|
 |
Biography
Alpha-man: Student creates first-ever alphabet for African language
EMU graduate Steven Moran lived three months without running water and electricity. The mud-brick building he called home was in a remote African village about as far as from his boyhood home in Milan, Mich., as possible. But the sacrifices he made, including bouts of painful sickness and indescribable meals made from bats and monkey, paid off with a scientific coup: the mapping of an endangered language.
Moran’s work on the Western Sisaala language, spoken by several thousand residents in the Upper West Region of Ghana, became his recently completed EMU master’s thesis. The efforts were a work of passion, fueled by his love of travel, language and the world of linguistics opened to him as an undergraduate and graduate student.
“For me, linguistics was a way to learn about language through scientific means so when I went to teach, I had a broader understanding of how language works,” said Moran, 25. “But once I got into the linguistics program, I found out about The LINGUIST List and started getting interested in endangered languages. After volunteering for awhile, I was offered student employment, which led to my graduate assistantship, which led to my master’s.”
During his three-month stay in Ghana, Moran recorded elicitation sessions and stories as told by native speakers on a battery-powered MP3 player. He then used his knowledge of linguistics to analyze the language data to transliterate the sounds into the first-of-its-kind alphabet for Western Sisaala, using letters borrowed from English and Dagaare, an indigenous language of the region taught in schools. To test his theories, villagers read the stories written using the new alphabet. The comprehension was nearly crystal clear. “It really worked out well. Just to see someone read their language for the first time, knowing there are no books or materials – that was very special. It was pretty intense,” Moran said.
The idea to study Western Sisaala first surfaced in the winter of 2002 during a field-methods course at Wayne State University. At that time, EMU did not offer the course, but now does. In it, budding linguists learn the science of collecting and analyzing data to document and describe a language. A Western Sisaala speaker, Michael Alandu, a doctoral student at WSU, was brought in as the course’s language informant.
"I worked with a little bit of the data from the fields-methods course as a basis, but due to Michael’s father’s employment, he had not spent much time in the village. Michael did not command the Sisaala language like natives who had grown up in the village, so I went to Ghana to start from scratch,” Moran said. “Through him, I made my contacts in the village.”
Moran saved money by working as a waiter and beer merchandiser and paid for the trip himself, setting off in May 2003. Once in Ghana, he journeyed more than 18 hours by bus along hundreds of miles of dirt roads to reach the village of Lambussie, the Sisaala’ tribe living in it, and the mud-brick building he would call home.
Moran came to EMU in 1997 to study German. He expanded his interest in languages to include linguistics and TESOL, or Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. He eventually learned of The LINGUIST List and the E-MELD project, which is a federally-funded effort to preserve endangered languages’ data through the creation and dissemination of standards for digital language documentation. A graduate assistantship soon followed.
He recently arrived at the University of Washington in Seattle to pursue a doctoral degree in computational linguistics and learn even more about technology’s role in understanding and saving languages. “Present estimates are that a language becomes extinct every two weeks. Using and developing new computer technologies increases how many languages we can help preserve and document,” he said.
-- reprinted from Exemplar: The Magazine of Eastern Michigan University, Fall 2005
|
|
