Learning the Unexpected
Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories. Photo: Franklin Hugo Kitto
Languages play a crucial role in both social and cultural development. They are intimately linked to people’s own sense of identity, to their lands, and to their environments. In line with the United Nations’ 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages, The Arctic Institute’s Indigenous Languages in the Arctic celebrates the linguistic and cultural diversity of Indigenous languages across the North. In a series of articles, commentaries, and op-eds, the contributing authors seek to raise awareness about the challenges and opportunities facing Indigenous languages and to highlight the immense value of linguistic diversity across the Circumpolar North.
The Arctic Institute Indigenous Languages Series 2019
- From the United Nations to the Arctic: Celebrating Indigenous Languages
- Language Revitalization, Cultural Stabilization, and Eskaleut Languages
- Learning the Unexpected
This short article is a story about my learning from people things that I never expected to learn.
I am writing as a linguist who has been fortunate to have lived in small communities in the Mackenzie River valley, working with Dene people to learn about their language. My initial goal was to write my thesis on the sound system of one of the varieties. The thesis accomplished, my goal became to compile a dictionary of one community and write a grammar of what is called North Slavey and South Slavey, now commonly referred to by the names in the Indigenous languages.1) When I first went to these communities in the early 1970’s, my aim was to examine sounds and grammatical structures. What I came to understand, through much patience on the part of the many people who agreed to teach me, was how much more there is to a language than its sounds and structures. They also made me aware of responsibilities that I did not know I had.
In this commentary I focus on the importance of the meanings of words. Meanings do not always line up nicely with meanings in English, and they are often very hard to interpret; but, as I came to understand something about meanings, I came to understand more about cultural and societal values. My experience speaks to the challenges of truly understanding what is being told to you, and the small pleasure that arises when you suddenly see something that you did not even realize existed.
Perhaps the best way to begin the story of truly hearing is as follows. I would be knitting, and people would say to me why are you wasting your yarn? I would think, I’m not wasting my yarn, I’m using up my yarn.
People would say to me ‘spill me some water.’ I would think, but spilling is an accident, don’t you want me to pour you some water?
I found such comments bewildering, and, sometimes, even offensive.
One of my major interests in studying the Dene language was to understand what I will call the verb word. Verb words in Dene language are complex, containing subject pronouns, object pronouns, tense, aspect, mode, valence, and adverbial concepts. A few examples of verb words are given below, using standard conventions for writing the language.
k’ínashinededa ‘she/he/it walks around singing’
k’ína-shine-de-da
around-song-oral activity-one person goes on land
k’ínashinedada ‘she/he/it walked around singing’
k’ína-shine-d-a-da
around-song- oral activity-perfective-one person goes on land
k’ínashinedehda ‘I walk around singing’
k’ína-shine-de-h-da
around-song- oral activity-I-one person goes on land
Every verb has what is called a verb stem, which is the main meaning part of the verb. The verb stem in the examples above is –da, meaning one person goes on land. Verbs can be divided into different sets depending, for instance, on how they indicate what is called perfective aspect. I would find a verb that had, I thought, a perfective form that I was pretty sure existed based on other words that I had learned, but I didn’t have examples of. I would get to the critical forms. I would wait with anticipation to see what the form was. But, more often than not, the speakers I was working with would change the verb stem and the paradigm would change as well. I didn’t have any idea why the people I was working with did this, nor did I know how to figure out what to ask about in order to learn the verb word that I was interested in!
I’d ask what the meaning difference was between the two verb stems. Sometimes people would say they had the same meaning. Other times they would say that in one case the verb was done gently and in the other roughly, or slowly and quickly, or deliberately and accidentally. Changing the stem would sometimes change the meaning, say from ‘leave behind’ to ‘lose’ or from ‘give to’ to ‘hand to’ or from ‘give away’ to ‘throw away.’ I could see that there was something similar about these – for instance, with ‘leave behind’ and ‘lose’, the former is deliberate and the latter accidental but the result is the same; with ‘give to’ and ‘hand to’, in the former the giving was for good while in the latter was temporary. There was something about control. But in most cases, things were not so clear. And this was not just a few random verbs – it turned out that there were two stems that translate as cut, two that as chop, two as drink, two as go on land, two as swim, two as an action made with the foot, two as roll, two as hit, two as tear, pierce, stir, crawl, poke, break, tie, action with a stick – the list goes on and on.
I tried to figure out what in general was the difference between these stems that seemed so similar, but were not.
People told stories, often stories in which the major point was to illustrate Dene values, or Dene ts’i̜li̜ – what it means to be a Dene person. I learned the words that ethnographers who worked with Dene people used to talk about the kind of characteristics that are valued in people –industrious, capable, generous, mutually supportive, cooperative, polite, humble, reasonable, reserved personally autonomous, caring, restrained, controlled. They taught me a word that they had taught the ethnographers– séodi̜t’é – a word that describes Dene ts’i̜li̜ and has no real equivalent in English.2)
I kept returning to the pairs of words, and listened to what verb words were used with different characters in stories. I slowly began to see what people had been trying to tell me that I had been unable to see – when people displayed séodi̜t’é behaviour, then one verb stem was used. But if their behaviour was séodi̜t’é íle (not séodi̜t’é), then the other stem was used. I also learned that séodi̜t’é íle behaviour is not devalued; it was expected that people would show séodi̜t’é íle behaviour. Séodi̜t’é is an ideal; séodi̜t’é íle is perhaps well characterized as every day.
I learned how what it means to be séodi̜t’é suffuses the language. It is found in other ways as well, as in how people make requests of others.3)
We have similar pairs of verbs in English– eat/dine; use up/waste; pour/spill. But there is something different about these. For me, ‘waste’ is negative, while ‘use up’ is not; ‘dine’ might even be snobby rather than positive while ‘eat’ is neutral; ‘pour’ is deliberate while ‘spill’ is accidental and unintended. One or the other pole is, at least for me, negative. But that is not the case with these Dene verbs – one indicates séodi̜t’é; the other is every day or ordinary. One is controlled; the other is not – but not being controlled is not necessarily construed as negative.
I learned how hard it can be to hear what people were trying to tell me. And I learned how stories resonate throughout a lifetime, understanding different parts of a story in different ways at different times. It is in fact only recently that I think I have come to understand why people told me I was wasting my yarn and spilling water.
Keren Rice is in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto and was the first director of Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto.
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