Hollywood movie revives long lost Native American language

[telemann]

Comments

[surprisesex]

That's awesome. I love it when people make movies in rare languages, and I am definitely going to that.

[muckefuck]

The 2,275 speakers of Algonquin in Canada will be a bit surprised to find out that the language they speak has died out and been revived. I think you mean "Virginia Algonquian", a.k.a. Powhatan. Both are Algonquian languages, but then so are Mahican, Lenape, Cree, Ojibwe, and dozens of others.

[sivi_volk]

I was wondering. My girlfriend's Anishinabe, and I thought she'd wonder where all her relatives went.

[muckefuck]

To be fair, it's a very easy mistake to make. Using "Algonquian" for the name of the family and "Algonquin" for the name of a particular Algonquian variety is a convention that verges on sheer perversity (and one not helped a bit by the variants "Algonkian" and "Algonkin").

[sivi_volk]

I didn't know there was a difference until this post.

[fourseat]

and then we could get into the semantics of this quote from the article:
"He would be speaking - and some of the audience would be hearing - his native language for the first time."

"Native" for the layperson because, sure, it's the language his ancestors spoke natively, but it certainly isn't as if he's learned it as an L1...

[muckefuck]

Yeah, that sort of bothered me. I would've preferred "ancestral" there--partly because I can't imagine that same sentence being used to describe, say, a high-school student named "Botticelli" learning to speak Italian for a role in a school play.