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Inuttitut, a language shaped by humility, poetry, and the land

beside.media

31–32 of 32 posts

Re: Inuttitut, a language shaped by humility, poetry, and the land

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposedly there's an Inuttitut Rosetta Stone project although I don't see much else about it online. [0] I tried to get access to the Iñupiat Rosetta Stone at one point but failed even though I have the "unlimited" "all languages" Rosetta Stone subscription. It seems like the tribe manages registration and acts as a gatekeeper. [1] I'm sure it has to do with who funded the project or something, but you'd think for e…

> but you'd think for endangered languages you'd want to make it as easy as possible to access language learning resources. For a lot of Native Americans/First Nations peoples, it's actually a highly contentious issue. Some of them don't want outsiders, with no connection to the culture or the group, coming in and learning it just to prove they can, especially when children of the group haven't had the opportunity to…

Well, the bigger issue is that a lot of folks like to write grants to serve Native Americans and then get the money and don't provide the service, or, and this is a personal favorite, don't ask the reservation if they even need the service. Special awards to those who not only got money granted to provide and unneeded service, but by virtue of their applying to serve the reservation, got the legitimate reservation organization's grant blocked and unfunded.

It is actually illegal, as in there is a tribal resolution, for me to provide any demographic information to any entity without tribal permission.

The worst part is those folks who say they are Native American from a particular tribe and are NOT on that tribes enrollment rolls. They are always fun to deal with.

Re: Inuttitut, a language shaped by humility, poetry, and the land

#32
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds to me more like you already had a tool in mind (ML) and were just looking for some nails ;) If you approach the problem instead from the language preservation perspective and ask what is necessary to make it succeed, there are essentially two tasks: documentation (recording current speakers' knowledge of the language) and community maintenance (allowing people to keep using the language and teaching it to t…

It sounds to me more like you already had a tool in mind (ML) and were just looking for some nails ;) Well, like all people looking to get grants, I had a pot of money we could get but we had to use a tool to do it. Welcome to grants in 2020 where ML is one thing that gets funded and language preservation is not funded but actually needed as COVID seems to be removing a fair number of people who know the language.

Maybe you can do a dual-use project, where, if the ML part turns out to be not that useful, at least the data you collected or the baseline model you developed have a positive impact as well.
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