We're pleased to be about to welcome Bruce Starlight, the Language Commissioner for the Tsúùt'ínà Nation of Alberta. He will be giving a talk on Friday the 13th in SS 560A, starting at 3:30 PM: "The central place of paradigms in teaching Dene languages."
Dene languages like Tsúùt'ínà have complex verbal systems, with
frequently dozens of forms of each verb. Control of the verb paradigms
is one of the hallmarks of fluent speakers, who can also build new verbs
on the fly by adding extra morphology. In addition, our languages
are very verb-centred; many nouns for day-to-day objects are derived
from verb phrases, and this is the most common way of coining new nouns.
One of the current challenges we face in teaching our languages is the
fact that in many educational jurisdictions, curricula are expected to
follow an ESL model, where typically half an hour is allotted for the
introduction, teaching and practice of a new verb. For languages like
English, where verbs have only a few forms, this approach is reasonable,
but for Dene languages it creates great difficulties for both teachers
and learners. For this reason, it is important for any
Dene-language curriculum to allow considerable more lesson time for new
verbs, and when designing teaching methods, to look for ideas to
teachers of other “verby” languages, like Arabic, Hindi, or Hungarian,
not English.
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