[HN Gopher] How Did a Self-Taught Linguist Come to Own an Indige...
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How Did a Self-Taught Linguist Come to Own an Indigenous Language?
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-04-16 14:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| pradn wrote:
| The article criticizes the linguist for 1) Being a cranky,
| arrogant academic - supposing his study of the language trumped
| elders' pronunciations of those words, assuming there was a
| "standard" version of the language that could be reconstructed 2)
| bequeathing his dictionary and his field-work materials to the
| American Philosophical Society, where its hard to access the
| materials, instead of giving them to the Indigenous community or
| releasing via public domain
|
| I think the first one is fair. Perhaps, for the second one, he
| expected the materials to be easily accessible. That's on the
| APA, which should at the least put them up online for free in the
| public domain, sans the restrictions the article talks about.
|
| I applaud him for caring enough to try to preserve the language,
| no matter the flaws. He is a human after all, warts and all.
| skissane wrote:
| > which should at the least put them up online for free in the
| public domain, sans the restrictions the article talks about.
|
| The article says: "Some of the oral narratives in the A.P.S.
| archive, for example, are meant to be shared only by women, or
| only in winter, or only by elders."
|
| Putting the materials up online without restrictions might
| actually upset the Indigenous community.
|
| This is part of why a lot of archives are restricted access -
| there can be material in them which could be confidential,
| private, offensive, defamatory, restricted by third party
| copyrights (e.g. papers or books authored by others with
| marginal notes added by the scholar), etc. Restricting access
| to bona fide researchers, you can trust scholars to exercise
| some professional discretion in dealing with the material. Just
| dumping it all on the general public isn't doing that.
|
| To properly put material like this online, you need someone to
| digitise it. This involves scanning, quality control (going
| back and checking the documents are actually scanned
| correctly), cataloguing the documents (often archives just
| catalogue the boxes, not the individual documents in each box).
| Then you need someone qualified to review each document to see
| if there is any reason why it can't be released - in this case,
| that would involve consulting the Indigenous community about
| how they feel about releasing documents which may describe some
| of their traditional cultural secrets. All this takes a lot of
| time and money. Consider the archives of APS have not just this
| scholar's papers, but those of many others, putting all their
| archives online would likely cost many millions. (If you have a
| spare few million to donate to them for this, I'm sure they'd
| be happy to hear from you.)
| pradn wrote:
| Yes, exactly. That's why I said "sans the restrictions the
| article talks about."
|
| He didn't seem to think about the issues of access that have
| arisen since then. He might have primarily meant these
| materials to be available to scholars. You are right. We're
| now in a pickle. No one is saying he shouldn't have done the
| work. But getting the material to a place where it helps the
| language thrive is hard and will take resources. No easy
| answer here.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Can't read the article without paying.
| djoldman wrote:
| https://outline.com/JzTzYG
| skissane wrote:
| Try this: https://archive.is/NAll8
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