In my last semester at college, I had a free class period to fill, so I decided to try something new: I took a language course on Lenape. Lenape is the language the Native Americans known as the Delawares spoke. It has a highly complex grammar system, and a beautiful, lyrical sound to it. You can listen to some sample sentences here, many of which are read by Nora Thompsom Dean, a Lenape woman famous in the community for her work on language preservation. She was one of the last native speakers of Lenape, but a recent resurgence of interest in preserving the language, both on the part of linguists and members of the Lenape community, has brought Lenape back into use again.
It was a great experience to be a part of this revival, because the projects we worked on in class were designed to help future generations and current members of the community learn the language. As both a linguist and a writer, languages are very important to me. I believe that words have power, and that a language is more than a means to communicate: it is a world view. Every time a language dies out, we lose a unique view of the world.
Since I have experience as a storyteller, and because I know how amazing children are at picking up languages, I decided to write, draw and paint a children's picture book in Lenape. That way, parents could read it to their children, and teach them new words in a visual way.
Much to my delight, my professor asked if they could reproduce the picture book to sell on their website. At the moment, the book is in the final stages of editing before it will be printed, but it will soon be available for purchase on the Trading Post.
The images in this post are taken from the book (be gentle with me - it was my first attempt at painting in watercolor. And I'm pretty new to drawing as well). The story follows the main character, a snake (xhuk* in Lenape) as he tries to find out what color he is. He meets various animals along the way, asks what color they are, and if they know what color he is. The idea of the book is to teach children the color words, as well as the different conjugations (verbs aren't the only thing conjugated in Lenape - adjectives change to reflect the number and tense of the noun you're discussing). I am very excited about this project, so expect more updates when the book is released!
*xhuk is pronounced /xuk/, in which the /x/ sounds like the gutteral "ch" sound in German, and the u is long
It should be noted that "h" in Lenape is actually pronounced as one would say "x" in IPA (similar to the German "ch"). However, since this letter is difficult for most English-speakers to pronounce, I've substituted it for "h" in the brief pronunciation guide I gave here (and also for simplicity's sake, since the pronunciation was given in a parenthetical note).
ReplyDeleteAs a speaker, and teacher of the Lenape Language, I have to disagree! In Lenape "h" is pronounced as "h" as in English "hand", also the "adjectives" you speak of are actually intransitive verbs, either animate or inanimate depending on the noun involved.
ReplyDeleteTrue. I guess I should have said "in this case, when I said 'h,' what I meant was the 'ch' sound." Like I said, I was just trying to give a quick pronunciation guide, and I know most Americans I've talked to have difficulty saying the 'x,' so I thought it'd be easier to skip over that :P
ReplyDeleteBut, in retrospect, that's pretty limiting, so I just added a little *, with a better pronunciation guide at the bottom of the page.