Speaker 1:	Today's speaker is Ted Fernald from the professor of linguistics. Ted describes himself as, and I'm gonna quote this because I'd never come up with these words myself, "a semanticist with interest in the distinction between individual and stage level predicates, negative polarity items, generic sentences, definite and indefinite descriptions, and all things having to do with Navajo syntax and semantics." I understand the last phrase. 
	Ted received his B.A. in economics from Ohio State University, and proving that you can indeed do anything with a degree in economics, he got his M.A. in linguistics from Ohio State and his PhD in linguistics from the University of California Santa Cruz. At Swarthmore, Ted teaches introduction to linguistics, introduction to semantics, a seminar in syntax and semantics, and, when he gets the chance, courses on the structure of Navajo.
	Ted's scholarly work and teaching merge in his work in the Navajo community. Ted is Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the Navajo Language Academy, which is a non-profit educational organization devoted to the scientific study and promotion of the Navajo language. The NLA provides linguists, language teachers, and students with the opportunity to join together for classes and collaborative research every summer since 1997. I believe a number of our students have had the opportunity to participate in this as well. Ted also directs the Navajo Linguistics Archive Project of the NLA, which is housed in Swarthmore's McCabe Library. Ted's current research is supported by the National Science Foundation and it involves linguistic research on Navajo, which will lead to the creation of a reference grammar drawing on previous studies of Navajo sentence structure. The proposed reference grammar will cover the structure, meaning, and use of all known Navajo sentence types. 
	Today, Ted will talk about the process of doing research that involves multiple languages and cross cultural interactions. Ted.
Ted Fernald:	[00:02:13 Foreign language] I just told you something that would not be surprising if you understood it, which is what my ancestry is. That's a common way to introduce yourself if you're meeting a Navajo person for the first time. What I said was, "Hello everyone. My name is Ted Fernald. My mother's mother's family is French Huguenot and my father's mother's family is Norwegian," so it's customary to introduce yourself in terms of clans in Navajo society and that's what I just did. As you know, different cultures have different ways of doing things. This is to emphasize that.
	I have attended 13 of the last 19 Athabaskan Language Conferences. The Athabaskan Language family is one of many language families indigenous to North America. It's shown in red on this map. There are recognized to be about three main regions, the large area in the North, the Southwest of the United States, and a few small communities on the Pacific Coast. The Athabaskan Languages Conference tends to rotate between these three regions. Here's the map of Navajo country where I do most of my work. Navajo is part of this family, which is why I go to this conference so frequently. Here are the northern regions. 
	This conference meets in a lot of different places and it's always hosted by a combination of academics and language workers from host communities, from Athabaskan communities. The other word that's up here is Dene, it means person. It's the word for whatever tribe you happen to be from in any of these languages, any members of this language family. Athabaskan is a term, it's basically a Cree word. We know the origin of this word. It comes from a Canadian surveyor who figured out that the languages spoken around Lake Athabaska all were from a single language family and he said that he's just arbitrarily gonna call it Athabaskan. Athabaskan is not an Athabaskan word, that's often what happens when you name languages. Dene is an Athabaskan word, but the problem with saying dene is that everybody says it a little bit differently, but not differently enough. In Navajo, the word for Navajo is not Navajo, it's dene, but it's den-eh, not den-ay, or den-e, which is what you find farther north. 
	Linguists, and anybody who wants to talk to among different Athabaskan groups, has to come up with a way of distinguishing den-eh from den-ay from den-ee and it's kind of difficult unless you're really tuned into slight differences, and often there aren't enough difference even for somebody who's really paying attention. 
	This conference is an interesting thing, and this is what I really wanted to begin getting at. Because it is hosted by communities of people who are not professional scholar, and the people who are not professional scholars are the people who own the language, they're the people who speak the language and use it and have maintained it. The professional scholars tend to be people from outside the community who have academic credentials and some things you might anticipate begin to happen at some of these conferences. Always there are some talks by linguists, and linguistics can be a very esoteric discipline, as esoteric as any academic discipline. This is the handout from a talk I gave here almost just five days short of four years ago on negative polarity items. What happens at this conference sometimes is that a graduate student from outside the community will walk in and do what is expected at an academic conference. They'll just go up and start talking, then they'll start talking about aspects of the language that the people in the audience understand, but they don't know what they're doing to it. They'll find this person who they haven't ever seen before taking something beautiful, taking the language, taking bits of the language and chopping it up into littler bits, into small bits and pieces, which is what you see in this picture. 
	That's a Navajo verb, it means "I started to roll them out again, one after another." That whole thing is in that one word, all that information is there. As a linguist, I can chop it up and tell you the ch- at the beginning means out horizontally, in that sort of a direction, that kind of a motion, and then each of these things is marked as indicated pseudo-lingusiticese underneath it so the ha- at the end is the thing that means roll and the sh- right before it means that I'm the one who's instigating this. There are a bunch of other things in this, but this is something I'm telling you from my perspective as a academic, somebody who's studied these languages, and here's a chart of the Navajo verb complex that a lot of linguists have come up with. 
	The thing that can be very disturbing at these conferences is if you are a community elder and you see people doing this and they're people you don't know, you worry about whether they're treating the language with respect. In effect, it looks like they're dissecting it. They're taking something that's beautiful and chopping it up. And really, what the linguists tend to do to this is kind of ugly, unless you find some use for it, which we claim we have. But that's not always obvious, and it's particularly not obvious when you have a grad student, say, somebody who doesn't have a lot of experience trying to do this, attending a conference maybe for the first time, and what has not been acknowledged at these conferences is that this really is an intercultural interaction. 
	I went to a few of these where eventually in one of them, the one that happened in 2000, the grad student was talking for awhile and at a certain point she was interrupted by an elder who had been getting more and more upset as the day went on. There were all these older linguists who were sort of large and confident and that sort of thing and the elder didn't feel comfortable enough yelling at them, but once he got a grad student up there then it seemed like a fair enough time to start venting some of this frustration, "This is our language and we don't like what you're doing to it. And by the way, your pronunciation is pretty bad." The trick is, they don't know where these European-Americans are coming from. 
	In 2007, I was part of a group that hosted the conference. This was the first time that my group really had an opportunity to try to address some of these things and to really acknowledge that this is an intercultural interaction. We did a few things to try to make it work right. We opened with a panel of Navajo linguists explaining what linguistics is all about in Navajo using Navajo terminology. We had translators who struggled to come up with terms on the fly. They were the only translators we could get. They were the best we could get. They were professional court translators, but going back and forth on the fly between Navajo and English is really a non-trivial matter. That's why she looks like she's got a headache. That was one thing we did. We started out with this panel to get things going so that you had people from the community telling other people in the community what we're trying to do, what it's all about, how linguists think about language, and what good it is for teaching the language and helping maintain the linguistic traditions. We were fortunate in that there are several Navajo folks who have PhD's in linguistics who have been deeply involved in language planning work and in theoretical linguistics. 
	You may recognize this gentleman here in the middle. That's Paul Platero, who was the 1996 lang professor for social change here at Swarthmore. The woman next to him is Elevina Perkins, who's a co-author of mine. She's given a couple talks here from time to time and has shown up at the Friday afternoon COBC committee.
	The other main thing that we tried to do in setting up this conference was to tell anybody who was not from an Athabaskan community to introduce themselves more carefully and to explain how it is that they came to be doing what they're doing, how it is that they ... by what reason they claim to have any expertise at all on the language that these folks speak. With that in mind, I need to make amends and show you this film that I did with the Digital Storytelling Project on campus.
Film:	Navajo's beautiful to me. I grew up in Ohio. My father is a pediatrician who always wanted to work for Project Hope, a medical relief organization. But my father had a private practice that he couldn't abandon. In the early 1970's, Project Hope was operating a hospital on the Navajo reservation. For two years, he spent his vacation time at the hospital. He took the family along with him. Navajo country is like a different planet from Central Ohio. The land is glorious, the sky goes on forever. I made friends, we played football. I thought it would be really cool to speak a language that no one in Ohio could speak. We got some books and a reel to reel tape. I learned to say a few things like yah-te and shlee -- hello and horse, and denebozad bosh ah [foreign language 00:13:22], I am learning Navajo. Back in Ohio, after trying to tackle the verbs, I knew I was in over my head. 
	The natural way to learn a language is to learn it at home and at play, to speak it with your family and friends. Most Navajo children today learn English as a first language. They'll learn to speak a little bit of Navajo at school. If the language survives the next few generations, it is likely to be very different from what it is today. I have spent the last 14 summers with the Navajo Language Academy. At the NLA, linguists and language teachers are working together to research Navajo and to develop new pedagogical and reference materials to help students and teachers. 
	[foreign language 00:14:20] Linguists always ask what do you know when you know a language. Children learn whatever language is spoken around them. Obviously, they need to know how to make words and what they mean, and they need to know how to put them together to make sentences. But there's more to language than a grammar and the dictionary. Ken Hale was a linguist and scholar of Navajo who knew the grammars and lexicons of over 70 languages, but he said he was fluent in only three. He was teaching a class on Dutch syntax, lecturing in Dutch. When the class ended, he got to the door at the same time as someone else and he didn't know what to say. In English, we'd say something like after you or age before beauty. Although Ken knew a lot of the language, what he was missing was a kind of user's guide to the language. [Foreign language 00:15:20] 
	As part of the summer workshop at the Navajo Language Academy, linguists and language teachers are recording conversations that will be used to develop this kind of guide for Navajo. I'm still learning verbs. I'm not optimistic that I'll ever be fluent, but I still have hope. 
Ted Fernald:	I recommend the Digital Storytelling Workshop, it's a pretty good thing. They did this in three days. A number of other people produced it as well. The Navajo Language Academy started out as pure research, but language teachers started coming to get help with technical aspects of the grammar. Navajo is taught in every school on the reservation, and administrators don't always really understand very well what it takes to teach a language. Since teachers are in high demand, if someone comes along who can speak the language, they think that the person probably has the capacity to teach it also and they show them to their classroom. What happens is, as I've tried to indicate, the verbs are very important in this language. They are in all languages, but a verb is a sentence all by itself in Navajo. They're complicated. I showed you that very long one about rolling things out horizontally. The thing is there are lots and lots of different forms of each verb, and although a fluent speaker can produce all the forms that they want to, they don't have a very good understanding of how they do it. They just do it because they learned it innately and they didn't study the grammar of it, necessarily.
	So, they start coming to the NLA for some help with this and, what also happens if the teachers don't have training in verbs is they wind up teaching students lists of nouns so students can point to a horse and say, "Shlee" but they can't tell you what the horse is doing. You really can't have a conversation at all with just nouns. That's a problem. This was an organization that was mainly doing pure, esoteric linguistic research, and then we had language teachers coming to it. Linguists normally don't work very hard at being useful to language teachers, and maybe vice versa. We found a way to make it work and everybody has to stretch a bit. It winds up being something that's really quite cool. We have a course on the verb structure every time we do this workshop for people who have never seen it before. We explore classroom techniques for teaching verb forms and there are some pretty decent techniques that have been developed. Then we also are true to linguistics. We provide introductory and advanced level linguistics courses. We have colloquial by scholars, it's a forum for people doing research, students as well as professional linguists. Then there are plenty of discussion time discussions about planning the language and working on the future of things. 
	One of the things that emerged from this, just for example, here's a conjugation. This is a European-American style conjugation of a verb. One of our participants came up with this as a different way of illustrating the conjugation. This is for "speak". The thing in the middle is a wedding basket with the opening at the top. The top represents the east, which is oriented towards the top of Navajo maps. The opening indicates both the emergence from the previous world and it's the door to the hogan, to the house. Since it's your house, as you emerge from it, you have the first person form. Sh is the first person pronoun, it's "I", and then [foreign language 00:19:08] is "I speak". 
	The farther away from home you get, the more people there are so you go from the singular form in this circle to the dual form for two of us speak to the plural form, three or more of us speak. To the south, which is out this direction towards the blue mountain, that's the direction of warmth, which is ostensibly how I feel about you so that's second person. So you have the second person pronoun and then the singular, dual, and plural forms of second person. The third person is just kind of what's left over. It's neither the speaker or the addressee, and the west is basically what's left over. To the north, all directions are sacred and significant, but the north is especially so, and it's a bit dangerous. That's where the fourth person is indicated. The fourth person is used, among other things, as a kind of honorific, something like, "Would you offer our distinguished guest a cup of coffee?" You'd use fourth person for that. It's a bit more careful.
	This kind of intercultural thing, this way of presenting verb structure is something that's kind of cool. It makes sense to a group of different folks. There are a number of research projects going on at the NLA, including documenting conversations. These have multiple uses for research and for pedagogy. We're working on a reference grammar, as Lisa mentioned. My colleagues were heavily involved in the Rosetta Stone Navajo that's just came out. You can join the NLA on Facebook, if you care to. Visit us on the website. I've got one or two more clips for you. This is a code talker explaining the word hill to you using the word "heen" which means close. [foreign language 00:21:10]. His horse begins with "H". The Navajo word for horse is "slee" so that's the first part of it. [Foreign language 00:21:25] So that's how you say hill, you say the horse is sick in Navajo. That was one of the ways that they were working on ... that's what they came up with back in the early 1940's when they were creating the Navajo code that was used in World War II. In Western scholarly traditions, growing up in Ohio we were told that when you get to the end of the talk you find some subtle way to indicate it rather than saying that's the end. However, in Navajo culture, what you do is say, "That's the end." [Foreign language 00:22:17]