For those less comfortable reading Oji-Cree, CBC has helpfully published a translation in English: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/first-person-rochelle-bragg-reclaiming-language-1.6371587" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/first-person-roch...</a>
An aunt who teaches Ojibwe was showing me how the alphabet uses symmetries for its phoenetics <a href="https://www.kercstore.com/product-page/ojibwe-syllabic-chart-eastern-finals-with-phonetics" rel="nofollow">https://www.kercstore.com/product-page/ojibwe-syllabic-chart...</a>
I feel like there's a deep deep tragedy in the loss not just of individual languages, but of entire language families.<p>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).<p>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, <i>and</i> are fragmented, making a concerted effort to save any one of them almost doomed to failure, let alone all of them.<p>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.<p>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.
There is a recording “Rochelle Bragg speaks Oji-Cree”.<p>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.
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.<p>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).
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).<p>This article could have been about any topic, and the tone wouldn't change - as the bulk talks about the author themselves.
I feel like articles like this could really benefit from a translated reader function. allowing one to simultaneously swap between languages and get phrases
"Invented by white christian missionary James Evans around 1840".<p>There seems to be no historical background or linguistic reason whatsoever?<p>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.
Books & videos in Cree Plains:<p><a href="https://www.jw.org/en/library/?contentLanguageFilter=crk-x-cys" rel="nofollow">https://www.jw.org/en/library/?contentLanguageFilter=crk-x-c...</a>
I'm surprised obscure languages like Oji-Cree have unicodes<p>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