Open Nursery
The main strategic goal for those who want to preserve linguistic diversity consists in preserving the “transmission chain”, i.e. the mechanism by which the seeds of a culture and a language get planted into the human field.
Languages have a reproductive cycle just like the humans in and by which they live, so loosing the basic mechanism of transmission to the next generations is equivalent to castrating a language and a culture. In order to be alive a language needs babies to use it as a native language, and in order to do so it needs to keep the tools it developed in thousands of years.
If you allow a physiologic equivalence, the language used to deal with children is pretty much the language DNA. The part of that language/culture that is first passed to a new member of that culture and by which he/she later will build the rest of his/her vision of the world. It is also responsible for the roots of the baby's affective system.
Let alone the anti-genocidal value of preserving such cultural tools, there is also another extremely important reason for us to have special care in preserving the language connected to birth, children care and family structure. The reason is that in every culture this is the area that usually contains the most ancient parts of the language itself.
This is natural, because baby language mostly deals with an affective system of values. Something that has the highest chances to remain untouched through changes in technology, religion etc. So when you save this stuff, you save the crystallized memory and experience of hundreds of generations of native speakers in that language. One may well say that you save the very “soul” of the language.
Vox Humanitatis is now launching a public open source repository of birth and children related content called Open Nursery. We aim to collect lullabies, nursery rhymes, tales and whatever is used to raise children from the very start to school age. We also aim to collect it in a way that is usable by children: as audio files.
The material collected will be available to the general public and can be used by anyone to decide the language to which they want to expose their children since the very birth. If we can manage to collect enough material and the help of psychologists and linguists we will use it to launch a second step called: “adopt a language”.
With this second step we will ask families who are native speakers in major languages to adopt an endangered language and to pass it to their children with the help of the structure we are building. The information technology is making distance shrink with exponential speed, so it will soon be possible to have children who adopted a language have a basic social life with natives of the same language even while living very far from them.
Open Nursery
In the linguistics chat there was just a nice idea that came up: one can help kids to learn a specific language by employing a nanny who speaks that language ... it is so obvious ... so thanks to cein for his/her idea.
Open Nursery
Just adding a link I found about lullabies in Italian regional languages:
http://www.repubblicaletteraria.it/Cantipopolari_ninnananna.html
Open Nursery
Mail I am just about to send out to / in various places:
How to get languages to kids (and not only).
Well when my kids were approx. 3 years old I wanted them to be exposed to a certain kind of terminology in German, because many of the "kid's words" were not part of our daily language. They are twins and therefore of course prefer to play one with the other and mom was was called when it was about eating, drinking, going to the bathroom etc. Then I created slideshows with all kinds of words that were interesting to them and I noted that this worked really well. The photos I then used cannot easily be published in a slide show (because of the licenses that others used – GFDL is not suited at all for photos) and therefore I now just took what my two produce(d) at school.
I created a slide show where the intro still needs to change, but I already wanted to show you an example and ask you to help with the translation and the recording of the words. It is really not much: just 10 objects, some colours and 10 short sentences. They can be recorded in "one rush" using audacity (I can cut them) and you need to use OpenOffice.org since I use a presentation I then transfer into single jpg files from where I create the slide shows.
The contents are available under cc-by-sa which means that also your translations will be under that license.
I already talked with SJ from the OLPC project and yes: the videos will be available for OLPC.
You can have a look at the sample slideshow here:
http://www.youtube.com/iiterinternational
I did not upload the file to be translated since I would like to avoid that maybe two of you do the same language (so I will send it to you by e-mail). Btw.: it would be nice to get the recording of the English terms from a native speaker – I did it myself in that trial part. Over time I would like to see American, European, Australian etc. English, because indeed there is a difference.
For now, since this video is part of the Open Nursery project which will be introduced during our conference about less resourced languages in Cherasco, Piedmont, Italy, I am concentrating on less resourced languages, but: all languages are welcome. I will just create the ones that belong to the less resourced languages first.
During the next days I will create a second slide show which shall include the numbers from 1 to 10 in combination with the words I used for the first slide show.
Like I already said: the introduction will be different, I just added it so that one sees that there will be an introduction.
As for the programme of our conferece, you can find it here:
http://gopiedmont.i-iter.org/contn%C3%B9/programme-international-day-31s...
Some notes on the Open Nursery project can be found here:
http://eng.i-iter.org/content/open-nursery
Anybody is welcome to join us. Besides that the event will be also available via web-tv.
Well, so now I hope you will help to translate these videos. They will be made available in various places – so if you wish to host them as well: that would be really great.
This is being posted in various groups and sent through various mailing lists, so sorry if you get it more than once.
Thank you for your attention and I hope to read you soon!
Cheers, Sabine
*****
Sabine Cretella
CCO – Vox Humanitatis
s.cretella@voxhumanitatis.org
skype: sabinecretella
The slide show posted on
The slide show posted on YouTube:
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