disappearing, and their systematic documentation preserves endangered knowledge systems while also contributing to an understanding of the way human languages are structured.
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Phone: (808) 956-3227
Address: 1890 East-West Rd., Moore 563
Honolulu, HI 96822
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Papers by Gary Holton
Here I suggest that this difference in place-naming strategies can be explained in part in terms of differences in the demonstrative systems of the two language families. Both Inuit-Yupik and Dene languages have elaborate systems of words expressing spatial relations, allowing a much finer distinction than is possible with the proximal ‘this’ and distal ‘that’ in English. However, the function of the demonstrative system differs greatly in the two language families. In Inuit-Yupik languages the demonstrative system functions primarily on the local level and have limited application to the larger landscape domain. In Dene languages the demonstrative systems are fundamental to the conceptualization of landscape, playing a key role in place naming strategies."
Proto‒Alor-Pantar vocabulary items and propose an internal subgrouping based on shared innovations. Finally, we compare Alor-Pantar with Papuan languages of Timor and with Trans-New Guinea languages, concluding that there is no lexical evidence supporting the inclusion of Alor-Pantar languages in the Trans-New Guinea family.
Here I suggest that this difference in place-naming strategies can be explained in part in terms of differences in the demonstrative systems of the two language families. Both Inuit-Yupik and Dene languages have elaborate systems of words expressing spatial relations, allowing a much finer distinction than is possible with the proximal ‘this’ and distal ‘that’ in English. However, the function of the demonstrative system differs greatly in the two language families. In Inuit-Yupik languages the demonstrative system functions primarily on the local level and have limited application to the larger landscape domain. In Dene languages the demonstrative systems are fundamental to the conceptualization of landscape, playing a key role in place naming strategies."
Proto‒Alor-Pantar vocabulary items and propose an internal subgrouping based on shared innovations. Finally, we compare Alor-Pantar with Papuan languages of Timor and with Trans-New Guinea languages, concluding that there is no lexical evidence supporting the inclusion of Alor-Pantar languages in the Trans-New Guinea family.
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In addition to these there are a wealth of official names, carefully documented by Orth (1967), which are clearly of Native origin but are improperly spelled. These could benefit greatly by having the Native name included as a variant and displayed on maps in parentheses next to the official name. For example, Talkeetna (K’dalkitnu), could be rendered easily since K’dalkitnu is the sole variant for this name in GNIS. In other cases this approach would be more difficult. GNIS lists 47 variant names for Mt. McKinley, 33 of which appear to be of Native origin, but there is no easy way to determine that Deenaalee is the correct spelling of the Koyukon Athabascan name from which the common name Denali derives. Another situation we find on occasion is a Native-language place name that has been inadvertently assigned to the wrong feature.
Since its founding by state legislation in 1972 the Alaska Native Language Center has worked to develop standardized writing systems for all twenty Native languages in the state, while also compiling place name lists. In this presentation we suggest ways that ANLC could collaborate on Alaskan GNIS entries to make them (a) more effective for public use; and (b) more accurately mirror authentic the native language place names."
This paper presents a tentative typology of kinship classification in the languages of the Alor-Pantar family of eastern Indonesia, drawing on data from three years of collaborative field work. Comparing sibling, cousin, and parents’ sibling classifications across four of these languages reveals a significant degree of variation, even between closely related, neighboring languages. The most elaborated systems reflect a cross-cousin pattern in which siblings and children of parent’s same-sex sibling are classed together and opposed to children of parent’s opposite-sex sibling. Additional distinctions are made based on relative age and relative gender. However, some languages have much less elaborated systems which collapse some of these distinctions. Based on these comparisons it is possible to draw some conclusions about the historical evolution of kinship systems in Alor-Pantar languages, as well as possible language contact scenarios, augmenting recent work in historical phonology of the family (Author et al. 2012).
Finally, this paper discusses two significant challenges which face field workers documenting kinship systems in endangered languages. First, kinship terms must be understood as an interrelating semantic system rather than a set of lexical items. In this sense the documentation of kinship is analogous to the documentation of ethnobiological domains, where it is not just the lexical items but also the underlying taxonomy which is important. Second, ongoing shift from indigenous languages to languages of wider communication, as well as increasing intermarriage between language groups, leads to interference from second languages. Such interference may be difficult to detect when original lexical items have been retained but the kinship system itself has shifted semantically. The paper concludes by suggesting several strategies for overcoming these challenges.
Tanacross is typical of the Athabaskan family in its typological characteristics. There is a relatively small phonemic inventory, and most of the phonemic contrasts are neutralized outside the stem-syllable onset position. The lexicon is relatively small, consisting of perhaps six thousand distinct morphemes. Noun morphology is relatively straightforward, with few active morphological processes. In contrast, verb structure is extremely complex, consisting of a possibly discontinuous root morpheme together with a string of inflectional and derivational affixes which combine via an elaborate system of non- concatenative templatic morphology. The verb word may stand alone as entire utterance. Members of other minor word classes tend to be monomorphemic.
Tanacross exhibits several unique properties which distinguish it from neighboring Athabaskan languages and invite further study. Tanacross is unique among the Alaska Athabaskan languages in having high tone as the reflex of Proto-Athabaskan constriction. In addition, more than any other tonal language in Alaska Tanacross has preserved segmental information lost via apocope through an elaborate system of compound tone. Tanacross also has many unique phonetic features, including the loss of suffix vowels and the devoicing of stem-initial fricatives. Tanacross morphology reflects its transitional status between the (historically) conservative languages of the lower Tanana river and the innovative languages of the Tanana and Yukon uplands.
In this presentation we describe a model by which local, community-based archives can be empowered through partnerships with academic endangered language archives. A collaborative, distributed model allows preservation and access issues to be separated, so that communities can focus on developing an approach to access from the bottom-up. The benefits of this collaborative approach have already been demonstrated in the creation of the first community-based language archive in Alaska (Berez et al. 2012). We present case studies from six different community-based archives which illustrate the range of solutions possible within a community-based model of language archiving. If academic archives are the trunk of the tree, then community-based language archives are the branches which reach out and allow the tree to thrive. Growing these branches is critical to the continued success of endangered language archiving.
References
Austin, Peter. 2011. Who uses digital language archives? Endangered Languages and Cultures [Internet], posted April 29. Online: http://www.paradisec.org.au/blog/2011/04/who-uses-digital-language-archives/. <Accessed 8 August 2013>.
Author. 2014. Mediating language documentation. Language Documentation and Description 12: 37-52.
Berez, Andrea L., Tana Finnesand & Karen Linnell. 2012. C’ek’aedi Hwnax, the Ahtna Regional Linguistic and Ethnographic Archive. Language Documentation and Conservation 6: 237-52.
Bird, Steven & Gary Simons. 2003. Seven dimensions of portability for language documentation and description. Language 79 (3): 557-82.
Dobrin, Lise M. & Author. 2013. The documentation lives a life of its own: The temporal transformation of two endangered language archive projects. Museum Anthropology Review 7 (1-2): 140-54.
Nathan, David. 2006. Thick interfaces: Mobilising language documentation. In J. Gippert, Nikolas P. Himmelmann & Ulrike Mosel (eds.), Essentials of Language Documentation, 363-79. Berlin: Mouton.