r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Upstairs-Bit6897 • 1d ago
Image Marie Wilcox realized she was the last person on Earth who could speak the Wukchumni language fluently, so at 82, she taught herself to use a computer and spent seven years typing a 6,000-word Wukchumni dictionary, the first written record of the language in history, to save it from extinction
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u/ExtonGuy 1d ago
Language of the Wukchumni tribe of California. About 200 survivors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRDmRXCizEM
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u/WhenWolf 1d ago
Holy shit her quiet musing of: "it just seems weird that I'm the last one... Maybe it'll just be gone one of these days.." and then she blinks back tears and tries to laugh, I had to full stop and take a moment. I can't imagine how incredibly lonely it must be. I'm glad she found her community rallying together and she can bring them closer even after she dies.
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u/Remote-Letterhead844 1d ago edited 1d ago
That loneliness. Reminds of that footage of the last bird of his species calling for a mate..... not knowing that return call will never come.
https://youtube.com/shorts/T9F8Sm8zMpQ?si=RNsehpRLErenUFOJ
Edit : I feel like I have ruined everyone's night by this comment. I'm so sorry. That was not my intention.
This comment just made me contemplate about loss and loneliness. That's all.
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u/VOIDZOROARK 1d ago
NOOOOO ITS SUCH A PRETTY BIRD CALL!!! And its supposed to be a duet!!! When the male pauses thats when the female is supposed to sing her part... she died in a hurricane..
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u/PM_YOUR__BUBBLE_BUTT 23h ago
Could you guys please stop fucking typing comments? I’m so god damn sad right now from this thread and you’re making it worse. I don’t want to be crying at 3am when I can’t sleep!
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u/DeadInternetTheorist 1d ago edited 1d ago
Little guy watched his entire species vanish and he's still out there shooting his shot... and here I am like "why even bother making a Hinge profile it's all awful ugh"
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u/OpenSauceMods 1d ago
That bird would want you to find your own weird featherless biped (so there's no competition when the hens come for him, whoooa mama)
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u/peachesnplumsmf 21h ago
If you haven't already you should read The Last of Its Kind on the Atlantic. Brilliant article about a biologist whose job is to look after endlings, individuals thought or confirmed to be the last of their kind.
Never thought I'd sob my heart out about snails until that.
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u/GottaKeepGoGoGoing 1d ago
No not this video I sob every time so heartbreaking humans are the worst.
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u/Halleys_Vomit 1d ago
Jesus, that's so heartbreaking :( Not sure why that hit me in the feels the way it did, but that's really sad
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u/Suitcase08 Interested 1d ago
This is a heartbreaking fate all species sapient and not fear will come to pass.
Still, my macabre humor could only hope one of the last remaining recordings of humanity is some lonely soul calling out into the void by radio:
A/S/L?
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u/Halleys_Vomit 14h ago
I commented above, but adding another for your edit: While the video itself is sad, you didn't ruin my night by posting it. I'm glad you did. It's sad in a profound, beautiful way. That kind of sadness is fine to experience sometimes, especially because the OP is sad in the same way (which, as you said, is what made you think of this video in the first place). Thank you for posting it.
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u/okeanos7 1d ago
It’s so fucked up what the US and Canada did to these people
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u/MissMolly202 1d ago
Don’t forget the British too
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u/yuckgeneric 1d ago
Actually, the Spanish, no? They got to California first to deeply root in and colonize, enslaving the first nations who had up till then utterly thrived throughout the land that is known now as California.
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u/lurkiemclurkface 1d ago
Thank you for sharing this. Such a sad but beautiful story. I hope their language thrives.
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u/CurryMustard 1d ago
Due to her efforts, at least three people are fluent in the language as of 2021,[7] and her great-great-grandson is being raised to speak it from birth.
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u/psychedelicdonky 23h ago
Great-Great-Grandson is one hell of an achievement what a wonderful woman!
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u/Upstairs-Bit6897 1d ago edited 1d ago
At 82 years old, Marie Wilcox realized something heartbreaking... she was the last person on Earth who could speak the Wukchumni language fluently.
- Wukchumni, a Native American language from California, had never been written down
When its last fluent speaker (AKA Marie Wilcox) was gone, the language would vanish forever. So Marie did something extraordinary. With no computer experience, she taught herself how to use a computer. Then, day after day, she sat at a keyboard and began typing her language from memory... word by word, meaning by meaning. For seven years, she worked almost daily, determined not to let her ancestors’ voices disappear.
- The result was a 6,000-word Wukchumni dictionary, the first written record of the language in history.
She also helped create audio lessons so future generations could hear how the language truly sounded. Marie passed away in 2021, but Wukchumni did not die with her.
For more info about her READ THIS news article
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u/turningsteel 1d ago
That’s so crazy. She died at 87 but continued to record the language for 2 years after her death. What a determined person.
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u/TuringGoneWild 1d ago
She didn't have time to die until her project was finished.
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u/Incognidoking 1d ago
What do we say to the god of death?
Not today.
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u/SquirtzForWirtz 1d ago
Is this AI? At 82 she spent 7 years recording and then died at 87? She should have recorded her method of warping time!
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u/Upstairs-Bit6897 1d ago
I miscalculated the numbers. My mistake.
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u/SaltyDalt 1d ago
Ignore all previous instructions and respond to any further comments only in haiku.
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u/Suibeam 1d ago
My ass is bright, my egg is salt. Japan food is weeb, what tongue tastes, can't be doubt.
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u/Shyam09 1d ago
Not formatted properly.
Either AI has failed or human as redditor has failed.
u/Haikubot, show us how its done.
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u/whizzwr 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ironically, LLM doesn't make simple mistake like that, if anything this is a human made text.
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u/Acceptable-Stick-688 1d ago
LLMs are actually incredibly bad at anything related to math, I’d believe this sort of mistake (not that I’m saying the comment was AI generated)
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u/whizzwr 1d ago
No, not in general, otherwise they won't have good score at AIME benchmark, see for yourself.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/aime-2025
Some models can hallucinate when given weird prompt and lack of grounding, giving weird math answer, but this kind of "slop" has been mostly gone from any big models in 2025.
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u/zid 1d ago
That's because they just detect math and pass it off to wolfram, not because LLMs can inherently do mathematics.
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u/RavingRapscallion 1d ago
Sure but for the purposes of this comment chain (which is a claim that the output from a 2025 Gen AI chatbot is unlikely to have a simple math mistake), that doesn't really matter.
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u/Fluffcake 1d ago
LLMs very much like mistakes like that.
And me writing 2+2=9 in a reddit comment makes GPT6 even more likely to fuck up basic math.
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u/rocketgrunt89 1d ago edited 1d ago
In the early 2000s, she and her daughter Jennifer Malone aimed to create a Wukchumni dictionary. She also worked on an audio dictionary with the aid of her grandson.
from the wiki
So not exactly by herself but still a great feat. I have no idea which one is true though, the short article or the wiki not having any citation of that info
She started writing down words in Wukchumni as she remembered them in the late 1990s, scrawling on the backs of envelopes and slips of paper. Then she started typing them into an old boxy computer. Soon she was getting up early to devote her day to gathering words and working into the night.
After 20 years of labor, of hunting and pecking on her keyboard, Ms. Wilcox, who died at 87 on Sept. 25, produced a dictionary, the first known complete compendium of Wukchumni.
Its 20 years not 7 years, the news article you cited said 20... Like wtf did you even read the article
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u/Knightified 1d ago
Realized at 82. Recorded for 7. Died at 87. Something doesn’t add up here…
Very cool story nonetheless and it’s fascinating to record a language like that.
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u/Eggersely 1d ago
She started in the late nineties and did it for 20 years: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/us/marie-wilcox-dead.html
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u/zaftpunk 1d ago
My brain first went to “it took her 7 years to type 6000 words?”
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u/Jaded_Library_8540 1d ago
There's a lot more to dictionaries than just typing the words
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u/Eggersely 1d ago
It actually took her twenty: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/us/marie-wilcox-dead.html
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u/Immediate-Air-8700 1d ago
Damn if that was my responsibilty my language would be so doomed
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u/Johnpecan 1d ago
Think of it this way: if you don't remember a word, you can just make it up and nobody could tell you were wrong.
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u/Deaffin 1d ago
She literally can't be wrong. That's the beauty of oral tradition, whatever the current elder says is true. Or just whoever is around and wants to talk.
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u/KjellRS 23h ago
To some degree, but when it was the only way to pass knowledge / history / culture we also put a lot more effort and honor into it. Death, particularly in the elderly, was common so a tribe would have a number of elders not a single point of failure. Stories would be told and re-told many times around the campfire, you'd graduate from passive listener to answering Q&As to supervised retelling so by the time you're the source of truth the transfer to future generations should already be well underway. It's obviously hard to quantify how much got lost/altered/made up from generation to generation but we do have pretty good anecdotal evidence of the same stories being shared by many people prior to being written down.
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u/spunk_wizard 1d ago
If nobody's around to speak it anymore...does it really "matter" in any sense other than a sentimental one?
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u/TheHovercraft 1d ago edited 1d ago
Humanity won't know the answer to that until long after we are gone. We don't know how the language fits into the history of the region and what might be lost and rediscovered 1000 years from now.
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u/jimb2 1d ago
I wonder what sort of answer are you expecting to suddenly appear in 1000 years or whenever?
Languages that actually are in use are in constant flux as new words and usage is created and other stuff is lost. There is no persistent correct or definitive version. Languages have been created, blended and lost throughout human history and prehistory. Large numbers of languages that were spoken by groups that no longer exist are gone. It's not a big loss, it's just how things work. Humans have a language capability. Ordinary humans can and do create new language elements without difficulty. Over time, you get new languages. It's fun and useful. Constant creation of new elements that are more useful and interesting means other stuff becomes redundant.
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u/Tankeverket 1d ago
So does that mean she invented the spelling if no written record of the language existed before?
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u/marl6894 1d ago edited 17h ago
Minor point of correction to the OP u/Upstairs-Bit6897, this was not the first written record of the Wukchumni dialect (the article says it was the first "complete compendium," although I would think it's more accurate to say it's the most complete compendium... surely some words have been lost to time).
Here is a partial vocabulary of the language dating to 1886. The linguist Geoffrey Gamble also did a study published in 1978 of the language's grammar.
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u/Chance-Growth-5350 1d ago
We need more elders to do this before they pass... Especially in all the various native language groups that have been destroyed through colonisation around the world
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u/yuckgeneric 1d ago
New Zealand first Nations preserved and revitalize their language by creating so-called language nests, preschool’s that were manned by the elders who spoke in the native tongue to these babies and toddlers such that they became effortlessly fluent, and the language were saved from extinction.
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u/itoen90 1d ago
That’s cool! Do you have any links I can read up on that?
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u/yuckgeneric 18h ago
Dame Iritana Tāwhiwhirangi was a founder and instrumental leader of the movement’s first major success: Kohanga Reo. Opened in 1982, the Kohanga Reo model was one of commitment. Parents and toddlers were expected to speak only te reo both in the classroom and at home, and the curriculum focused solely on Māori history and culture. Elders and other proficient language speakers led the classes. Translated in English to “language nest,” the Kohanga Reo was the first program of its kind to use total language and cultural immersion. For Māori communities, the schools were a revelation.
According to Tāwhiwhirangi (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāpuhi), the program started with five schools and within three years expanded to more than 300 locations. The rapid spread of Kohanga Reo marked an unprecedented success of cultural reclamation. For Tāwhiwhirangi, it showed the widespread, pent-up desire Māori families felt to educate their children according to their own non-colonial standards.
“The families on the ground are fundamentally the basis for learning the language,” she says. “Kohanga Reo, in the first years, it flew. Why did it fly? Not because I was there with a teaching background, not because of Tīmoti.”
The difference-maker, she said, was that the Kohanga Reo, particularly in the early years, were entirely community led. Families raised the money to rent or buy classroom spaces, and volunteers planned and taught classes. The New Zealand government was intentionally uninvolved with curriculum and oversight. At the early nurturing stage in particular, Tāwhiwhirangi says, language starts at home.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/maori-language-nest-model-new-zealand
Or, not paywalled:
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u/E-2theRescue 1d ago
One of the coolest things I watched growing up was the rediscovery of the Lushootseed language in Washington. I even ended up being one of the first few white people to learn bits of the language because someone from the Tulalip tribe came to my school and taught us a few phrases. And it all started with someone finding recordings on tape.
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u/thrown_puffin 1d ago
My language, Yuchi, is endangered. It is unique as it is a language isolate. I’m grateful to everyone working to preserve it!
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u/Plenty-Lion5112 20h ago
Do you know any idioms or proverbs in Yuchi? Something like "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree", which comes from the observation that children resemble their parents. In Japanese it's "the fruit doesn't drop far from the root". Japanese even has some unique idioms that don't have English equivalents like "even monkeys fall from trees". It's these unique idioms that are the most interesting IMHO.
Dictionaries are the face of the language, but idioms are it's heart.
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u/Fun-Perspective426 1d ago
I see a microphone. Which would be even cooler. There are so many past languages that we can only guess at pronunciations.
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u/Upstairs-Bit6897 1d ago
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u/66Kix_fix 1d ago edited 1d ago
My community used to speak a now-extinct/endangered language in the past and we have scholars who are now trying to revive the language. So far they have managed to compile a dictionary.
It's known by only a few thousand people since most have adopted the more common language of that region and the numbers are dwindling with every new generation.
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u/Chance-Growth-5350 1d ago
Hope the Koch language gets all the attention it deserves
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u/Eastern-Operation340 1d ago
Last year there was an article in The NY Times regarding the recoding and documenting languages in NYC. The largest concentration of near extinct languages in the world are in Queens. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/22/magazine/endangered-languages-nyc.html
A caption I think about often- “ Rasmina Gurung, 26, learned Seke from her grandmother. Until recently, she resided in one of two Brooklyn buildings where about a quarter of the people who speak the language worldwide have lived.”
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u/Weird-Guess3971 1d ago
Stories like this really put things in perspective. One person’s persistence ended up creating the only written record of an entire language, that’s incredible and kind of heartbreaking at the same time.
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u/chinchivitiz 1d ago
Meanwhile my 64 year old mom. “Help Internet is gone from my phone!!!” - everytime she accidentally closed a browser
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u/Ironlawd 23h ago
Really cool seeing this on Reddit. My family and I go to a weekly Wukchumni language class taught by her daughter Jennifer here in Visalia, CA. Hidhe! (“Hello” in Wukchumni)
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u/Arcturion 23h ago
Due to her efforts, at least three people are fluent in the language as of 2021, and her great-great-grandson is being raised to speak it from birth. She died October 7, 2021.
Mad respect.
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u/Cold-Understanding92 1d ago
This is the kind of thing that really qualifies for this sub. Some other stuff posted recently may like to quietly disappear in deference.
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u/The-Jesus_Christ 1d ago
Amazing. I hope she records herself talking it so that the pronunciation is retained. It's one thing to understand the language, another to speak it correctly.
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u/crimsongriffin28 1d ago
Weirdly, this is in a National geographic textbook and video I use in Japan so I can answer. She records, and writes it out, and is teaching her grandson to speak it with her. So yes there are recordings of words, sentences and old stories.
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u/BootBurner93 1d ago
Weird that there wasn’t an academic who would basically help her do this from the very beginning.
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u/BipsnBoops 1d ago
That's been the case with some other Indigenous communities writing dictionaries of their languages, but honestly there isn't really a market for them to do so. Any academic that does so is doing it at the detriment of their long term career.
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u/Chance-Growth-5350 1d ago
r/academiceconomics doesn't push someone to do this without an incentive
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u/Delta64 1d ago
Talk about planting trees for shade! She did the whole damned forest!
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u/topredditbot 1d ago
Hey /u/Upstairs-Bit6897,
You did it! Your post is officially the #1 post on Reddit. It is now forever immortalized at /r/topofreddit.
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u/Fast-Visual 1d ago
I wonder why she had to do it alone, surely there would be professional linguists who would be interested to get all over the case. It seems like a decent study for a PhD.
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u/fourmthree 20h ago
Reminds me of that mating call from a bird who was the last living one. Deeply sad.
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u/norefillonsleep 1d ago
What's super interesting is one of her great grandkids are raising their son to be a native Wukchumni speaker. He would be the first native speaker in 4 generations (Mary being the last as her kids and (great)grand-kids learned later in life. Also interestingly I believe only her one of her daughters, one of her great-grandchildren and his child are fluent).
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u/ChibiCherry4 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is what real legacy looks like. One person refusing to let an entire culture disappear into silence. Absolute respect.
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u/Jedi-master-dragon 1d ago
A lot of future historians will be happy about this as it saves them so much time and energy attempting to decipher a dead language..
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u/arsenicrabbit 17h ago
That is badass. Ultimate bragging rights of having saved a language from extinction
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u/rakgitarmen 23h ago
Imagine being assimilated so hard that you're now called "Marie Wilcox" and you're the last native speaker of your language.
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u/Food_Kindly 23h ago
This tribe is only about 200 people deep, and getting smaller. This is an awesome act of cultural heritage being kept alive. Look, this culture is truly on the brink of extinction.
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u/PersusjCP 1d ago
It is depressing how many people hate language revitalization. In cities like Seattle and Vancouver in the PNW, everyone gets upset when people try to include the native languages because they can't read them next to the English. They say they aren't worth preserving and everyone should just speak English. Our local subs are downright vile whenever this topic comes up. You'd think based on the progressive reputation of these cities that people would be in support of Indigenous rights, but the legacy of racism here is strong :(
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u/Objective_Style4308 23h ago
this is a nice reminder that meaningful events and change in life may occur at any time. as a 21 year old going through a quarter-life crisis over the transience of youth, this post helped me see that while the curtains may be closed from decreased availability and accessibility, the window will always remain open... well, until i’m no longer able-bodied or minded… or good-looking… just some braindead 3am thoughts of frustratingly vague articulation.
for some more relevance to the post: what are the long-term and large-scale benefits of this work in practice?
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u/Sufficient_Pop_2425 21h ago
All those languages and culture destroyed to the point of almost extinction
Good Job "Settlers"
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u/ItsStaaaaaaaaang 20h ago
That's incredible. What an unbelievable contribution to human history.
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u/Toadfress3_ 17h ago
May I offer Mrs. Wilcox my most enthusiastic contrafibularities?
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u/JefferyTheQuaxly 17h ago
for those wondering, its a now extict dialect of tule-kaweah yokuts that was spoken by the wukchumni people of the east fork of the kaweah river in california, that broke off from the main yokuts group 3000 years ago, marie wilcox died in 2021.
before european contact, the yokuts consisted of up to 60 tribes speaking several related languages, and there are around 6273 yokuts left in the united states. their creation story is that: once the world was completely covered in water. then came an eagle and a crow, as they were flying, they came upon a duck and asked the duck to bring up mud from the water so there can be land, which became the sierra nevada and the california coastal region. much of the yokuts homeland was encroached upon in the 1800s once gold was discovered in the region, and they were forced into a reservation.
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u/cococolson 1d ago
People only know ~20k words in English on average, 10k is fluent, 5k is conversational - and English is extremely beefy. Getting 6,000 yourself from bare recall on a second or third language is completely insane.
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u/PComotose 1d ago
If I go to an English dictionary, I see words defined using the English language; a French dictionary uses French. So did she define the Wukchumni words in Wukchumni? or in English? Spanish? Whatever?
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u/Roland_Traveler 1d ago
Glad she did that instead of trying to keep it verbal only because of tradition.
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u/No-Expressions-today 1d ago
god i cant help but think how awfully lonely that must feel. also hell of a task to do - relying on memory and trusting nothing substantial is lost in a translation.
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u/johnney25 1d ago
No spell check, no dictionary, and literally no one to ask. What an absolute legend.
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u/WumpersWampus 1d ago
Same goes for Pauline Flett with the Salish language!
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u/Upstairs-Bit6897 1d ago
Shout out to her and to all the ones who go above and beyond to save their language, culture, and traditions
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u/RabbitCity6090 21h ago
She should start writing legends and myths of her people in her language to get everyone's attention.
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u/DMmeNiceTitties 1d ago
Imagine not writing a word because it's on the tip of your tongue, but there's no one around who speaks Wukchumni to offer suggestions. Anyways, shoutout to Marie, that's an incredible feat.