Trigger warning: Old Former English teacher talks about language.
I'm making a New Year's Resolution:
I will learn how to pronounce some words in Lekwengwen, the dialect of the traditional people of theVictoria area. You see we have a relatively new library here and no one (almost no one) knows how to say its name. We call it "the James Bay library (or "libree" in Canadianese)" although the sign above the front facade says "sxʷeŋ'xʷəŋ taŋ'exw" and if you get serious you can find out that it's pronounced "s-hweng hw-ung tongue-oo-hw". Even that transliteration looks (and sounds) like a mouthful, and finding a site that gives a rendition to listen to is not easy. Try this: sweng hungkh tonkh and you'll be close enough.
One cranky person posted a comment somewhere that it was (expletive) ironic that a library was given a name in an indigenous language that didn't have a (expletive) written language. S/He was uninformed as well as cranky. If the records of early missionaries and explorers were anything to go by, indigenous peoples across the continent had literacy rates in the 90% range with a variety of written forms of different languages. This was while European settlers had literacy of about 40%. Of course I'm not an historical linguist and so I have to rely on Ma Google and some texts from my own sxʷeŋ'xʷəŋ taŋ'exw. Here's what I found.
Languages are what makes us human. We can transcend time and distance by codifying our thoughts in sounds and then representing those sounds in some tangible way that others can decode days later and miles away. Simply put, we can talk and write. That's the easiest way for most of us to conceptualize the process. But if by "writing" we think only of our English alphabetic system, we are really shortchanging the creative abilities of homo sapiens.
Chinese has more speakers than English. They use characters for concepts. Taken together, the Asiatic (Sinetic) languages are much greater in number of speakers than English. Beverly and I took Mandarin lessons from a friend of hers who for many years had been the principal of the Chinese school in Victoria and learned some of the tonal variations on items in the syllabic or pinyan forms of that language.
For Instance, the one syllable "ma" could be pronounced with rising, falling, dipping or flat intonation each utterance denoting a different thing. Mà (falling sound) was "to scold". Má (rising tone) was "hemp". Mā (flat sound) was "mother". Mã (dipping sound) was "horse". Speakers of Mandarin as a first language learned it as easily as our kids learned how to sing "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"with the corret intonation even if it drove us parents batty. As a side note, our lessons in Mandarin did us little good as the area of China in which we were teaching was a Cantonese-speaking district. Ah well, it kept us from calling anyone's mom a horse.
We have just returned from a trip to Egypt and I had some interesting conversations with our guide whose degree in Egyptology included a proficiency in translating hieroglyphs. I got a brief lesson in how modern Arabic owed much in its form to the pictographic script of those precursors. It looked like a case of make a picture to represent a sound and then use the picture so often that the lines become simplified into what we call a "letter". But not always.
In some languages that picture represents a syllable and some would argue that makes for a much more efficient system than one that relies on the pronunciation variations of twenty-six letters. One 19th century genius from the Cherokee nation south of our border was such an individual.
OK, some of you are bored and just want out. Go have your coffee.
But if you want to know more about that Cherokee, Sequoya by name, hang in here a bit. I'll italicize the following because it's an adaptation of a couple of Wikipedia entries.
In 1821, Sequoyah completed his Cherokee syllabary, enabling reading and writing in the Cherokee language. One of the first North American Indigenous groups to gain a written language, the Cherokee Nation officially adopted the syllabary in 1825, helping to unify a nation. By 1830, 90% of Cherokees were literate in their own language and within a quarter-century, the Cherokee Nation had reached a literacy rate of almost 100%, surpassing that of surrounding European-American settlers.
In Canada, Cree syllabics were created in 1840 by James Evans, a missionary who was inspired by the success of Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary. The local Cree quickly took to this new writing system and used it to write messages on tree bark out on hunting trails far from the mission. Evans believed that it was well adapted to Native Canadian languages, particularly the Algonquian languages with which he was familiar.
Evans attempted to secure a printing press and new type to publish materials in this writing system; however, he faced resistance from colonial authorities. The Hudson's Bay Company, refused to import a press for him, believing that native literacy was something to be discouraged, and so Evans constructed his own press and type and began publishing in syllabics.
And, Sequoya simply ("simple" for him because he was a genius) codified and popularized a syllabic writing system. But, and this is significant, there were many reports (the Jesuit Relations, a history of their time in Canada among them) of Indigenous peoples of North America using scripts and pictographs in the 1600s. If a nation has a word for "writing" and has different grammatical forms for it, that is a strong indication that they have a written form of their language. They did; it had; it's true.
We think that pictographs on the rocks around our Great Lakes are interesting archaeological items from ancient times, but the times weren't all that ancient. Hieroglyphc writing systems were in use by indigenous peoples from the arctic to Mesoamerica and from eastern to western coastlines. Why didn't they survive?
Most (let's say all) of the articles I consulted noted that there was a definite tendency among colonizing nations to discredit those forms of writing, labelling them as "pre-writing" and valorizing alphabetic script as true writing. This granted a sense of superior culture to the European colonizers and justified their subjugation and displacement of aboriginal peoples. And, because those writing systems were mostly recorded on biodegradable surfaces such as bark or skins, they didn't survive.
This is not going to be one long "mea culpa" for all of the wrongs visited upon a continent's original inhabitants. Stuff happens and you didn't do it. Take it as merely an interesting diversion from the horrible news from other parts of our world. And look at how the system for transcribing indigenous languages works. There are different systems now. These ones below are from a curriculum resource at my University of Victoria.
Dave Elliot, an elder of the Tsartlip People of the Saanich Peninsula just up the road from me, worked with linguists to formulate a system for transcribing his language. The school at Saanichton now has immersion classes for preschoolers as well as a curriculum for school-agers and for adults.
Now try pronouncing the name of our local libree as it is in Lekwuengen.
sxʷeŋ'xʷəŋ taŋ'exw
And you've earned that coffee.