{"id":255,"date":"2010-12-15T00:05:39","date_gmt":"2010-12-15T08:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.savagenobles.com\/?p=255"},"modified":"2010-12-15T00:05:39","modified_gmt":"2010-12-15T08:05:39","slug":"the-education-of-hopi-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/?p=255","title":{"rendered":"The Education of Hopi, Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

The native American pueblo into which Theo has been welcomed (?) is fictional, but I modeled it after the villages of the Hopi. The Hopi are from northeastern Arizona, so placing a similar tribe in southern New Mexico is a bit of a stretch, but I have been so fascinated by the Hopi since I first read about them in a middle school American history textbook that I couldn\u2019t pass up the opportunity to include them in my desert epic. Their art and culture, the songs and dances of their religion, their groovy adobe villages that spring out from the mesas like mushrooms from a tree stump \u2013 it\u2019s all extremely cool\u2026 you know, when you get past the miserable tragedy. And even if it would remain untranslated, I really wanted to include some snippets of the Hopi language.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I was reading reviews online for the Hopi Dictionary\/Hopiikwa Lavaytutuveni<\/a>, which apparently is one of the best translation-dictionaries of any <\/em>language in the entire linguistics community. I knew I\u2019d never be able to afford this sucker, but to my delight there was a copy at the central Multnomah County Library.<\/p>\n

It is indeed an exhaustive tome. But since it\u2019s only a dictionary and not a book of grammar, I had no way of constructing the sentences I wanted to place in the mouths of my characters. My compromise was to look up individual words that might possibly relate to my desired dialogue, and see if the example sentence could conceivably work. I was expecting \u201cWhere is Maria? Maria is in the library.\u201d What I got were complex and interesting sentences which proved surprisingly appropriate to my story. Here are the dictionary example sentences used in my comic, which the elder uses to shoo Theo away on page 96:<\/p>\n

\u201cYup\u00e1y, yam\u00e1ku\u2019u. Nu\u2019 pay son pew Pahanmuy tangatani\u201d<\/strong> \u2013 Go on, get out. I\u2019m not going to admit Anglos here.<\/em><\/p>\n

And which the Indians murmur while gathered around the Theo as he eats on page 97:<\/p>\n

\u201cVelakaana? Kastiilam?\u201d<\/strong> \u2013 An American? A Mexican?<\/em> (The Hopi word for \u201cMexican\u201d is the same as the word for \u201cSpaniard,\u201d and you can see that it\u2019s derived from the word \u201cCastilian.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cPam so\u2019oosouik q\u00f6muit akw tsoqa\u2019asi\u2019y tangwu.\u201d<\/strong> \u2013 He is painted all over with black body paint.<\/em> (no, those are tattoos!)<\/p>\n

\u201cPas pam himu son suup haqam nakwhani\u2019y tangwu.\u201d<\/strong> \u2013 He\u2019s one who just can\u2019t seem to stay in any one place.<\/em> (This could be Theo\u2019s entire biography. Or Tonya\u2019s!)<\/p>\n

\u201cPuma pas qu atsat lalakharum.\u201d<\/strong> \u2013 He is excessively skinny.<\/em> (fair enough)<\/p>\n

\u201cUm okiw hin ewayhoya.\u201d<\/strong> \u2013 You poor, ugly little thing.<\/em> (Hey!)<\/p>\n

So hopefully from these few rudimentary snippets, you can see there\u2019s a lot more to this language than the “Koyaanisqatsi”<\/a> of Phillip Glass\u2019s film score.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The native American pueblo into which Theo has been welcomed (?) is fictional, but I modeled it after the villages of the Hopi. The Hopi are from northeastern Arizona, so placing a similar tribe in southern New Mexico is a bit of a stretch, but I have been so fascinated by the Hopi since I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.everettpatterson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}