Feeling Durbin. A Handbook of the Cherokee Verb

Cherokee Heritage Centre. Tahlequah, Oklahoma. 2003 — 256 p.The Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma has as its goal the preservation of Cherokee culture. This goal necessarily includes the preservation of the language, since the culture and language of a people are inseparable. The Center became aware several years ago that the suni\sal of the Cherokee language is problematic. Only 15,000 of the quarter million Cherokee tribal members can fluently speak Cherokee. Furthermore, more than 95% of the fluent speakers are over 65 years old. It became apparent that another generation could see the xirtual disappearance of the Cherokee language. The Cherokee Heritage Center then began efforts to try to presene this important language.
Cherokee language classes were offered by the Center. These classes quickly discovered a major problem with preserving the language - there are no adequate texts for teaching the language. The existing tools fall into two general Qpes - scholarly descriptions prepared by professional linguists for other linguists, and study materials prepared by native speakers. Neither of these approaches really worked very well in Cherokee language classes.One fundamental problem is that Cherokee has a highly inflected verb system. One can generate thousands of possible inflected forms for any given verb. Also, Cherokee has characteristics not found in English - vowel length, tones, and glottal stops -that pose a big challenge for the beginning student. One approach to teaching Cherokee is to put the student in a room with a native speaker and to ha\e the student start memorizing vocabulary items, phrases, and sample sentences. This is of course similar to how small children learn their native language. Unfortunately there is a great difference between the brain of a small child and that of an adult. Children have very plastic brains that quickly absorb and sort out the grammar of the language they are hearing. Adults quickly lose this abilib. They also lose a lot of other abilities. Imagine a trampoline with little children jumping easily and gracefully into the air. Now imagine a fat, middle aged man trying to do the same thing!The same principle applies to language acquisition. Adults must consciously learn grammar to learn a foreign language. This can be a difficult process. Most English-speaking adults don't know much about English grammar, so how can they be expected to learn Cherokee grammar?The Cherokee Heritage Institute decided on a new approach to teaching Cherokee. A new type of teaching grammar would be prepared - one that explained Cherokee grammar in terms that a non-linguist could understand. The Institute made contact with Durbin Feeling and Charles van Tuyl. Durbin is a fluent native speaker of Cherokee and is now teachlng Cherokee at the University of Oklahoma. Charles van Tulyl is a practicing psychiatrist uith a long time interest in Cherokee. These two men had been working together on Cherokee language projects for over twenty years. Then it was decided to bring in hvo other schvlars - Craig Kopris who has a Ph.D. in Iroquoian languages (Cherokee is Irvquoian!), and Jordan Lachler, a young scholar with extensive and successful work in Apache language preservation projects. Since all these men have other jobs, a plan of work was developed which brought the four together at regular inten-als for intensive work on the project, with specific sub-projects were assigned to each of the four.The work was divided into three stages. The first stage - represented in this volume - is an attempt to make a preliminary description of the Cherokee verb system. This description is intended to be linguistically accurate and intelligible to the general reader. It is intended to give the student a clear idea about the basic structure of the Cherokee verb. The student will be able to use this volume to generate many thousands of Cherokee verb forms. This volume will be field tested in classroom situations to find where better explanations are needed. The second phase will result in the completion of the introduction to the verb and a teaching grammar for Cherokee. The teaching grammar will be keyed to the final verb handbook. The third stage will involve collecting historic and modern Cherokee texts, transcribing and translating them, and providing commentary on them that will be useful for language learners.The final result will be a three volume publication. Volume One will be a teaching grammar of Cherokee. Volume Two will be the final handbook of the Cherokee verb. Volume Three will be an collection of annotated Cherokee language texts. A set of audio recordings will also be produced to accompany each volume.The successful completion of this first part of the project was made possible by a generous grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. The authors would like toextend their appreciation to Kean Kaufmann and Sean M. Burke for donating many hours of technical assistance to the project. We also wish to thank Neil Kandalgaonkar For designing the new Cherokee font used in this book, and to the Cherokee Heritage Center for their on-going commitment to preserving Cherokee language and culture.
Durbin Feeling, Craig Kopris, Jordan Lachler, Charles van Tuyl