John Whitman had a wonderful and far-reaching presentation on the languages of the North American 1st Nations and how they are working to restore the lost knowledge caused by the systemic way that it was suppressed due to the colonization of North America. This was a great topic for our 7:30 am early morning meeting at PaNe & Company. We invite the general public that have an interest in our guest speaker to come out and find out more about all the good that Rotary does in the local community.
https://linguistics.cornell.edu/john-b-whitman
John Whitman is a professor and former chair of the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University in 1985. Whitman has previously served as director of the Department of Crosslinguistic Studies (言語対照研究系) at the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics (国立国語研究所) in Tokyo, Japan and Director of the East Asia Program at Cornell. His linguistic specializations are East Asian linguistics, comparative syntax, language typology, and historical linguistics. Recent publications include the Handbook of Korean Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2022, editor, with Sungdai Cho), Korean: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2020, with Sungdai Cho), and Ryūkyū shogo to Kodai Nihongo: Nichiryū sogo no saiken ni mukete (Ryūkyūan and Premodern Japanese: Toward the Reconstruction of Proto-Japanese-Ryūkyūan), Hitsuji shobō, 2016, with Yukinori Takubo and Tatsuya Hirako). Whitman’s recent research has focused on the Gayogohó꞉nǫʔ (Cayuga) language, the original Haudenosaunee language of the Cayuga Lake region around Cornell, now spoken by less than ten first-language speakers on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. He was instrumental in establishing a Gayogohó꞉nǫʔ language program at Cornell and currently works with first and second-language speakers on the description and reclamation of this language.
https://linguistics.cornell.edu/john-b-whitman
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