Word by word, tribes begin to find their voice - Seattle Times(California News)
Though the last native speaker of Salinan died almost half a century ago, more and more indigenous people are finding their extinct or endangered tongues, one word or song at a time, thanks to a late linguist and some University of California, Davis, scholars who are working to transcribe his life’s obsession. Sometimes he spent 20 or 30 minutes on one word, saying it over and over until the person he was interviewing agreed he’d gotten the pronunciation correct, said Jack Marr, who met Harrington as a 12-year-old boy and worked as his assistant into his 20s. But the same impulse that made him successful — in many cases his notes provide the only record of long-gone languages — would also confound later efforts to pass the words down to new generations. The Harrington Project was created with the goal of returning the words to those who can imbue them with life again, as well as making the material more accessible to scholars. He has decoded all the material Harrington gathered on his people — more than 6,000 pages — and is now working on information about their linguistic neighbors to the north. More California News
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