From: gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo)
Subject: Re: Language and thought (endangered languages)
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 07:47:53 GMT

I think this issue of preserving endangered languages is one whose time has
really come - and it's a very urgent matter indeed!

In alt.consciousness article <14foheINNimt@agate.berkeley.edu>
	dbucher@ocf.berkeley.edu (Daniel Bucher) writes:

> In article <1992Jul18.171123.4920@kei.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
	jeff@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp writes:

> >...The English language sucks for concrete communication :-) 

> Which is PRECISELY why I and many others are so concerned about the rapid
> extinction of the world's languages...


Following is the text of an article which appeared recently on a mailing list
which I administer.  Professor Bernard, the author, was featured this past
Sunday on the Cable News Network in a brief story about the work he has done
in Oaxaca, Mexico.  He has written a description of another article on the
subject of that work which I will post in a second followup article, which
will contain details on how to obtain the full text of the longer article
from a LISTSERV archive.

For more information on the "Native languages" mailing list, please get in
touch with me (gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us).  To just subscribe, send a message:

	subscribe native.lang Your Name

to "nn-request@gnosys.svle.ma.us"

Gary Trujillo, NativeNet facilitator

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

** Topic: "Preserving Language Diversity" article **
** Written  9:38 am  Mar 21, 1992 by ufruss@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu **

Original-Sender: ufruss@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu (Russell Bernard)

The following article was published in the March, 1992 issue
of Human Organization (the journal of the Society for Applied
Anthropology).

This is an ASCII file. Read words between asterisks as underlined
for emphasis. Other non-ASCII characters are noted in the text (in
ASCII, of course).


                 PRESERVING LANGUAGE DIVERSITY

                       H. Russell Bernard
                   Department of Anthropology
                      University of Florida
                     Gainesville, FL 32611



Introduction

In 1987, Jesus Salinas and I conceived a plan for the development
of a center where Indian people could learn to read and write their
own languages using microcomputers. More importantly, they would be
able to print and publish their own works, in their own languages,
on topics of their own choice. The idea was to make it possible for
Indian people in Mexico to save their languages from extinction.

This paper is about how that center came about, and about how we
hope to extend the work to help preserve thousands of native
languages throughout the world. First, though, I address the issue
of why I believe anthropologists must work to preserve linguistic
diversity.


The Problem

Depending on how you count them, there are between 3000 and 6000
languages spoken in the world today. Only 276 languages, however,
are spoken by a million people or more. <footnote 1> About 80-90%
of all languages are spoken by indigenous peoples like the Zuni,
the Samoans, and the Jivaro. Taken together, all these peoples
comprise less than 10% of the world's population.

In other words, about 80-90% of all linguistic diversity is today
vested in 10% of the world's population. A few native language
communities, like the Aymara and the Tswana, are large and robust.
Most are small and fragile. Languages are vanishing quickly.

Languages have always come and gone. Neither the language of Jesus
nor that of Caesar are spoken today. But languages seem to be
disappearing faster than ever before. My guess is that there are
about 15% fewer languages today than there were in 1500 A.D.

As an anthropologist, I'm alarmed at this prospect. It's not that
I worship language diversity for its own sake. Nor do I want to
preserve a lot of cultural-linguistic groups for my own (or my
colleagues') pleasure of studying them. I'm concerned instead that
humanity itself, the species H. sapiens, may be at evolutionary
risk. The wholesale disappearance of languages, and what I will
argue is the consequent reduction of cultural diversity, may
threaten our survival.

I say "may threaten" because I have no way to test my hunch about
this. But consider: 40,000 years ago, there were no more than 15
million humans in the world (Cohen 1977:54). Today, there are over
5 billion of us. We have occupied the Americas, the string of
smaller Pacific Islands, Australia, New Zealand, and Greenland.
We've adapted to jungles, deserts and the arctic. By any reasonable
measure, H. sapiens sapiens is an evolutionary success story.

It is practically an article of faith in anthropology that the
adaptive success of our species was due to "culture." Culture
implies ideas and the communication of ideas through language.
Linguistic diversity, then, is at least the correlate of (though
not the cause of) diversity of adaptational ideas - ideas about
transferring property (or even the idea of property itself), curing
illness, acquiring food, raising children, distributing power, or
settling disputes. <footnote 2>

By this reasoning, any reduction of language diversity diminishes
the adaptational strength of our species because it lowers the pool
of knowledge from which we can draw. We know that the reduction of
biodiversity today threatens all of us. I think we are conducting
an experiment to see what will happen to humanity if we eliminate
"cultural species" in the world. This is a reckless experiment. If
we don't like the way it turns out, there's no going back.


Tribal Languages Remain Unwritten

Before 1500 A.D., reading was an extremely rare skill. Since
Johannes Gutenberg's improvements in the printing press, however,
literacy and printing have been spreading around the world (see
Eisenstein 1979 for a review of the effects of printing on the
West). Still, more than 500 years after Gutenberg, most languages
of the world remain unwritten - without any literary tradition,
without books.

It's not for lack of writing systems. Virtually all indigenous
languages have writing systems, usually alphabets. Some alphabets
are more and some are less standardized, but missionaries and
linguists over the past 500 years have seen to it that every extant
language can be written.

A few indigenous literary traditions have flourished in the past or
are flourishing now (Zulu, Xhosa, and Luo in Africa; Cherokee and
Navajo in North America; Quechua and Aymara in South America, to
name a few), and a great many peoples have two or three books in
their native language: a formal grammar, a dictionary, and a
translation of the Bible.

Still, what most native languages lack is native authors who write
books in their own native languages. They lack popular literacy,
where people read newspapers and books regularly and write letters
to one another as a matter of course. I argue that without popular
literacy, all but a few such languages will soon disappear. And
when nonwritten languages disappear, they disappear forever.
<footnote 3>


Bilingual Education and Writing

There are, to be sure, many bilingual education programs in the
world. In those programs, native children learn to read and write
in both their first language and in the major national language of
their country. In Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia, and
the Pacific Islands, governments spend millions of dollars every
year on such programs. In Mexico alone, there are 56 Indian
languages, spoken by 8-10 million people, and there are bilingual
(Indian/Spanish) school programs in half of those languages.

In Canada, there are 70 Indian and Eskimo languages, with active
literacy training programs in Cree, Ojibwa, Montagnais, and Inuit
(Eskimo), among others. (Burnaby, 1985, offers an excellent
overview of how native writing is taught in Canada.) There are
nearly 38 American Indian languages still spoken by more than 1000
people each in the U.S. There are bilingual education programs in
most major Indian Reservation schools.

These programs do not produce popular literacy, however - at least
not in the native language. Typically, children learn to read
primers and, in church-related programs, the Bible in their native
language. They learn special alphabets and spend hundreds of hours
of their childhood composing simple sentences, but they don't grow
up to write books in that language, and the tribal languages of the
world remain largely unwritten. Bilingual education programs do not
produce true native literacy, because they are not, in general,
meant to produce true native literature. <footnote 4>


Why Tribal Languages Remain Unwritten

There are several reasons why bilingual education programs have
failed to produce either popular literacy or sustained traditions
of native literature:

1) Many people who speak nonwritten languages believe that by
giving up their language - by not speaking it at home - they will
impart some economic advantage to their children. They reason that
the minority language creates an indelible mark that prevents
people from getting jobs in the economic mainstream. <footnote 5>

There is some truth to this reasoning. Native peoples are almost
everywhere discriminated against when it comes to competing for
jobs in national economies. Giving up one's language and culture,
however, does not automatically bring economic benefits. I'll have
more to say about this later.

2) In some cases there are competing alphabets. People argue about
which alphabet to use and don't get down to the serious business of
writing. Different alphabets are often the result of missionaries
from different faiths or denominations competing for the allegiance
of native people. I have seen competing interest groups (both
native and foreign) battle for decades over how best to represent
a particular sound in a particular language.

3) Even when there is just one accepted alphabet, it may be too
complex. I have seen alphabets so unwieldy they cripple the efforts
of native people who want to write native language books.

This problem is particularly common in alphabets devised to write
tone languages. Euroamerican missionaries and linguists find it
next to impossible to read tone languages correctly unless tones
are marked. They make up cumbersome writing systems, and insist
that tone be marked. Then they convince native people that the
language cannot be written "correctly" unless tones are marked.

Native speakers of tone languages usually don't need to see tones
marked in writing. <footnote 6> They discern the correct tones from
the context. Consider the sentence: "The man /bit/ /sit/ /kit/
/lit/ his lip" and suppose you had to choose one of the words in
brackets. No native speaker of English would fail this test.
Similarly, native speakers of a tone language can usually choose
the right meaning of a word in context.

We could, of course, devise more ambiguous examples, such as: "The
child was quite /mad/ /bad/." This is the sort of example used, in
bilingual teaching materials around the world, to convince native
people that they have to mark tones. But people rarely have to make
choices among such ambiguities in isolated sentences. Instead,
sentences and thoughts occur in the context of paragraphs and whole
texts.

Even if ambiguous sentences do create problems once in a while,
that's a small price to pay for the ability to write. In my
experience, it comes down to this: if native people have to write
tone languages by marking all the tones, they simply don't write at
all. I'll return to this later, too.

4) It costs too much to print books. Despite these problems, there
are native speakers of tribal languages who want to write books.
There are even some who have written lengthy texts. Those books
remain unpublished because the costs of modern printing technology
are too high.

If a speaker of, say, Mixtec, in Mexico, wrote a 200-page
manuscript in that language, no commercial printer could afford to
produce the book. It would require a complete new family of type.
Even if individual characters could be manufactured (an expensive
item), no typesetter could understand the text and the proofs would
be riddled with errors. Correcting those errors would take a lot of
time and expense.

A realistic print run for a book in Mixtec might come to three or
four hundred copies. The cost per book, assuming 150 pages of text
would be around $8.00, just for photoreproduction and the least
expensive binding. That figure leaps to about $15.00 when the costs
of type setting and editing are included. That's about 45,000
Mexican pesos, or two days' wages for a laborer in rural areas of
the country.


Microcomputers and Native Literacy

Beginning in 1971, I taught Jesus Salinas Pedraza, an ^Na:h^nu
Indian from the state of Hidalgo in Mexico, to read and write his
own language. (For ^Na:h^nu in this ASCII file, read "upper case
enye, a-umlaut, h, lower case enye, u.) <footnote 7> We used a
modified version of an alphabet that had been developed by
missionary linguists (from the Summer Institute of Linguistics)
some years before.

During the 1970s, under support from the National Science
Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Salinas
wrote a description of his own, ^Na:h^nu , culture. I translated
and annotated his ethnography and entered the text into a mainframe
word processor. Two bilingual (^Na:h^nu -English) books resulted
from that effort. One was a volume of folk tales (Bernard and
Salinas 1976), and the other was a volume on the ethnography of the
^Na:h^nu  people (Salinas and Bernard 1978).

In order to use the mainframe word processor, I had to make some
adjustments. The existing alphabet contained several symbols that
did not appear on a standard terminal keyboard. So, for example,
the letter  in ^Na:h^nu  sounds something like the "aw" in the
word "paw." That sound is written with a character that looks like
a backwards c in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Since the
letter c is not needed in ^Na:h^nu , I used it to represent the
"aw" sound.

The problem was that Salinas and other ^Na:h^nu  bilingual
educators didn't like the compromised writing system that I'd
concocted. I thought it would be easy for people to use whatever
letters were available on the IBM keyboard to represent the sounds
of their particular language. I was annoyed when Salinas and other
^Na:h^nu  educators balked at using the standard IBM keyboard to
write their language. I insisted that they adjust their needs to
the available technology. They insisted that the technology should
serve their needs, not the other way around.

They were absolutely right, but it was only 1981. The then-current
wisdom in linguistics was that writing systems for previously
nonwritten languages should be constructed from characters
available on standard keyboards. The idea, of course, was to make
writing systems accessible (Fishman, 1977:xiii). Word processors
were still pretty clumsy. Hardly anyone thought about using them to
write Spanish or French, much less the exotic, nonwritten languages
of the world.

A couple of early word processors for the Apple II series allowed
the user to build new characters that would appear on the screen,
and print them exactly as they appeared on the screen. One of those
word processors, called, appropriately, *Gutenberg*, also had its
own programming language that gave the user control over page
layout, and it took advantage of the downloading capacity of the
early Apple dot matrix printers to permit the use of multiple type
fonts. The Apple II/Gutenberg system of the early 1980s made it
possible (with a lot of effort) to do basic desktop publishing.

I used that system to design a ^Na:h^nu  word processor and taught
Salinas to use it. The system contained all the characters that
Salinas and his colleagues had asked for, and Salinas wrote an
ethnography of more than 250,000 words on the ^Na:h^nu  word
processor. The annotated translation of that ethnography appeared
in 1989 (Bernard and Salinas 1989).

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of our being able to
produce the ^Na:h^nu  alphabet on the screen. Suppose you want to
produce the character U. It's not in ASCII, but you can still
program any reasonably sophisticated word processor to construct
that character.

First, create a macro so that striking ^u (control u) produces the
string u$@ on the screen. Second, define the dollar sign ($) as the
ASCII character for the backspace, and define the ampersand (@) as
the ASCII character for underline. The macro would be interpreted
during printing to produce the underlined u.

This works, of course, but it is aesthetically unpleasing. It is so
unpleasing, in fact, that people won't use it unless they have to.
(For a long time in the evolution of word processing, American
programs required the use of this clumsy, ugly procedure even for
writing Spanish and French.) Using Gutenberg, Salinas could write
the special characters of ^Na:h^nu  directly to the screen in 1981.
By 1984, he was so comfortable writing ^Na:h^nu  on the Apple II
that I began to consider how we could extend the technology to
others.


Extending the Technology to Other Languages in Mexico

That's how we came, in 1987, to develop a plan for a center where
Indian people could learn to read and write and publish books in
their own languages using microcomputers. The center is sponsored
by four organizations: The National Directorate for Indian
Education (the part of Mexico's Ministry of Education in charge of
bilingual, Indian-Spanish education programs); the Interamerican
Indian Institute; the Center for Advanced Studies in Social
Anthropology (CIESAS); and the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Florida.

The native literacy center began operation in August 1988 at the
Oaxaca, Mexico headquarters of CIESAS. The head of CIESAS in
Oaxaca, is Salomon Nahmad. The literacy center has received funding
from the Jessie Ball du Pont Foundation and a grant of equipment
from Apple Computer, Inc. Salinas runs the center, together with
Josefa Gonzalez, a Mixtec Indian from the state of Oaxaca. (Seven
language families are represented in the state of Oaxaca, with 16
major Indian languages spoken by more than a million people.)

In the first phase of the project (which ended in May 1991),
Indians applied to spend up to three months at the literacy center.
The trainees were mostly bilingual school teachers. They were
already literate in Spanish, so they needed only to transfer the
technology of literacy to the creation of documents in their
previously nonwritten languages. They found this very easy to do,
once they learned to use a word processor that produced the
characters they needed.

In other words, Mixtecs learned to use a Mixtec-Spanish word
processor; Chinantecs learned to use a Chinantec-Spanish word
processor; and so on. While at the center, the Indian teachers
produced a chunk of original writing (prose or poetry) on a topic
of their own choosing (ethnography, biography, etc.).

In the second phase of the project, now underway, those literary
works are being edited, published, and distributed to the people of
the various language communities. There are plans to select a few
of the works for expansion, translation into Spanish, and
publication in bilingual editions for wider distribution.

Even now, the Oaxaca native literacy project relies on the old
Gutenberg software and the Apple II series hardware, but change is
coming. In the current, second phase of the project, we are setting
up a complete desktop publishing center, based on IBM- compatible
hardware, capable of handling all the various characters needed.
<footnote 8>

So far, 36 people, representing seven different Mexican languages,
have trained at the Oaxaca native literacy center. They have
produced works in ^Na:h^nu , Mixtec, Chatino, Amuzgo, Chinantec,
and Mazatec. Other books in Tzotzil and Zapotec are in the works.
In every case, the trainees wrote directly in their own languages.
In the next stage of the project, the authors-teachers will use
their books to teach adults and children of their home regions to
read.

The microcomputer has *not* made it possible for most Indians in
Mexico to afford books. It has made it clear, however, that many
native people want to write books. People everywhere want to read.
Since there is no more potent force for literacy than an author
(who quite naturally wants others to read his or her work), it
follows that if we want to help people become literate we should
help as many of them as possible become authors.


Extending the Technology to South America

In April 1989, Salinas and I presented a demonstration of our work
at the meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. Norman Whitten, Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Illinois, offered to help bring this new technology
to Ecuador. During the summer and fall of 1989, E. Chango, a
trilingual (Shwara-Quichua-Spanish) school teacher from Ecuador
spent three months at the center in Oaxaca. Salinas and Gonzalez
taught Chango using the common medium of Spanish, just as they have
taught Mexican speakers of Chinantec to write Chinantec.

Chango was supported by the Sacha Runa Foundation. During his stay,
he produced a 50-page text, in Ecuadorean Quichua, about Shwara
culture. (Quichua is spoken by about 5 million people in Ecuador.
It is different from Quechua, which is spoken by about 6 million
people in Peru and Bolivia.) In 1990, according to Whitten
(personal communication), Chango acquired a computer system of his
own in Ecuador and began teaching others to read and write Quichua
and Shwara.


Extending the Technology to Africa

In July 1988, Salinas and I presented a demonstration of our work
at the XIIth International Congress of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences held in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. Paul Nchoji Nkwi,
head of anthropology at the University of Yaounde, Cameroon,
suggested that the technology might be used to help the Kom people
of Cameroon to write books in their language, too.

The Kom kingdom is part of the North West Province of Cameroon, an
area formerly controlled by the British. Kom is spoken by about
127,000 people and Nkwi is himself a Kom. Almost all Kom people are
bilingual in English and Kom, and all educated Kom people are fully
literate in English. According to Nkwi, many Kom people would read
Kom books - if any were available.

Nkwi and I applied to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research for funds, and in August 1989, I spent two
weeks training five speakers of Kom to use a microcomputer and to
produce text in their native language. The five participants in the
two-week course included two bilingual (Kom-English) school
teachers, a recently graduated lawyer from the University of
Yaounde, a graduate student of anthropology, and a Catholic priest.



The Tone Problem

Like most nonwritten languages, Kom has an alphabet, but it has
little else in the way of an orthography. An orthography is a set
of rules for writing a language. English orthography, for example,
consists of an alphabet plus a massive set of conventions for
spelling words in the language, another set of conventions for
syllabification of words, another for punctuation, and so on.

All those orthographic rules have developed out of a large body of
literature in English. To get an idea of how large the set of
orthographic conventions is for, say American English, think of
Webster's International Dictionary, where the conventions are
listed.

Furthermore, there are different conventions for different dialects
of English. For example, "labor" is spelled "labour" in Britain;
"night" is spelled "nite" in tabloid newspapers in the U.S. Rules
for placement of commas and quotation marks vary from one
English-speaking country to another.

Indeed, conventions for spelling and punctuation change within one
country over any reasonably long time, as authors of various
literatures take liberties with this and that rule and as the
public accepts or disposes of the changes. Until recently,
Americans used a circumflex-o in the word "role"; it's gone now.
some British publishers still use it. The c-cedilla in "facade" is
almost gone, too, and other changes are going on all the time.

Still, the most basic part of any orthography is the set of
characters that are used conventionally to write a particular
language - its alphabet. The first alphabet for Kom was developed
by German missionaries in the 1880s. Various other religious and
secular groups contributed over the years to the evolution of the
currently favored Kom alphabet.

The five participants in the Kom language writing project were all
familiar with the current alphabet (though none of them had ever
written a substantial text in Kom). The task was to transfer their
skill in writing English to writing Kom, using the alphabet that
they knew.

There was an immediate problem, however. Kom is a tone language,
with three tones. As I noted earlier, native speakers of most tone
languages do not need to see tones in order to read a text
correctly. Nonnative speakers of English complain bitterly about
how hard it is to pronounce words that are written in English. "How
does one know where to put the stress on a word?" they ask. Native
speakers have some difficulty with this as children, but adults do
not need to see stress marked in writing in order to read English
fluently. <footnote 9>

Spanish is often mentioned as an example of a "rational" writing
system. For the most part, the five vowel letters /a e i o u/
represent just five distinct sounds, and the accents in Spanish
tell the reader where to put the stress on words that do not have
predictable stress. Words in Spanish that end in r, for example,
are normally stressed on the final syllable; there is no need to
mark stress with an accent unless that rule is violated.

Today, many Spanish writers are leaving out the accent marks. Will
the convenience that this represents to writers and to publishers
overcome the force of tradition? Maybe not, but native speakers of
Spanish clearly do not need to see accents in order to read their
language fluently. Spanish-speaking scholars around the world who
communicate by electronic mail are writing messages without
accents, since electronic mail systems (like IBM's Bitnet, used by
many academics around the world) simply do not permit accents.
<footnote 10>

The Kom speakers in the Cameroon project learned in school that
they had to mark the tones in their writing of Kom if they wanted
others to be able to read their work. I programmed a character set
that included all the vowels with the tones, and taught the
participants how to access those characters. The problem was, of
course, that the system was cumbersome. Each sound required its own
character.

For example, if the sound /a/ can be pronounced in high, or low, or
rising tone, then you need three different characters on a keyboard
to represent that fact. Multiply that by all the vowels that can
take different tones (including the vowel u: [u-umlaut] in Kom,
pronounced much as the u: [u-umlaut] in German), and you can see
the problem: to type Kom on a computer keyboard, you would have to
learn the placement of dozens of extra keys. And most of those
extra keys are going to be hard to access (control-i, for example,
or even control-shift-i).

By the third day of the two-week session, all five of the
participants had abandoned the tones. One of the school teachers
insisted to the end that the tones should be marked; that is, he
felt it was somehow more correct to do so.

There is no argument against this position, any more than there is
an argument against those Spanish speakers who reject the idea of
giving up accent marks. Tradition is its own explanation and it
must be respected. But the simple fact is that two weeks after we
had begun, those five Kom speakers had produced a corpus of 25,000
words of *casual*, *adult*, *literate* Kom.

It was *casual* literature: by the end of the two weeks, each
participant would turn on the computer in the morning and just
start typing Kom without hesitation. Anything he or she could say
they could write.

It was *adult* literature: it was not the sort of thing one sees in
school primers ("Paul's father is going to the field to plant
corn"), but was instead composed of complex sentences.

It was *literate* literature: it was not a bunch of disconnected
sentences of the sort one finds in reading tutorials. It was
flowing Kom text that ran on for pages and pages, was organized
around some theme (the lawyer, for example, had recently married
and wrote about customary Kom marriage contracts), and had
something to say.

All five participants in the group read one another's texts. At the
end of the two weeks, the group held a special ceremony to which
two dozen other Kom people were invited. The priest wrote a speech,
in Kom, without any marked tones, describing the group's
experiences over the preceding two weeks. One of the school
teachers delivered that speech, in unhesitating locution, after one
preliminary reading.

The evidence, so far, then, is that Kom people do not need to mark
tones in their writing any more than we need to mark stress or
"rationalize" English spelling. We can, in other words, tolerate a
lot of ambiguity in our writing systems. Word processing made it
possible to test this assertion about the marking of tones in Kom
as it had, in fact, in Mexico earlier. (There are many examples of
how much ambiguity human beings can tolerate in their writing
systems. Modern Hebrew is written entirely without marking vowels.)



Word Processing and Other Orthographic Conventions

Word processing also made it possible for the Kom people to short
cut the process of convention building in the rest of their
orthography. At one point in the two-week training session, I right
justified one of the Kom texts, just to see what it looked like,
and the participants asked to learn how to do that. This led to
their developing various rules of punctuation. Right-hand
justification looks attractive, but if a language uses long words,
then there are inevitably big, ugly spaces in right-justified text.


The cure for those spaces is the clever use of hyphens. The user
right justifies the text and looks at the spaces in each line. He
or she then decides a) whether a line has too many spaces, and, if
it does, b) exactly how to hyphenate the first word of the
following line. When the word is hyphenated and the paragraph is
rejustified, the spaces on the offending line are filled in. The
next line may now have offending spaces, and so the process is
repeated, all the way through the text.

The Kom participants in the course worked together on putting the
hyphens into one text. At each line they discussed how to hyphenate
certain words, and whether some words should be hyphenated at all.
In some cases, they decided that long words were really composed of
two stand-alone words. They separated these words rather than
hyphenate them. Taking the development of English orthography as a
historical benchmark, decades of convention building were squeezed
into those discussions about how to hyphenate Kom words in order to
achieve the prettiest right- justified output possible.


Making Dictionaries

This raises a final point regarding the uses of computers in the
preservation of previously nonwritten languages. As any language
acquires a corpus of literature, it acquires the basis for a
growing, context-sensitive dictionary. The first edition of
Webster's dictionary of American English was a fraction of the size
of the latest edition. That dictionary grew to its enormous present
size because the printing presses of the U.S. have churned out so
much literature in the last two hundred years. Generations of
dictionary builders have combed that literature, searching for
newly coined words, new uses for old words, and word obsolescences
as well.

By contrast, it is common for a fieldworking linguist to produce a
dictionary of perhaps 5000 words after a decade of studying a
nonwritten language. <footnote 11> Many tribal languages are still
without good dictionaries. At a minimum, the 25,000-word corpus of
literature that the Kom group produced in two weeks contains 2000
unique words. We can now use a program that collects the unique
words in a text, alphabetizes those words, and presents them on a
screen for input of the information needed in a dictionary database
(part of speech, plural form, conjugations, etc.).


Discussion

My experience with these projects leads me to two conclusions.

1) Teaching people to read primers and Bibles does not produce
authors; it produces readers. Printing presses and publishing
houses produce authors. This rule is no different today for
nonliterate languages than it was in late medieval times in Europe
(see Eisenstein 1979, Davis 1981).

2) Teaching a few highly motivated people to write and print their
own books can help many people become literate. Authors want others
to read what they have written and are anxious to help people learn
to do so.

Between 1940-1958, Navajo literature and newspapers began to
appear, but Navajos themselves were not authors of books and
articles in Navajo (Young 1977:469). Programs to promote Navajo
were implemented at several universities (Northwestern and MIT, for
example).

These programs, along with the demonstration school at Rough Rock
and Tribal Youth Conferences fostered pride in Navajo culture
(ibid). Navajo authors began to write books in Navajo. More and
more Navajos speak Navajo these days, rather than fewer and fewer.
I think this is related to the increasing presence of Navajo
written literature.


What Can We Do?

The technology of printing is too expensive to make publication of
books in most native languages commercially attractive.
Microcomputers and desktop publishing reduce the cost of
publication, but this technology is still more than most native
language communities can afford.

On the other hand, this technology is not too expensive for
government agencies, private development agencies, foundations that
support literacy training, missionary groups, and local community
self-help groups. The technology can even be supplied by
individuals: economically successful native people who may want to
help local schools, anthropologists and linguists.

There are some objections. Clearly, when the choice is between food
and computers, the computers must wait. But anthropologists (and
missionaries) are not usually faced with such choices.

Some may also argue that insisting on the importance of written
literature may make native people "disdain their own discourse"
(Verne 1981:302). One response to this objection is that, while
both the written and the oral word offer exciting possibilities, in
order to gain the power of literacy we must give up the beauty and
power of the oral world. "We have to die to continue living" (Ong
1982:15).

Both arguments are wrong. While literacy is today a correlate of
more technologically developed peoples, it is debatable whether
literacy causes some kind of "great divide" among cultures of the
world. Goody (1977:18; see also Goody 1986) takes the strong
position that acquisition of literacy transforms the nature of
cognitive processes, as does Ong (1982:15), but other researchers
question this conclusion (see Finnegan 1988, Scribner and Cole
1981).

Moreover, oral traditions remain strong in the most literate
societies. People pay a lot of money to see a Broadway play, and
while the script may exist somewhere as a written document, it has
no relevance to most theater-goers whose appreciation of the
performance comes from exposure to an oral and visual experience.

The same can be said for movies, television shows, and country
music. There are differences in spontaneously generated works of
music and theater and works that are rehearsed from scripts. But
the oral/visual performance traditions remain strong even in the
most technologically advanced societies.

Even if literacy does cause some kind of fundamental change in the
human condition, it is extreme hubris to conclude that, while this
transformation has happened to us, it should not happen to still-
preliterate peoples.

The critical argument, however is this: even if literacy causes
some irreversible change in thought and culture, it is better to
preserve language diversity than to preserve orality.

In the end, it comes to that. There were 260 Aboriginal languages
in Australia, but only 40 or 50 were in daily use in the 1970s by
just 40,000 speakers (Wurm 1981:23). <footnote 12> In the Americas,
hundreds of languages have become extinct since contact with
Europeans, and many more have only a few elderly speakers left. Our
humanistic interest demands that we respond to these facts. Nothing
less than the richness of human knowledge is at stake.

If the humanistic perspective is too impractical, and if the
species-survival argument too hypothetical, then consider the
material implications of language-and-politics events in India,
Belgium, Canada, Lithuania, and Estonia. Apparently, people
everywhere understand that cultural uniqueness - ethnicity -
reinforces their claim to a share of political power, land, jobs,
and other resources in ethnically heterogeneous states. A unique
language is a powerful force in legitimating those claims.

Neither literacy nor a unique language is always a key to
development, of course. Eastman (1983:86) shows how promoting
native languages may be used to deny people access to resources.
She points out that in South Africa, many people are given primary
instruction in their native languages (Xhosa, Zulu), and then
denied further education. Without mastery of English and Afrikaans,
native people have no access to those in power, nor even to one
another.

More typical, however, is the case of some islands off the west
coast of Ireland. According to O'Brien (1981:88), the people there
complained in 1977 that they were receiving less state funds
because they were English speakers. People of Gaelic-speaking
islands, they said, who were in similar social and economic
circumstances, were receiving more.

This case is particularly interesting because it involves a state
that had taken an official stand in favor of developing an
ancestral tongue. The efforts to push for the use of Gaelic in
Ireland have been less successful than hoped for by language
planners; hence the use of the promise of general state revenues to
promote the language.

Finally, consider the recent case of a group of Mexican Indians who
sued a power company. The company had received funding from an
international development agency to build a hydroelectric
generator. This required building a dam and the resulting lake in
back of the dam was due to flood out thousands of acres of the
Indians' ancestral lands. The power company offered to pay for the
land, of course, and the government appealed to the Indians to
accept the offer.

The government argued that it was the Indians' patriotic duty, as
Mexicans, to accept the offer and help provide needed electricity
for development of the nation. The Indians argued that the offer
was inadequate, but they also said that they wanted their land so
that they could retain their identity. The lawyers for the power
company noted that only a few elderly people in the Indian
community spoke the Indian language anymore and that none of the
younger generation was learning the language.

How, the lawyers asked, did the Indians expect to convince anyone
of their claim to special ethnic status if they didn't speak their
own language? How, indeed?



Acknowledgments

This paper has benefitted from advice and encouragement from George
Bedell, Kenneth Hale, Eric Hamp, Marvin Harris, Dell Hymes, Allan
Lomax, Nancy Lurie, Duane Metzger, Salomon Nahmad, Jack Roberts,
Scott Robinson, and Oswald Werner. My thanks to the Jessie Ball du
Pont Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research, and Apple Computer, Inc. for their support of the
projects reported here. My thanks to the National Museum of
Ethnology, Osaka, Japan, for support during the writing of parts of
this essay.


Footnotes

1. My thanks to Joseph Grimes for the data on which this count was
made.

2. There is an old debate, of course, about whether people think
different thoughts *because* they speak different languages. My own
position on this debate is that people who speak one language can
grasp new thoughts that happen to originate with speakers of
another language, no matter what the two languages happen to be.
Whatever one's position in this debate, though, it is a matter of
fact that language diversity is a correlate of cultural diversity.

3. A very interesting case of casual, popular literacy without
printing or books is found among the Vai people of Liberia. The Vai
use a locally invented syllabary for keeping ledgers and for
writing letters. They do not, apparently, produce literature with
the script (Cole and Scribner 1981).

4. In the rest of this paper I use the term "literature" to mean
only written documents. Oral literature is neither less valuable
nor less interesting than written literature. But it is not a
substitute for written literature in my argument regarding language
preservation, so I exclude it from further discussion.

5. Many Americans will recognize this pattern from their own youth,
when their parents forbid the use of anything but English in their
homes. Price (1979:41) cites a modern example where the women of
Bagnols-sur-Ceze in France deny they ever heard of Provencal and
forbid men from introducing it into family conversations. The women
are concerned that their children won't learn proper French if
Provencal is encouraged.

6. Venezky (1977:39) notes that in 1930, the International African
Institute concluded that tones could be omitted from African
languages when the context made it clear what the writer wanted to
convey. De Francis (1950) concluded that the ambiguity that would
result from not marking tones in Chinese would be small enough to
leave them out of any alphabetic writing system.

In 1958, however, the Pinyin romanization of Chinese was adopted by
the People's Republic of China. That system did include four tones.
Nonnative speakers of Chinese, of course, welcomed the marking of
tones. I know of no tests, however, to see whether native speakers
of any Chinese language would require tone marking in an alphabetic
system.

7. The ^Na:h^nu  are generally known in the literature as the
Otomi. The name "Otomi" has negative connotations in Mexican
Spanish. Many ^Na:h^nu  people today prefer to be known by the name
they call themselves.

8. 286-level technology is now inexpensive and the latest version
of Word Perfect allows users to define any character they need for
their text (although one can only see the characters on the screen
in "view document" mode). Other software is also becoming available
for handling special screen and print fonts, and as the WINDOWS
environment becomes more popular, there will be many solutions to
the problem of specialized screen fonts.

9. This does not mean that English spelling is the best it could
possibly be, only that it is not as bad as myths would make it.

10. Lack of the enye /$/ is another matter. Spanish speakers with
whom I have electronic mail communication use either /ny/ or /n^/.
This avoids embarrassing situations like having to write /ano/,
"ass" for /a$o/ "year."

11. This is because the corpus of text that a linguist collects is
oral. In any language, most people get along with 5000 words or
less (Ong 1982:107). So a linguist who transcribes everyday speech,
or perhaps a few folk tales, is not likely to run into more than
about 5000 words. A large body of folk tales is likely to contain
many more words.

12. There are quite a few Aboriginal authors in Australia, and they
feel the loss of their ancestral languages deeply (see Davis and
Hodge, 1985: pages 11, 25). They make their living writing in
English. Unless they write books in their ancestral languages,
those languages are doomed to quick extinction.

Should Aboriginal authors, therefore, feel obliged to write in
Aboriginal languages? Absolutely not. The Oaxaca project
demonstrates that there are many, many potential authors among
people who speak languages that have no literary tradition.
Providing many people with the tools to write and print books will
not guarantee language survival, but it will make language survival
possible.



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--
    Gary S. Trujillo                            gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts              {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst
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