Tim Benninghoff

What’s an LRP, you might ask?  According to Greg Thomson, it’s a Language Resource Person.  My job has been kind enough to let me work from home on Tuesdays, in part because I have early morning calls with our staff in India.  Fortuitously this means that I’m at home and done with work early enough that we can meet with our LRP on a schedule that works for him, on Tuesdays at 4 pm.

He won the girls over immediately by bringing them presents; 2 coloring books and some watercolors for painting in them.  Hinų sat down and immediately started painting, and Wihą quickly followed suit.  We talked a little bit about how the girls would refer to him, and how though he’s old enough to be their grandpa, they technically could call him brother because of his relationship to their Gaga xete, and he could technically call my wife ’little mother’.  We settled on Coka, grandfather, though.

My wife and I had no idea how it was going to go.  We didn’t talk with our LRP about a plan.  Coka launched right into using Hoocąk in every interaction with the girls, and they really started to show off in front of him, but didn’t really repeat any words in Hoocąk.  We struggled to keep up, trying to write down everything that he said, but quickly started to see the folly of that method.  The point was to speak the language, not write it down for later reference, and so we gave up trying to write things down, except in those rare instances where we really wanted to be able to reference a phrase or a word later.  We were kicking ourselves for having misplaced our digital audio recorder and not being able to record our session.  That’s a mistake will correct for next time.

We talked briefly about colors, and our LRP told us the literal translation of components of the words, which not only gave us a great mnemonic device for remembering them, but also taught us some other root words that we could use in other context.  For instance, co, in a sense, means blue, and so you add to co to specify what color you really mean, mąąhįco, sky blue, xąąwįco, grass ’blue’, and haapsįcco, grape ’blue’.  Of course, you can see that calling co ’blue’ doesn’t really quite cover what it means.  My scientific mind says that co really means the higher wavelengths of visible light, and we just pair it up to a thing so we can describe the vicinity of that wavelength that we really mean.  Another way that I would think about it is that co can really just mean blue, but sometimes in needs some ’help’ to really zero in on what color you mean.  In the color theme, we also learned the etymology of pink, casakšokąwą, and learned about how yellow, orange, and tan follow a similar principal as co, but with zii, yellow, as the basis.

We learned about the power of jagu, what, and how you can build so many simple, quick phrases from it.  Jagu rooragu?  What do you want?  Complicated words like book,wagax hakiruxara, blew right past us.

I stepped into the minefield of how the position of an object affects a question which seems so simple in English, ’What is that?’.  I couldn’t keep up with the positional way of asking the question, so our LRP was kind enough to provide us with a relatively simpler way of asking the same question (please forgive my spelling) using a form of jagu wawigaire, which I think means roughly ’what do you call this thing?’  That isn’t even that simple, because there are different ways to put that phrase together, depending on your distance from the object; te’e if you’re touching it, že’e if it’s sorta close, and ga’a if it’s farther away.

Anyway, there was so much more that we were exposed to.  I’d like to say learned, but it’s going to take more repetition than one session to absorb it all.  I’d like to think down a wall in the back of my mind by saying ’hey, you can speak this way every day, and it isn’t weird.  You’re going to suck at it to start, but we’re just going to throw Hoocąk fast and furious around you like you’re a little kid, and your mind is eventually going to get it.’

The biggest payoff, though, wasn’t in what my wife or I had learned from the generosity of our LRP coming to our house, but rather what Hinų learned.  Hours later after our LRP had left, Hinų scolded Wihą.  Pinaje, Wihą!  Ka, Wihą!  Nearly 3-year-old Hinų has generally been resistant to our use of Hoocąk, sometimes even scolding us with ’don’t talk like that!’.  But, here she was, only hours after Coka’s visit, scolding her sister in Hoocąk.  Beautiful.

On Labor Day weekend we went, as we usually did every Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend, to visit my father-in-law.  It was only the third time he got to see our youngest daughter.  He asked us about the drive up, how the traffic was, if the car was running ok.  We small talked.  He said things like ‘what beautiful singing!’ when our daughter would cry.  I showed off my latest ‘trick’.  ‘Hinu, jah goo yah, zhay xay day?’  ‘Chair!’  ‘Jah goo yah, zhay xay day?’ ‘Puppy!’  We talked about the Ho-chunk language; practiced some words.  I wasn’t persistent.  We had plenty of time, and there would be plenty more visits.

A little over a week ago, he was struck by a car while driving his ATV, and killed.  The loss is a terrible personal one for us, and, in ways I will probably never understand, a terrible loss for the Ho-Chunk tribe.  I’ve read and heard various estimates along these lines; of the 8,000 to 12,000 Ho-Chunk and Winnebago that remain, less than 200 are native speakers of the language, and all of those speakers are older than 60.  Linguists would characterize the language as being in the last stages of extinction.

Jah jee would often tell me that his elders had told him of the day when the language would die, and with it the Ho-Chunk’s world.  I thought there was a generation or two or three, easy, before that might happen.  I’ve been told that day is as close as 10 to 15 years.  I’ve been a fool.  Woe wunk would be a kind way to put it.

As we mourned Jah jee’s passing, I was included in the ceremonies in a way I had never been before, not in the 14 years I’ve known my wife and her family.  Stories that Jah jee had told me years ago, maybe even a decade earlier, started to make sense, and yet I still felt that I was just a little child when trying to understand what was happening around me.  I’ve had extreme difficulties explaining it to my white friends.  It’s a mindset, a wisdom, that is completely outside my experience, and one I will never completely understand.  There’s no set of instructions, no rulebook.  Why would you even think there should be one?

Jah jee loved the Ho-Chunk.  He loved the language.  The two are inseparable.  And he loved the land on which he was born, lived, and died.

Let good come from evil, the elders said at the ceremonies.  I balk to use the word ‘ceremonies’.  It’s a crude metaphor that stands arrogantly in the place where the real description of how Jah jee began his path home should be.  Regardless, let good come from evil.  But how?  I’m just a ‘my xka day’.

We’re going to try to be part of the good.  My wife and I have talked a great deal about it, and we’d like our house to be a Ho-Chunk speaking one.  We’re approaching this goal with renewed purpose, but also hopefully approaching it with a strategy for success.

A new friend pointed us in the direction of some resources to help us achieve our goal.  First, a website about learning languages, www.languageimpact.com.  My wife and I have been reading the articles by Greg Thomson and it’s been an eye opener.  It explains why we’ve had such meager success as a result of our previous efforts, helped us more accurately size up the challenge, and encouraged us that, despite the difficulty and complexity of our relative circumstances, it is possible to learn the language with an effective strategy.

We’re still wrapping our heads around what our complete strategy will be, but for now, while we iron out that strategy and try to put it into place, we have a mini-task of learning 5 new words every week day, with Saturday and Sunday being our review days for the words we learned over the week.  We have no illusions that this alone will make us Hocak speakers.  It’s just a measure to keep us going while we look at the other aspects of our strategy, such as time commitment, connecting to community, and so forth that Greg Thomson’s articles talked about.  We’re collecting the tools we’ll need.

Secondly, just this year a Hocak-English dictionary and some accompanying texts for analysis and translation have been published, and we purchased them both.  Not a moment too soon!

We’ve a bunch more resources to go through, and I’ll be sure to mention them as we go through them.