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Show DAILY B8 Sunday, February 17, 2008 HERALD Voices from the grave Eccentric linguist saved extinct native languages for modern study and use and crackers Harrington kept in his pockets so he wouldn't have to waste time looking for meals. Decades of sorting and categorizing followed. The National AnthroJuliana Barbassa from," Macri said. "There is so much pological Archive finally finished cultural knowledge embedded in lantransferring Harrington's notes to v microfilm in 1991. guage." he first time Jose By all accounts, Harrington, who Linguists, archeologists, botanists died in "1961, was a devoted, if someFreeman heard his and others have spent the years since what eccentric, scholar. Sometimes tribe's lost language combing through the files. But mi20 30 of he crofilm readers are expensive, and on the minutes crackle one or, spent through record a word, saying it over and over unreading the notations requires some til the person he was interviewing ing, he cried. training, said Macri. So the treasure trove of infor"My ancestors were speaking to agreed he'd gotten the pronunciation mation on lost native languages correct, said Jack Marr, who met me," said Freeman of the sounds remained all but inaccessible to the boy and captured when American Indians still Harrington as a worked as his assistant into his 20s. inhabited California's Salinas Valley. people with the greatest interest in re"It was like coming home.'' members of the tribes "They trusted him," Marr said of viving them themselves. While the last native speaker of Sa- the Indians they worked with, "A lot of people, if they tried to walk in and The Harrington Project was crelman died almost half a century ago, ated with the goal of returning the more and more indigenous people are say, 'I want to record you,' they'd get thrown out, But not Harrington. I words to those who can imbue them finding their extinct or endangered think people recognized that we were with life again, as well as making the tongues, one word or song at a time, material more accessible to scholars. thanks to a late linguist and some doing this for posterity." The researchers are teaching tribal The linguist's sense of urgency University of California, Davis scholmembers across California how to ars who are working to transcribe his animated the letters he sent to Marr read Harrington's cramped handwritlife's obsession. nearly everyday. "Rain or no rain, rush," Harrington ing and decipher the notation system Driven to record the native languaghe devised, then sort the information es he saw disappearing all around him, said in signing off one such dispatch. into searchable categories. John Peabody Harrington spent four "Dying languages depend on you." For now, Maori's team is focused But the same impulse that made decades gathering more than 1 million on the more than 100 California lanhim successful in many cases his pages of phonetic notations on lane guages Harrington catalogued, such guages spoken by tribes from Alaska notes provide the only record of as Wiyot, Serrano and Luiseno, for to South America. When the technololanguages would also conwhich there are few records other found later efforts to pass the words gy became available, he supplemented down to new generations. his written record with audio recordthan Harrington's work. "It would be hard to exaggerate first using wax cylinders, then Harrington was so focused on ings the linguistic diversity that existed at aluminum discs. gathering information, for instance, one time in California," Macri said. "It that he spent little time polishing his Martha Macri, who teaches Cali- was more common to be multilingual fornia Indian Studies at UC Davis and work for publication, according to is one of the principal researchers on Marr. He hated being "cooped up" in than not." Jacob Gutierrez, a member of the an office, wasting precious time on the J. Pi. Harrington Database Project, is working with American Indian papers, Marr said. Deeply mistrustful San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians volunteers to transcribe Harrington's of other researchers, he stashed much ("Pipiimaram," in the tribe's own language), has been working on the projphonetic notations. Once entered into of his research as he traveled, delibect for 2 12 years. He has decoded all a database that tribes can access, reerately keeping it out of reach of his the material Harrington gathered on searchers hope the words will bridge colleagues. his people He kept evert his employers at over 6,000 pages and silence separating the decades-lonis now working on information about the Bureau of American Ethnology the people Harrington interviewed now the National Anthropological their linguistic neighbors to the north. from their descendants. in the dark about where "I find it to be the most rewardAlthough it will be years before all Archives he was and what he was doing, routthe materialman be made available, ing work I have ever done," he said. some American Indians connected to ing his mail through Marr's mother to "Every new word, story or song is an absolute treasure for me and my cover his tracks. the Harrington Project have already After his death, the federal arpeople." begun putting it to use. Members chives began receiving boxes of Gutierrez has developed a rudi-- . of Freeman's tribe gather on their material Harrington had stored ancestral land every month to pracmentary map of villages where his tice what they've learned of their away from people who Came across language was spoken by charting Harrington's travels with the milelanguage a few words, some gram- it in barns and basements across the West. They were stuffed with old mar, old songs. age and route information he left. At " he ult imate outcome is to clothes and religious artifacts, notes get gatherings with other tribe members, it back to the communities it came he's also sung religious songs un- and recordings, and even the buns f ; S r V m m & m long-gon- g .... ;0 i1"1"1 "jEL '""""' , .Smithsonian Institution Linguist John Peabody Harrington is seen in this 1918 photo in California. heard for decades. Karen Santana, who started working on Harrington's notes about her Central Porno tribe while she was a student at UC Davis, is now drawing plans for a dictionary with phonetic spellings that could help tribe memwords. bers sound out "I want to develop a system that will make sense to others," Santana said. getting cut off from our roots," he said. "The world view that our ancestors carried is quite different from world view. And the their language can carry that world view back to us." Wondering out loud whether Harrington would have been satisfied to see languages born again from his notes and recordings, Marr said, "It's "It's a lifelong goal, publishing something so that my tribe can refer to." Freeman hopes his will grow up with the sense of heritage that comes with speaking her ancestors' lan- gratifying.": "But he would have felt very sad he didn't get more. He always wanted to do more." n On the Net: J. P. Harrington Database Project: nas.ucdavis.eduNALCJPH. guage. 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