ANTH 493: Linguistic Anthropology

Here are a couple of references.  Our WCU Cherokee Language Program blog is blog.wcu.edu/cherokee.  Our website is paws.wcu.edu/cherokeelanguage.  We have an itunes university site.  It is at itunes.wcu.edu (public login).

Our partners, Kituwah Preservation and Education Program of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in Cherokee, North Carolina, have the website Fluent1.com.

Cherokee is a language that is in danger.  National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project is a good introduction to the problem.

Here is a sound file for our brief introduction to the Cherokee language.  Here is a rough gloss in English.  Listen to the sound file and write out the Cherokee words.  What are the sounds of Cherokee?

apple, deer, pig, chicken, egg, eggs, someone’s mother, my mother, your mother, water, meat, fruit, something to eat, you are eating, you eat, something to drink, someone is drinking, dirt, soil

TBeltLingAnth090909

http://www.learningthai.com/

China’s many different ethnic groups speak many different languages, collectively called Zhōngguó Yǔwén (中国语文), literally “speech and writing of China” which mainly span six linguistic families.

Includes the many different Han Chinese language variants (commonly simply called Chinese) as well as non-Han minority languages such as Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang.

Chinese is written with characters which are known as 漢字 [汉字] (hànzi).

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese.htm

http://www.chinapage.com/learnchinese.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China

http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Burmese/language.htm

Has links to lessons as well as showing the writing systems.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/burmese.htm

Gives the origin of the writing system.

Mocking Artificial International Languages

Europanto

http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-eur2.htm

How English becomes German

http://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-becomes-german/

Yakan of the Philippines

http://www.univie.ac.at/Voelkerkunde/apsis/aufi/yakan/yakan.htm

http://www.language-archives.org/language/yka

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=yka

 Athabaskans – Who are they?

http://www.firstnationsseeker.ca/Chipewyan.html

 What languages?

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_lang_family.asp?code=chp 

Chipewyan

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/northamerica/chipewyan.html

Athabaskans (p. 310)

 but Chipewyan is not what they call themselves?

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=chp

 but some uncertainty

http://www.chipewyan.com

 Dene laws

http://www.clfns.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=20&Itemid=50