In the new movie about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, founded in 1607, the paramount Indian chief Powhatan asks Captain John Smith where his people came from. The sky?
Responding to the question, translated by an Indian whose smattering of English probably came indirectly from the earlier failed Roanoke colony in North Carolina, Smith replies: "The sky? No. We come from England, an island on the other side of the sea."
The dialogue continues as the interpreter puts Smith's reply in Powhatan's own words, Virginia Algonquian, a language not spoken for more than two centuries. Like most of the 800 or more indigenous languages of North America when Europeans first arrived, Powhatan's became extinct as Indians declined in number, dispersed and lost their cultural identity.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
A small but growing number of linguists and anthropologists has been busy in recent years recreating such dead or dying Indian speech. Their field is language revitalization, the science of reconstructing lost languages. One byproduct of the scholarship is the dialogue in Virginia Algonquian for the movie The New World.
More than movie making is behind the research. A revival of ethnic pride and cultural studies has stimulated Indians' interest in their languages, some long dead. Of the more than 15 Algonquian languages in eastern North America, the two still spoken are Passamaquoddy-Malecite in Maine and Mikmaq in New Brunswick.
In other cases, the few speakers of an Indian tongue are the old people, never their grandchildren, and so the research is a desperate attempt to save another language from burial with a departing gener-ation. The passing of a language diminishes cultural diversity, anthropologists say, and the restoration of at least some part of a language is an act of reclaiming a people's heritage.
Blair Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who specializes in reconstructing Indian languages, said several Algonquian commun-ities in the East had efforts under way to recover their lost languages and return them to daily use.
"What turns out to be really important is just that they learn some piece of the language because it is reclaiming their heritage," Rudes said. "So much was lost that reclaiming any of it is a major event."
Ives Goddard, a curator for linguistics and anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, said, "The loss of languages continues, and it's a worldwide phenomenon."
At least half the world's estimated 6,000 languages, Goddard said, have so few remaining speakers that they are threatened with extinction. By 2100, he predicted, "there will be fewer than 3,000 languages still spoken."
When the director of The New World, Terrence Malick, decided that for authenticity Powhatan should speak in his own language, he called in Rudes, who has worked with Goddard in reconstructing the defunct Algonquian language of the Pequot of Conne-cticut. He is also engaged in language restoration for the Catawba of North Carolina and is collaborating with Helen Rountree, emeritus professor of anthropology at Old Dominion University, on a dictionary of Virginia Algonquian.
Rudes was asked what would Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas say and how would they say it? It was a daunting assignment.
The related Algonquian languages were among the first in North America to die out, and no one is known to have spoken Virginia Algonquian since 1785. Like other Indians, except some cultures in Mexico and Central America, there was no writing system, and the grammar and most of their vocabulary were lost.
Just two contemporary accounts -- one by Captain Smith and the other by the Jamestown colony secretary, William Strachey -- preserved some Virginia Algonquian words, including ones that have passed into modern English as raccoon, terrapin, moccasins and tomahawk.
The first challenge for Rudes was the limited vocabulary. Smith, the colony leader, set down just 50 Indian words, and Strachey compiled 600. The lists were written phonetically by English-men who were not expert in linguistics and whose spelling and pronunciation differed considerably from modern usage, making it difficult to determine the words' actual Indian form.
Rudes had to apply techniques of historical linguistics to rebuilding a language from these sketchy, unreliable word lists. He compared Strachey's recorded words with vocabularies of related Algonquian languages, especially those spoken from the Carolinas north into Canada that had survived longer and are thus better known.
This family of Indian tongues, in one respect, reminded linguists of the Romance languages. Each was distinctive but as closely related as Spanish is to Italian or Italian to Romanian. Comparisons with related languages revealed the common elements of grammar and sentence structure and many similarities in vocabulary.
A translation of the Bible into the language once spoken by Massachusetts Indians offered more insights into the grammar. The Munsee Delaware version spoken by coastal Indians from Delaware to New York, including those who sold Manhattan, may be dead, but its grammar and vocabulary are fairly well known to scholars.
Another research tool was what is called Proto-Algonquian. It is the hypothetical ancestor common to all Algonquian speech, 4,000 words that scholars have compiled from the surviving tongues and documentation of the extinct ones.
The reconstruction involves educated guesses. Strachey set down words for walnut, shoes and two kinds of beast, "paukauns," "mawcasuns," "aroughcoune" and "opossum." In Proto-Algonquian, similar words are paka-ni (meaning large nut), maxkesen (shoe), la-le-ckani (raccoon) and wa-pa'oemwi (white dog).
From this, Rudes reconstructed the Virginia Algonquian words paka-n, mahkesen, a-rehkan and wa-pahsem, "or pecan, moccasin, raccoon and opossum.
Then there was the problem of creating dialogue reflecting what the Indians would have understood in the early 17th century. This also required changing the script for the initial Powhatan-Smith conversation.
In a paper summarizing his methods, Rudes said the original script had Smith saying: "The sky? No. From England, a land to the east." At the time, though, a land to the east was for the Indians more myth than reality, he noted, but they probably had already heard about "white-skinned people who lived on islands in the Caribbean."
So Smith's reply was changed to "We came from England, an island on the other side of the sea," and the translator then used documented words of Virginia Algonquian for sky, no, island and sea. The spelling was slightly modified to account for Strachey's misspellings and conform to similar words in other Algonquian speech.
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