A Dictionary in the Archives
2016; Routledge; Volume: 21; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13528165.2016.1223456
ISSN1469-9990
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Linguistics and Language Studies
Resumo'A Dictionary in the Archives' investigates First Nations and French transcriptions of Indigenous languages through the Chaumonot manuscript held at Brown University's John Carter Brown Library. This approach responds to diffuse narrative arcs regarding colonization that, through the writing of Carlos Ulises Deceno, I term 'tacit historiography.' In light of the move to revive North American languages repressed in the course of colonization, I address recently authored histories of North-Eastern and North-Central North America—here, modern day Ontario, Oklahoma, Quebec and Michigan—alongside the path-setting work of Wendat First Nations linguist Megan Lukaniec, poet, scholar and historian Georges E. Sioui and teacher and translator John Steckley. Reviving what Lukaniec calls the 'slumbering' language of Wendat/Wyandotte, a language Euro-American scholars previously described as 'extinct,' involves drawing from seventeenth-century French translations and transcriptions in archives in order to return the language to everyday use. This reflection on the Chaumonot manuscript, as well as Gabriel Sagard's 1632 phrasebook of French and 'Huron,' attends to codexes' materiality as well as to the social and embodied movements of reading's structural and scriptive codes. I investigate performatives and performance structures in the texts, theorizing 'trans-scriptive things' in the archives to address translation/transcription in cross-cultural, cross-linguistic and cross-temporal contexts. This work investigates Robin Bernstein's study of the 'scriptive thing' in Racial Innocence (2011) as well as Mel Chen's conceptual and linguistic 'ontologizing' structures (2012). Here, trans/performance traces the force of movements across and between languages as well as between spoken and written systems of memory, including the impact of translations on nonbinary gender and matrilineal authority.
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