👅✨The Nexialist #0020

Do You Speak Whale? | Figures of Speech | Language Maps | Internet's Lingua Franca | Appreciation or...? | Language Keepers | Indigenous Knowledge & AI | N’ko | Ghanaian Fufu with Context and more...

Welcome to The Nexialist, or my content-idea-thoughts catcher…

This week I am quite excited to tell you that Matt Klein and I collaborated in his 3_Trends format. I admire his work and mind, so I was completely fangirling when he told me of the idea. You can open on another tab by clicking here, but now focus on scrolling and reading this newsletter, which I prepared with lots of feelings and thoughts.

This week I got a playlist recommendation from Dimas’ newsletter Música em Casa, and it’s a playlist with electronic music sung in Portuguese, curated by Jean Tranjan. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

🐋Do You Speak Whale?

“With artificial intelligence and a painstaking study of sperm whales, scientists hope to understand what these aliens of the deep are talking about.” As someone who has watched Arrival (2016) quite a few times, this article really excited me. It is impressive to see machine learning being used to decipher whale’s language systems. We must have a lot to learn from them.

The team includes experts in linguistics, robotics, machine learning, and camera engineering. They will lean heavily on advances in artificial intelligence, which can now translate one human language to another without help from a Rosetta Stone, or key. The quest, dubbed Protect CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), is likely the largest interspecies communication effort in history.

🗣Figures of Speech

I remember seeing most of these in high school and university, but revisiting it now that I’m writing a bit more was a nice exercise. You can access it here to see it larger. I don’t think I had learned about Schemes and Tropes. “While schemes play around with the mechanics of a sentence, tropes stray from the literal or typical meanings to evoke emotion and keep a reader engaged and interested. Tropes help create an alternative sense of reality.” I think it validates how I like to write sometimes, not following some rules.

👅Language Maps

There’s something fascinating about these language visualizations. It helps to make sense of the number of different languages humans speak. What I liked about this one is that it included more languages than what I’m used to seeing, which usually focuses on European languages. I don’t think I had ever seen most of these language groups like that: Turkic, Dravidian, Niger-Congo, and Austronesian.

🌐Internet’s Lingua Franca

I don’t know about you, but even though I knew that English was prevalent on the internet, seeing some data about it is a bit scary. In my bubble view, Spanish and Portuguese would be at top of the list.

🪶Appreciation or…?

I decided to share this song because it raised a debate in my head and I think I can count on you to reflect on it with me. As much as I love Polo&Pan’s sound and aesthetics, there is a debate about cultural appropriation in their work, which is an uncomfortable and controversial topic.

The song Nanã (2016), one of their famous hits, takes its sample from an iconic Brazilian group from the 1960s, Os Tincoãs, whose work was heavily influenced by Bahia’s Candomblé tradition. Nanã is the most influential Orixá in West African theology and is central to Afro-Brazilian religions. These religions, however, are marginalized and still suffer greatly from religious intolerance in Brazil and other countries.

Now, about Ani Kuni: As I heard the unfamiliar language I had to Google about it. Ani Kuni “is a traditional Native American hymn and song originating from the Arapaho tribes living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming in the United States.” Ani Kuni was “popularized by the non-Indigenous pop singer Madeleine Chartrand in 1973,” which I’m pretty sure was the sampled version here. On top of that, the song “is not a lullaby, but a song of lamentation extracted from a ghost dance.” Read below the meaning:

Father, have mercy on me,

Father, have mercy on me;

Because I'm dying of thirst,

For I am dying of thirst;

Everything is gone - I have nothing to eat,

Everything is gone - I have nothing to eat.

There are so many layers, that I don’t know how to make sense of it. Does sampling a traditional song deplete it of its original meaning? Is it ok to turn a lamentation song into a lullaby (I don’t know how many years ago) and now turn that into a dancing song? Does the success of these songs bring more awareness to the languages and cultures they come from or does it hide their origins? If there is cultural appropriation, would it be better if this song didn’t even exist? 🤯

If you read their video description (which I don’t think many people do), it shows that have learned something from previous controversies, as they somehow give credit and support to the Native-American community, which I believe is a step forward.

'Ani Kuni is a playful dance track for children big and small. It's a tribute to our favorite childhood lullaby, a timeless Native-American hymn that has touched generation after generation, all around the world.'

Polo & Pan actively supports the National Indian Child Care Association (NICCA), a non-governmental organization that supports early care and education for Indigenous children in the United States. The mission of the NICCA is to promote high quality culturally relevant child care and development and to unify tribes and tribal organizations by providing leadership, support and advocacy on behalf of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. For more information and support, visit http://www.nicca.us. Donations can be made at paypal.me/niccaus

I’ll also leave here an interesting text from last year: Willful Ignorance by Alexandra Wells.

🌍Native Languages Map

Native Land Digital strives to create and foster conversations about the history of colonialism, Indigenous ways of knowing, and settler-Indigenous relations, through educational resources such as our map and Territory Acknowledgement Guide. We strive to go beyond old ways of talking about Indigenous people and to develop a platform where Indigenous communities can represent themselves and their histories on their own terms. In doing so, Native Land Digital creates spaces where non-Indigenous people can be invited and challenged to learn more about the lands they inhabit, the history of those lands, and how to actively be part of a better future going forward together.

Then I was looking really hard for this map, which I remember being fascinated about. It’s a crowdsourced map of indigenous languages, a reminder about the multitude of languages there are.

🫀Language Keepers

Emergence Magazine made a beautiful and necessary investigation and documentary about “The Struggle for Indigenous Language Survival in California.” Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu are languages that have only one or two native speakers. You can watch and read the stories of these people and families trying to revitalize these languages on the verge of extinction. There are also interactive maps to see closely how many dialects are spoken in the region. It has some eye-opening data and intimate moments.

There are approximately seven thousand languages in the world today; of these, the majority originated with, and are spoken by, Indigenous peoples. Up to half of the world’s languages are oral, with no orthography, no dictionaries. Knowledge is passed from person to person, through words and stories that formed and evolved alongside the places in which they have long been rooted, as diverse as the ecologies from which they come: Ainu on the island of Hokkaido in Japan, Arabela in the tropical forests of Peru along a tributary of the Arabela River, Tolowa Dee-ni’ among the redwood trees of Northern California.

🧠Indigenous Knowledge and AI

A few months ago I watched this AI for Good Webinar and I was absorbed by Burr Settles from Duolingo showing that since 2016 they have been releasing endangered languages courses on the platform, using a collaborative framework. The interesting part is that tools like Duolingo offer the potential of reaching more people. Irish, for instance, has been a success with more than 1million active learners, when there are only 140-200K speakers. Welsh, Guarani, Hawaiian, Navajo, and Scottish Gaelic have also been released and there are more coming. There are many nuances, however, in doing this. For instance, which dialect is the platform using? How is that decision made?

Read: Hawaiian, Gaelic, Yiddish: so you want to learn an endangered language on Duolingo?

✍️N’ko

“West Africa has been busy lately. Busy inventing writing. Since the 1800s, this area has become home to dozens of brand-new scripts. One paper I'm reading counts at least twenty-six.” N’ko, for instance, got its writing system in 1949. There are even writing systems that came to exist in the 80s.

🥣Ghanaian Fufu

I love Beryl so much and I’ll tell you why. On top of being someone who’s not a chef trying to cook/taste all of these dishes, she uses her platform to give a voice to people. In this video, she decided to join the TikTok Trend of eating Fufu, while still adding context. She first shares some history about Ghana, then invites a Ghanaian filmmaker to make the video with her, showing the people who can actually tell the story. She usually cooks things herself, but in this case, she went to a local shop and also showed that in the video. In the end, she invites local women to share which other dishes they feel represent Ghana. I would say this is how you show cultural appreciation.

❤️If anything made your brain tingle, click like and don't hesitate to share it with the world. It helps The Nexialist to reach more curious minds. See you next week!🦦

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