Back in the 1950s when I was a boy growing up in Georgetown, Tx, I was conscious of many languages being spoken as I walked around the downtown area: English, Spanish, German, Swedish, even Czech. There was still a substantial coterie of people growing up on the farms to the north and east who never spoke English at home, though their families had been local for generations. And when they spoke English in town, it was often in a halting singsong accent with Swedish or German grammar and word order. ("I trowed de horse over de fence some hay.") That experience was rapidly disappearing by the middle 1960s. Now, of course, only Spanish and English have survived as something commonly heard. I think Spanish would disappear as well if the supply of native speakers weren't constantly being renewed. I blame TV, which became commonplace during the fifties and quickly replaced almost all other forms of entertainment.
Welsh, Irish, and Maori are all examples of languages struggling to stay alive despite more resources than Cherokee. If you want a real success, look at Hebrew.
@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh not really in the same category. It is the only official language of a country. I am sure if the governments of the various countries mandated that all official business need to be done in Welsh, Maori, Irish or Cherokee respectively we would see the usage increase exponentially. But as none of those people have armed forces to compel people it is unlikely to happen. Commenting on my experience in Aotearoa New Zealand I see that as the older England looking generations die and their children grow up here there is increasing interest in learning Maori. So much so there are not enough teachers to fill the demand. Where once the cries of just speak English would get applause now it is met with a loud OK boomer.
@@andrewcrampton3433 Lots of interest in learning, yes. But that interest doesn't translate into actual gains for the language. The number of people reaching a basic level has increased. But the number of people at a native-like fluency is still dropping. In Ireland also the average person's attitude is growing much more positive, but positive in a superficial way "I love Irish, and I would love if it was spoken more. I just don't have time myself to learn." While the people who speak the language as their first language get ever stronger signals from Netflix, TikTok, university, businesses, etc., that life should take place in English. Hebrew is the only revitalization effort I am aware of that has been a real success. You're right it isn't really the same as Irish or as Cherokee - and that's why most scholars in the area of sociolinguistics/language shift are not optimistic about Irish or Cherokee as a living community language.
Yet they are still red listed as endangered! Too little funds from the colonizing government, therefore too few teachers and materials. Yes more kids learn and speak, but still too few for having a noticeable impact.
For those wondering about the etymology of sequoia trees this what Wikipedia has: The etymology of the genus name has been presumed-initially in The Yosemite Book by Josiah Whitney in 1868[8]-to be in honor of Sequoyah (1767-1843), who was the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary.[9] An etymological study published in 2012 concluded that Austrian Stephen L. Endlicher is actually responsible for the name. A linguist and botanist, Endlicher corresponded with experts in the Cherokee language including Sequoyah, whom he admired. He also realized that coincidentally the genus could be described in Latin as sequi (meaning to follow) because the number of seeds per cone in the newly classified genus aligned in mathematical sequence with the other four genera in the suborder. Endlicher thus coined the name "Sequoia" as both a description of the tree's genus and an honor to the indigenous man he admired.
My stepson is Cherokee on his mother's side and she is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He like my children and grandchildren are enrolled in the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma. My late father in-law was instrumental in recording the Sauk language because he was one of the few people to be a fluent speaker. My late mother in-law was a member of the Muscogee Creek tribe of Oklahoma. I am enrolled in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North and South Dakota. There is a member of my tribe, Ray Taken Alive who is revitalizing and reclaiming the Lakota language (Siouan) within the reservations from the Lakota Language Consortium. The LLC is run by two European people who went in and recorded several Lakota elders and then gave them no credit and monetized the language and tried to force Lakota people to pay them to relearn their own language. The LLC had the elders sign a contract that they would never teach the language again to their own community members. They have consistently tried to smear anyone who questions their methods. Slowly thanks to Ray Taken Alive, the various tribal councils of Standing Rock and other tribal councils on Rosebud are banning the LLC from trying to dominate any other Lakota people teaching their own language. Since the LLC is headed by Europeans, they don't understand the cultural context of much of the language because they are not Lakota and don't live and have not grown up around Lakota people. This has resulted in the version of Lakota that they teach being not understandable by fluent Lakota speakers. Tribal languages have different dialects and different cultural meanings that can't be taught or understood without having a connection to the community. It's very important for anyone teaching and taking language classes to live and learn within the respective communities instead of online.
The vast majority of Irish learners also cannot be understood by native speakers of Irish. It is partially because they spend their time only talking to each other, and partially because they simply don't know the language well. For Lakota I guess also it is both factors.
@@weepingscorpion8739, it is not taught in school, but there are special courses where one could learn it. I was born in Suebia and speak the Suebian dialect. That isn't taught in school either, but is widely spoken in families. I also speak a bit of Sardinian, which I learnt as a child during our holidays in Sardinia. My parents would only ever speak Italian to me. In the meantime, Sardinian is taught in school, but is not mandatory. I am not sure how well new generations know or speak Sardinian though.
@@weepingscorpion8739 I am Austrian, sort of half Bavarian (it's a complicated post-war story) and understand it easily, but have never tried to speak it, I have my own dialect to worry about. :) But I have noticed that many young people from Bavaria who leave school at 18/19 no longer speak it in public - standard German seems to be taking over everything. A sad thing, IMO.
@@ancliuin2459 Yeah, I know Bavarian is usually considered part of a bigger Austro-Bavarian language or dialect continuum or what have you but the only name I've encountered in German is Boarisch so that's why I went with that. - And yes, your observation is unfortunately what I expected to hear. It's a sad thing but hopefully someone will start a revival project. I think I've seen that Bavarian uses the letter å and if that's the case then that's reason enough to start reviving it. :)
In the UK the Welsh language was suppressed starting around the mid 1530s, until fairly recently. I think it's starting to recover and bounce back. On holidays about 20 to 30 years ago, I heard it spoken in many shops, cafe's and pubs. A cousin of mine married a lovely Welsh girl some time ago, and most if not all her family are Welsh speakers.
Actually no, the latest census showed that Welsh has dramatically fallen out of use in Wales in the past 10 years, and many in academia think this could be the beginning of the end of Welsh as a dominant community language anywhere in Wales
Yeah Welsh is a pretty pointless language since everybody who speaks Welsh also speaks English. kinda the same problem with like almost every Native American language, unfortunately.
Jackson is right about the horses of Chincoteague and Assateague having origins with the Spanish; a recent DNA test seems to make the Spanish shipwreck legend of their origin very plausible. Other horses like South Carolina Marsh Tacky and North Carolina Banker also have their origins from wild horses originating from the Spanish. This was fascinating! I am embarrassingly ignorant about Native languages within the US and it was an enlightening and quite a joy to learn a bit.
I realized why I admire these interviews so much. I thought it was because of the great intellect behind the questions and though that is true, I love it so much because the questions lead the conversation in a way I did not expect, so I end up so much better off going down a rabbit hole I did not even foresee. Uh, to clarify...one cannot ask great questions until they first understand enough to do so.
Both of my elementary schools carried the english spelling for their original Cherokee naming of each community... Both were close to a very significant meeting spot of very large earth mounds near the river among the intersection of popular travel routes, luckily now protected lands. In the same community below my grandmother's house we would play in the creek across the state road where we always easily found discarded Cherokee arrowheads that didn't chip just right... For someone to throw away arrowheads of that quality as rejects, I bet the ones kept and used were amazing and nearly perfect! I have only very little Cherokee blood left in me from my Dad's side of a marriage into the bloodline of a good family from the valley in the early 1800's, but all the unknowns are what interest me... What the now bare grass fields and woods would've looked like a few thousand years ago... Much of the forest, river (including many Cherokee placed giant rock fish traps) and valley hasn't changed much, but I wish I had a time machine to be able to see the same area over the last several thousand years! Sadly the clay trade for pottery ruined much of the area for the native Cherokee (now also hidden by time and asphalt roads) Thanks for keeping the Cherokee history and language alive! 👍
Jackson, I saw you out and about in Reykjavik today I think. My friend really wanted to say thank you, but didn’t want to bother you. So thanks for the great videos!
This is the video that finally got me to sign up on Patreon. I would have loved to have been able to submit a comment or question to this one when it was live.
My sister taught herself the Cherokee Syllabary back in elementary school. She learned a few words too but mostly just used the syllabary to English sentences she wanted to keep private, like her diary.
The historical Cherokee lands primarily in modern day NC, TN, GA weren't as far as you might think from the Great Lakes region and current day NY. The Warriors Path linked both regions and speakers of the northern and southern branches came in contact regularly as a result. If the 4k estimate did not take into account continued regular contact, it may well have underestimated the separation.
I am the first of my dad’s family born outside of Western NC (Sylva, Dillsboro, Andrews, Alexander, Cherokee). Before my Dad died, he asked that I visit Cherokee and the surrounding area (I am descended from Ensleys, Suttons, Dills, Quintons, Childers, Wilds, Cassadas (Austrians), Harrisons (Colonial VA), and I recently found out Kruse/Cruze/Cuzzine/Cousins(various spellings) from (amazingly) Kopparberg, Sweden!! I have been doing some family research since Dad has died. In some ways, I think it was his parting “gift” to me - so I would not be “alone,”without family. The Swedish connection is how I found this channel. I have begun analyzing my Swedish ancestors. Supposedly these Swedes immigrated to Rutherford Co. NC sometime around 1700. Maybe departing after the fall of Fort Christina in Delaware? (this I learned about from Pewdiepie on UA-cam, of all people!!). I cannot imagine what the journey was like and the strangeness of all the cultures that melded into that Western NC region - with the Cherokee/Aniyunwiya. From what I have learned, it was a very diverse region with many languages and dialects. When my grandmother died in 1996 (at 104) she was still able to speak Scots-Gaelic with a woman from Scotland (who was visiting in her retirement neighborhood in Virginia). My family has lost most of these languages. In fact, I was angry that I had not been told that my grandmother spoke Gaelic - only to find out that it was something to be “ashamed” of in her generation. I think this is also true for those of us with mixed-Cherokee heritage. Some in the past may have been ashamed of being Cherokee. And there probably is/was some shame associated with being “disconnected” from the language and culture, being afraid of being accused of “appropriating” culture/language - and this may hold us back from creating a broader group of Cherokee speakers. I am still diving into the history of the region, and I am beginning to get a feel for the politics and divisions that occurred before, during, and after the Indian Removal of 1838 - it seemed to “cleve” the community apart. We owe a huge debt to those in the EBCI, UKB, and Cherokee Nation today that are trying to retain and grow the language and culture.
My father was irish and i've attempted to learn the language several times but to no avail. Here in England we now have a tv channel in welsh and another in Scots Gallic
I was disappointed that he didn't mention anything about what's going on in Cherokee, NC itself to preserve the language. The high school teaches it, I graduated from WCU which has grown tremendously in its coursework in Cherokee culture and language and there's also a whole online setup for learning the language... not to mention that all along the Appalachian Mtn range, particularly in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia it's so blended into the mountain culture itself that it can be hard to distinguish but it's still very much there
Apparently Stephan Endlicher, who named the tree species but in addition to being a botanist was a published linguist, so the theory is that he did name it out of respect for Sequoyah. There is some theory that it is from Latin for something about sequence, but there is no evidence he was aware of that at the time. He may have also not known how to pronounce Sequoyah, as he was Austro-Hungarian and probably never heard Cherokee? Oh, also on the topic of being known for what your neighbours called you, I know that's the case for a bunch of Native Americans here in Canada. Iroqois apparently might come from the the French trying to say the Algonquin name for them, rattlesnake. Many tribes call themselves something like "the people". Also also, the Navajo language is in the Athabaskan family, which is weird, because the rest of the Athabaskans are in like NWern Canada, Alaska, just incredibly far away.
Taken from a story of how Ridley Scott used ancient languages in PROMETHEUS..."what did it sound like to hear the ur-language from which this confusion of tongues derived? In 1868, just before he died, German linguist August Schleicher made his best guess, writing out a short story in Proto-Indo-European as best he could reconstruct it. The tale has become known as Schleicher’s Fable, and has been updated by centuries of subsequent linguists as knowledge of Proto-Indo-European has grown. It probably achieved its widest-ever audience when it was featured as homework for robots in Ridley Scott’s 2012 movie Prometheus " There is audio of attempts to speak this from the movie..but... I had no way to embed the audio into a comment...😔
I have not yet finished the video (although I will). For virtual conversation, setting up a Discord server might be a modern, accessible, and culturally relevant area to facilitate that. My great-grandfather was the son of a Cherokee and Choctaw couple that escaped from the Trail, and I was already thinking about potentially getting more into my Cherokee heritage the last few days already.
Dr. Frey, I was under the impression that you can take Cherokee language at Western Carolina University...is this incorrect? I would wonder what learning materials they would use?
Regarding Jackson’s question about a native Cherokee literary canon, I can only speak secondhand. In college I had a class on the Indians of the southeastern US by a middle aged woman who had returned for her doctorate I think. At any rate she and her husband lived near the North Carolina Cherokee, and one day in class she brought in some masks which she said would traditionally be used in not really plays per se but sort of mummer’s performances maybe with the mask being a person or stereotyped group that had a recognizable character. I take it some or all of these were risqué as the mask for a white man was distinguished by a comically long nose representing shall we say another part of his body, and his character was to mostly make unending advances towards women in the audience. At any rate maybe she made The whole thing up, but if not I would not be surprised if some or all of these characters may have had some more or less standard dialogue along with things made up in the moment. It could be more wishful thinking than anything, but I’ve put a lot of thought recently into stuff like this, puppet theater, professional wrestling and similar sort of semi-literary performance art that isn’t recorded much.
For mainstream languages, there's some awesome emerging schools, I wonder if those emerging schools market in the same capacity as those, would affect the revitalization 🤔
What’s the status of the Wampanoag language? There is some revitalization l, but so really wish there were UA-cam videos teaching the world how to speak the Native languages.
By contrast with the Native Americans, who don't use a lot of greeting formulae, the East African cultures using Kiswahili have elaborate greeting formulae, which go through 2-3 responses before getting down to business.
Find Sam Hiders language tapes now on CD ... he was a Native 1st language speaker AND insisted it not be short cut .... Eastern Syllabary and Western have one more one less character .... I learned to speak with some Native Speakers in North Georgia as a young man .... Ani Yun WI Ya
On the name of the tree genus whether it was named for Sequoyah is still undecided and argued over. Some follow a late 19th century argument that it actually derives from the Latin _sequor_, to sequence, whereas others insist that it's a latinized version of the name, I'm not certain but think the latter is more likely.
The Irish immersion school situation is worse than described. It isn't just a dialect problem, but rather more a vicious cycle. There are not sufficient native or native-like speakers interested in teaching Irish (the pay is not particularly good for one), and so most of the teachers end up having only a poor grasp on the language. The students then learn this broken Irish and perpetuate it by speaking it with each other. They then graduate and their immersion school experience is what makes them 'qualified' to go and teach at other immersion schools, again perpetuating this vicious cycle of poor Irish speakers creating more poor Irish speakers. The language spoken in these schools is then more of a pidgin of nominally Irish vocabulary with English phonology and syntax. Native and native-like speakers hear it and cannot even recognize it as Irish because it completely lacks the sounds and patterns of actual Irish. This in turn creates more of a vicious cycle where these immersion school learners isolate themselves from and disdain the actual language community and either out of defensiveness or pure ignorance profess themselves as the better experts, teachers, etc., and go out into the world to further spread this pidgin while the Irish language itself continues to lose ground. Of course not every school or every speaker fits into this narrative, but broadly speaking it accurately characterizes the present immersion school situation in Ireland. All that being said, I still generally think the immersion schools are a net positive because it creates employment opportunities and it does create some number of students who do go on to really learn the language.
I have never yelled at a video like I did this one. The Aniyvwiya (Cherokee) is not Iroquoian! Our language is nowhere similar to them. The whole "we don't know where they came from" is also nonsense since our stories say we came to North America from a series of five islands (now underwater) off the coast of Brazil. Our usage of Tsalagi is evidence of this since it is derived from what the Choctaw called us ("Cave Dwellers") when our ancestors arrived here. The Shawnee and Delaware are our relatives. There were technically 4 dialects (I'm counting Chickamauga as well). The dialect mostly spoke in Qualla Boundary, NC is different from what is spoke in Tallaquah, OK. His own shirt is Western syle for "hello" (Osiyo or "oh-see-yo) while he only mentions the Eastern style for "hello" (Siyo or "she-yo") in passing.
If there is a printed work where you got this anthropological historical info, I would be interested to know. Personally, I am partway through Theda Purdue's history, Cherokee Women ebook.
Back in the 1950s when I was a boy growing up in Georgetown, Tx, I was conscious of many languages being spoken as I walked around the downtown area: English, Spanish, German, Swedish, even Czech. There was still a substantial coterie of people growing up on the farms to the north and east who never spoke English at home, though their families had been local for generations. And when they spoke English in town, it was often in a halting singsong accent with Swedish or German grammar and word order. ("I trowed de horse over de fence some hay.") That experience was rapidly disappearing by the middle 1960s. Now, of course, only Spanish and English have survived as something commonly heard. I think Spanish would disappear as well if the supply of native speakers weren't constantly being renewed. I blame TV, which became commonplace during the fifties and quickly replaced almost all other forms of entertainment.
Welsh, Irish and Maori are great examples of languages that have increased their usage and numbers of first speakers.
Irish usage, whether amongst first language speakers or not, has only dropped in the last 200 years unfortunately
Welsh, Irish, and Maori are all examples of languages struggling to stay alive despite more resources than Cherokee. If you want a real success, look at Hebrew.
@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh not really in the same category. It is the only official language of a country. I am sure if the governments of the various countries mandated that all official business need to be done in Welsh, Maori, Irish or Cherokee respectively we would see the usage increase exponentially. But as none of those people have armed forces to compel people it is unlikely to happen.
Commenting on my experience in Aotearoa New Zealand I see that as the older England looking generations die and their children grow up here there is increasing interest in learning Maori. So much so there are not enough teachers to fill the demand. Where once the cries of just speak English would get applause now it is met with a loud OK boomer.
@@andrewcrampton3433 Lots of interest in learning, yes. But that interest doesn't translate into actual gains for the language. The number of people reaching a basic level has increased. But the number of people at a native-like fluency is still dropping. In Ireland also the average person's attitude is growing much more positive, but positive in a superficial way "I love Irish, and I would love if it was spoken more. I just don't have time myself to learn." While the people who speak the language as their first language get ever stronger signals from Netflix, TikTok, university, businesses, etc., that life should take place in English.
Hebrew is the only revitalization effort I am aware of that has been a real success. You're right it isn't really the same as Irish or as Cherokee - and that's why most scholars in the area of sociolinguistics/language shift are not optimistic about Irish or Cherokee as a living community language.
Yet they are still red listed as endangered! Too little funds from the colonizing government, therefore too few teachers and materials. Yes more kids learn and speak, but still too few for having a noticeable impact.
For those wondering about the etymology of sequoia trees this what Wikipedia has:
The etymology of the genus name has been presumed-initially in The Yosemite Book by Josiah Whitney in 1868[8]-to be in honor of Sequoyah (1767-1843), who was the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary.[9] An etymological study published in 2012 concluded that Austrian Stephen L. Endlicher is actually responsible for the name. A linguist and botanist, Endlicher corresponded with experts in the Cherokee language including Sequoyah, whom he admired. He also realized that coincidentally the genus could be described in Latin as sequi (meaning to follow) because the number of seeds per cone in the newly classified genus aligned in mathematical sequence with the other four genera in the suborder. Endlicher thus coined the name "Sequoia" as both a description of the tree's genus and an honor to the indigenous man he admired.
My stepson is Cherokee on his mother's side and she is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He like my children and grandchildren are enrolled in the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma. My late father in-law was instrumental in recording the Sauk language because he was one of the few people to be a fluent speaker. My late mother in-law was a member of the Muscogee Creek tribe of Oklahoma. I am enrolled in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North and South Dakota. There is a member of my tribe, Ray Taken Alive who is revitalizing and reclaiming the Lakota language (Siouan) within the reservations from the Lakota Language Consortium. The LLC is run by two European people who went in and recorded several Lakota elders and then gave them no credit and monetized the language and tried to force Lakota people to pay them to relearn their own language. The LLC had the elders sign a contract that they would never teach the language again to their own community members. They have consistently tried to smear anyone who questions their methods. Slowly thanks to Ray Taken Alive, the various tribal councils of Standing Rock and other tribal councils on Rosebud are banning the LLC from trying to dominate any other Lakota people teaching their own language. Since the LLC is headed by Europeans, they don't understand the cultural context of much of the language because they are not Lakota and don't live and have not grown up around Lakota people. This has resulted in the version of Lakota that they teach being not understandable by fluent Lakota speakers. Tribal languages have different dialects and different cultural meanings that can't be taught or understood without having a connection to the community. It's very important for anyone teaching and taking language classes to live and learn within the respective communities instead of online.
The vast majority of Irish learners also cannot be understood by native speakers of Irish. It is partially because they spend their time only talking to each other, and partially because they simply don't know the language well. For Lakota I guess also it is both factors.
Would be great if these native American languages could really be taught in school! Greetings from Bavaria!
Speaking of Bavaria, is Boarisch taught in schools there?
@@weepingscorpion8739, it is not taught in school, but there are special courses where one could learn it. I was born in Suebia and speak the Suebian dialect. That isn't taught in school either, but is widely spoken in families. I also speak a bit of Sardinian, which I learnt as a child during our holidays in Sardinia. My parents would only ever speak Italian to me. In the meantime, Sardinian is taught in school, but is not mandatory. I am not sure how well new generations know or speak Sardinian though.
While not taught in most schools, certain tribes do have classes for learning their language and culture... so that it will not be completely lost.
@@weepingscorpion8739 I am Austrian, sort of half Bavarian (it's a complicated post-war story) and understand it easily, but have never tried to speak it, I have my own dialect to worry about. :) But I have noticed that many young people from Bavaria who leave school at 18/19 no longer speak it in public - standard German seems to be taking over everything. A sad thing, IMO.
@@ancliuin2459 Yeah, I know Bavarian is usually considered part of a bigger Austro-Bavarian language or dialect continuum or what have you but the only name I've encountered in German is Boarisch so that's why I went with that. - And yes, your observation is unfortunately what I expected to hear. It's a sad thing but hopefully someone will start a revival project. I think I've seen that Bavarian uses the letter å and if that's the case then that's reason enough to start reviving it. :)
In the UK the Welsh language was suppressed starting around the mid 1530s, until fairly recently. I think it's starting to recover and bounce back. On holidays about 20 to 30 years ago, I heard it spoken in many shops, cafe's and pubs. A cousin of mine married a lovely Welsh girl some time ago, and most if not all her family are Welsh speakers.
Actually no, the latest census showed that Welsh has dramatically fallen out of use in Wales in the past 10 years, and many in academia think this could be the beginning of the end of Welsh as a dominant community language anywhere in Wales
Yeah Welsh is a pretty pointless language since everybody who speaks Welsh also speaks English. kinda the same problem with like almost every Native American language, unfortunately.
Jackson is right about the horses of Chincoteague and Assateague having origins with the Spanish; a recent DNA test seems to make the Spanish shipwreck legend of their origin very plausible. Other horses like South Carolina Marsh Tacky and North Carolina Banker also have their origins from wild horses originating from the Spanish.
This was fascinating! I am embarrassingly ignorant about Native languages within the US and it was an enlightening and quite a joy to learn a bit.
Osiyo! so awesome to see this! greetings from California cherokee diaspora
OMG, Ben!!! He was my TA for one of my German classes. I'm so hyped to watch this video now. Great to see him doing well!
I realized why I admire these interviews so much. I thought it was because of the great intellect behind the questions and though that is true, I love it so much because the questions lead the conversation in a way I did not expect, so I end up so much better off going down a rabbit hole I did not even foresee.
Uh, to clarify...one cannot ask great questions until they first understand enough to do so.
Omg I’ve loved studying the Cherokee language!
Also first
Hello. Cherokee here also enjoying studying my ancestors language
Both of my elementary schools carried the english spelling for their original Cherokee naming of each community... Both were close to a very significant meeting spot of very large earth mounds near the river among the intersection of popular travel routes, luckily now protected lands. In the same community below my grandmother's house we would play in the creek across the state road where we always easily found discarded Cherokee arrowheads that didn't chip just right... For someone to throw away arrowheads of that quality as rejects, I bet the ones kept and used were amazing and nearly perfect! I have only very little Cherokee blood left in me from my Dad's side of a marriage into the bloodline of a good family from the valley in the early 1800's, but all the unknowns are what interest me... What the now bare grass fields and woods would've looked like a few thousand years ago... Much of the forest, river (including many Cherokee placed giant rock fish traps) and valley hasn't changed much, but I wish I had a time machine to be able to see the same area over the last several thousand years! Sadly the clay trade for pottery ruined much of the area for the native Cherokee (now also hidden by time and asphalt roads) Thanks for keeping the Cherokee history and language alive! 👍
Jackson, I saw you out and about in Reykjavik today I think. My friend really wanted to say thank you, but didn’t want to bother you. So thanks for the great videos!
This is the video that finally got me to sign up on Patreon. I would have loved to have been able to submit a comment or question to this one when it was live.
My sister taught herself the Cherokee Syllabary back in elementary school. She learned a few words too but mostly just used the syllabary to English sentences she wanted to keep private, like her diary.
The historical Cherokee lands primarily in modern day NC, TN, GA weren't as far as you might think from the Great Lakes region and current day NY. The Warriors Path linked both regions and speakers of the northern and southern branches came in contact regularly as a result. If the 4k estimate did not take into account continued regular contact, it may well have underestimated the separation.
walking around Hasidic Willliamsburg, I sure feel isolated and sense a barrier.
I am the first of my dad’s family born outside of Western NC (Sylva, Dillsboro, Andrews, Alexander, Cherokee). Before my Dad died, he asked that I visit Cherokee and the surrounding area (I am descended from Ensleys, Suttons, Dills, Quintons, Childers, Wilds, Cassadas (Austrians), Harrisons (Colonial VA), and I recently found out Kruse/Cruze/Cuzzine/Cousins(various spellings) from (amazingly) Kopparberg, Sweden!!
I have been doing some family research since Dad has died. In some ways, I think it was his parting “gift” to me - so I would not be “alone,”without family.
The Swedish connection is how I found this channel. I have begun analyzing my Swedish ancestors. Supposedly these Swedes immigrated to Rutherford Co. NC sometime around 1700. Maybe departing after the fall of Fort Christina in Delaware? (this I learned about from Pewdiepie on UA-cam, of all people!!). I cannot imagine what the journey was like and the strangeness of all the cultures that melded into that Western NC region - with the Cherokee/Aniyunwiya.
From what I have learned, it was a very diverse region with many languages and dialects. When my grandmother died in 1996 (at 104) she was still able to speak Scots-Gaelic with a woman from Scotland (who was visiting in her retirement neighborhood in Virginia). My family has lost most of these languages. In fact, I was angry that I had not been told that my grandmother spoke Gaelic - only to find out that it was something to be “ashamed” of in her generation.
I think this is also true for those of us with mixed-Cherokee heritage. Some in the past may have been ashamed of being Cherokee. And there probably is/was some shame associated with being “disconnected” from the language and culture, being afraid of being accused of “appropriating” culture/language - and this may hold us back from creating a broader group of Cherokee speakers. I am still diving into the history of the region, and I am beginning to get a feel for the politics and divisions that occurred before, during, and after the Indian Removal of 1838 - it seemed to “cleve” the community apart. We owe a huge debt to those in the EBCI, UKB, and Cherokee Nation today that are trying to retain and grow the language and culture.
Thank you so much for sharing this conversation.
Jackson needs to own the Star Wars thing and put it on his website.
Ben should make a Cherokee course as part of Glossika's Viva program! That would be a powerful tool for learners
And Jackson could make one for Old Norse
My father was irish and i've attempted to learn the language several times but to no avail. Here in England we now have a tv channel in welsh and another in Scots Gallic
I resorted to the Rosetta Stone language program that taught basics of my Tribal tongue. I am a "card carrying member" of the Chickasaw Nation.
I was disappointed that he didn't mention anything about what's going on in Cherokee, NC itself to preserve the language. The high school teaches it, I graduated from WCU which has grown tremendously in its coursework in Cherokee culture and language and there's also a whole online setup for learning the language... not to mention that all along the Appalachian Mtn range, particularly in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia it's so blended into the mountain culture itself that it can be hard to distinguish but it's still very much there
Apparently Stephan Endlicher, who named the tree species but in addition to being a botanist was a published linguist, so the theory is that he did name it out of respect for Sequoyah. There is some theory that it is from Latin for something about sequence, but there is no evidence he was aware of that at the time. He may have also not known how to pronounce Sequoyah, as he was Austro-Hungarian and probably never heard Cherokee?
Oh, also on the topic of being known for what your neighbours called you, I know that's the case for a bunch of Native Americans here in Canada. Iroqois apparently might come from the the French trying to say the Algonquin name for them, rattlesnake. Many tribes call themselves something like "the people".
Also also, the Navajo language is in the Athabaskan family, which is weird, because the rest of the Athabaskans are in like NWern Canada, Alaska, just incredibly far away.
Thx to you both - really enjoyed this
Taken from a story of how Ridley Scott used ancient languages in PROMETHEUS..."what did it sound like to hear the ur-language from which this confusion of tongues derived? In 1868, just before he died, German linguist August Schleicher made his best guess, writing out a short story in Proto-Indo-European as best he could reconstruct it. The tale has become known as Schleicher’s Fable, and has been updated by centuries of subsequent linguists as knowledge of Proto-Indo-European has grown. It probably achieved its widest-ever audience when it was featured as homework for robots in Ridley Scott’s 2012 movie Prometheus "
There is audio of attempts to speak this from the movie..but... I had no way to embed the audio into a comment...😔
I have not yet finished the video (although I will). For virtual conversation, setting up a Discord server might be a modern, accessible, and culturally relevant area to facilitate that.
My great-grandfather was the son of a Cherokee and Choctaw couple that escaped from the Trail, and I was already thinking about potentially getting more into my Cherokee heritage the last few days already.
Great video, thanks for posting this!
okie here. i am happy to say that there are cherokee language efforts here as well
Dr. Frey, I was under the impression that you can take Cherokee language at Western Carolina University...is this incorrect? I would wonder what learning materials they would use?
Regarding Jackson’s question about a native Cherokee literary canon, I can only speak secondhand. In college I had a class on the Indians of the southeastern US by a middle aged woman who had returned for her doctorate I think. At any rate she and her husband lived near the North Carolina Cherokee, and one day in class she brought in some masks which she said would traditionally be used in not really plays per se but sort of mummer’s performances maybe with the mask being a person or stereotyped group that had a recognizable character. I take it some or all of these were risqué as the mask for a white man was distinguished by a comically long nose representing shall we say another part of his body, and his character was to mostly make unending advances towards women in the audience. At any rate maybe she made The whole thing up, but if not I would not be surprised if some or all of these characters may have had some more or less standard dialogue along with things made up in the moment.
It could be more wishful thinking than anything, but I’ve put a lot of thought recently into stuff like this, puppet theater, professional wrestling and similar sort of semi-literary performance art that isn’t recorded much.
Always delivering 🤘
Thanks!
For mainstream languages, there's some awesome emerging schools, I wonder if those emerging schools market in the same capacity as those, would affect the revitalization 🤔
Great information! Both my heritages mentioned in this video! Very cool!
✌🏻🤍🌟
Love the shoutout to Birmingham
What’s the status of the Wampanoag language? There is some revitalization l, but so really wish there were UA-cam videos teaching the world how to speak the Native languages.
By contrast with the Native Americans, who don't use a lot of greeting formulae, the East African cultures using Kiswahili have elaborate greeting formulae, which go through 2-3 responses before getting down to business.
My great great grandmother was East band Cherokee
I've always wanted to reconnect with the culture but I feel out of place doing so
Find Sam Hiders language tapes now on CD ... he was a Native 1st language speaker AND insisted it not be short cut .... Eastern Syllabary and Western have one more one less character .... I learned to speak with some Native Speakers in North Georgia as a young man .... Ani Yun WI Ya
If you can get some of the language learning apps to pick up more obscure languages you may get more people interested.
Interesting how you end the letter with the greeting in Cherokee...
On the name of the tree genus whether it was named for Sequoyah is still undecided and argued over. Some follow a late 19th century argument that it actually derives from the Latin _sequor_, to sequence, whereas others insist that it's a latinized version of the name, I'm not certain but think the latter is more likely.
I'd kill to speak with the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Foundation 😁
Never thought of that: why wouldn't the Iroquoian ppls have walked south along the Appalachians? Like an elevated highway.
Tsalagi is a beautiful language that should be saved.
🤠💜
Bullying students out of the class and playing favorites should not align with the mission to revitalize the Cherokee language.
🙂
The Irish immersion school situation is worse than described. It isn't just a dialect problem, but rather more a vicious cycle. There are not sufficient native or native-like speakers interested in teaching Irish (the pay is not particularly good for one), and so most of the teachers end up having only a poor grasp on the language. The students then learn this broken Irish and perpetuate it by speaking it with each other. They then graduate and their immersion school experience is what makes them 'qualified' to go and teach at other immersion schools, again perpetuating this vicious cycle of poor Irish speakers creating more poor Irish speakers.
The language spoken in these schools is then more of a pidgin of nominally Irish vocabulary with English phonology and syntax. Native and native-like speakers hear it and cannot even recognize it as Irish because it completely lacks the sounds and patterns of actual Irish. This in turn creates more of a vicious cycle where these immersion school learners isolate themselves from and disdain the actual language community and either out of defensiveness or pure ignorance profess themselves as the better experts, teachers, etc., and go out into the world to further spread this pidgin while the Irish language itself continues to lose ground.
Of course not every school or every speaker fits into this narrative, but broadly speaking it accurately characterizes the present immersion school situation in Ireland. All that being said, I still generally think the immersion schools are a net positive because it creates employment opportunities and it does create some number of students who do go on to really learn the language.
I have never yelled at a video like I did this one. The Aniyvwiya (Cherokee) is not Iroquoian! Our language is nowhere similar to them. The whole "we don't know where they came from" is also nonsense since our stories say we came to North America from a series of five islands (now underwater) off the coast of Brazil. Our usage of Tsalagi is evidence of this since it is derived from what the Choctaw called us ("Cave Dwellers") when our ancestors arrived here. The Shawnee and Delaware are our relatives. There were technically 4 dialects (I'm counting Chickamauga as well). The dialect mostly spoke in Qualla Boundary, NC is different from what is spoke in Tallaquah, OK. His own shirt is Western syle for "hello" (Osiyo or "oh-see-yo) while he only mentions the Eastern style for "hello" (Siyo or "she-yo") in passing.
*Tahlequah. I live in Cherokee county.
@@ProfessorShnacktime my apologies. You are absolutely correct on the spelling.
If there is a printed work where you got this anthropological historical info, I would be interested to know. Personally, I am partway through Theda Purdue's history, Cherokee Women ebook.