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ᐊᐣᑕᔚᐣᐦᐃ ᐁᐏᒋᑭᐍ ᐅᑕᐱᓇᒪᐣ ᓂᒪᒪ ᐅᑎᔑᑭᔑᐍᐏᐣ ᒷᔦ ᐃᐡᑿᓭᐠ

by adamrmcd on 3/25/22, 9:57 PM with 59 comments

  • by nkurz on 3/25/22, 10:02 PM

    For those less comfortable reading Oji-Cree, CBC has helpfully published a translation in English: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/first-person-roch...

  • by twic on 3/25/22, 10:15 PM

    Wow, Go generics really have got complicated.

  • by __s on 3/25/22, 10:39 PM

    An aunt who teaches Ojibwe was showing me how the alphabet uses symmetries for its phoenetics https://www.kercstore.com/product-page/ojibwe-syllabic-chart...

  • by torstenvl on 3/25/22, 11:38 PM

    I feel like there's a deep deep tragedy in the loss not just of individual languages, but of entire language families.

    While it's sad that a language like Auvergnat will likely die in a generation or two, it almost feels like less of a loss because other Langue d'Oc languages will likely survive (e.g., Gascon probably).

    But the northern (a)nishn[aabe|abe|ini]m(o)w[e|i]n languages (Ojibwe, Oji-Cree, Odawa, Chippewa, etc.) are so much more endangered, have so little learning material, and are fragmented, making a concerted effort to save any one of them almost doomed to failure, let alone all of them.

    I'm not saying linguistic ethnicide is acceptable, just that linguistic genocide is so so much more heartbreaking. An entire line of peoples will lose their connection to their ancestors in just a generation or two.

    My step-father was Odawa. He never spoke it. But I try to study it some, to honor his memory. The Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar and Odawa Language and Legends book are... helpful but hardly sufficient.

  • by robocat on 3/26/22, 12:32 AM

    There is a recording “Rochelle Bragg speaks Oji-Cree”.

    I can hear she speaks it with a massive USA accent, even though I don’t know squat about Oji-Cree. It is weird how we can hear an accent even without knowing anything about a language.

  • by armagon on 3/25/22, 10:22 PM

    Interesting. I've been looking up at setting up Internet-in-a-box for a what-if scenario (ex. what if people can charge their phones but have no internet access), and am amazed that you can download wikipedia in well over a hundred languages.

    I wondered, after getting the key languages spoken here (English being #1 by far) about Blackfoot, but see that there is no version of Wikipedia in that language. I wonder if they have any first nations languages (and yes, I understand that it depends on volunteers writing the articles in those languages, and that they almost certainly speak English better).

  • by legostormtroopr on 3/26/22, 9:44 AM

    I have noticed an unsettling trend in journalism towards self-referential piece. In this article the author refers to "I", "Me" or "My" over 50 times. Despite being on a news site, yhis isn't a journalistic piece - its a blog post that just serves to allow the author to talk about themselves (framed around some topic).

    This article could have been about any topic, and the tone wouldn't change - as the bulk talks about the author themselves.

  • by kderbyma on 3/25/22, 11:22 PM

    I feel like articles like this could really benefit from a translated reader function. allowing one to simultaneously swap between languages and get phrases

  • by timonoko on 3/26/22, 4:55 AM

    "Invented by white christian missionary James Evans around 1840".

    There seems to be no historical background or linguistic reason whatsoever?

    Except there is this one reason: when English- (and French) -speakers made the phonetic writing system for Latin alphabeth, it became batshit crazy and quite unreadable.

  • by mmwelt on 3/26/22, 6:56 AM

  • by trinovantes on 3/25/22, 10:37 PM

    I'm surprised obscure languages like Oji-Cree have unicodes

    As more human languages go extinct, I wonder if people in the future will forget where some unicodes come from and if they will try to repurpose some codes

  • by junon on 3/25/22, 10:37 PM

    This language looks cool as hell. Is it difficult to learn?

  • by fortyseven on 3/26/22, 11:27 AM

    Thought this was about Earthbound at first.

  • by willcipriano on 3/25/22, 11:39 PM

    I for one welcome our alien overlords and want to let them know that I am available if they require any information on humanities weaknesses.