![]() While Weiser is working to teach his native Yahooskin dialect to his 26 grandchildren and has led programs at local schools and community centers, he faces constant challenges, he said, including lack of money for such programs. Weiser lives in Chiloquin, Oregon, and is a member of the Klamath Tribes. But Thornes continued to work on language preservation with Weiser’s grandson, Steve Weiser. Thornes’ early collaborator, Irwin Weiser, died in the 1990s. “I want to do my part to make it easier for communities to connect to their own history as told by their elders.” “When material is in an archive, it’s often not searchable,” said Thornes. The samples include documentation from their own field work in those communities and materials that had been sitting on archive shelves – in some cases for more than a century – gathered by linguists and linguistic anthropologists in the past. Thornes and co-editor Maziar Toosarvandani from the University of California Santa Cruz included samples from nine distinct Northern Paiute communities in their volume. Speakers of Northern Paiute are native to the high desert region that stretches from what is now South Central Idaho and Eastern Oregon across Northern Nevada and into Eastern California. The volume is a supplement to the International Journal of American Linguistics (University of Chicago Press) as part of the journal’s Texts in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas series. He has co-edited a volume, Northern Paiute Texts Across Varieties, containing transcribed, translated and analyzed oral narratives in Northern Paiute. Twenty-five years later, here I am,” said Thornes, an associate professor of linguistics in Boise State’s Department of English, and one of just three American linguists who specialize in Northern Paiute. “I volunteered to do what I thought would be a great summer project. ![]() He partnered with tribal elder Irwin Weiser to write a book including greetings, the names of plants, animals, colors and more. The Klamath Tribes in South Central Oregon were looking for someone to write a beginners phrase book for the Yahooskin dialect of Northern Paiute (Yahooskin is one of three groups comprising the Klamath Tribes). Tim Thornes was a linguistics graduate student at the University of Oregon when a chance project set the course of his studies for decades. ![]() The late Rena Adams Beers, Tim Thornes, and the late Ruth Hoodie Lewis in 2016 working on a translation of a story by community member Nepa Kennedy, who died in 2010.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |