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Day 10: Take your courage and dance!



It’s Friday, and I spent most of the day analysing multilingual books, but also some bilingual books featuring English and an indigenous language, and I’d like to share two of these with you:

One is from Taiwan- Where is Mom? Wada inu ka Bubu da? (Huang, 2016) is a story told in English and Truku, an Indigenous Taiwanese language which was only officially recognised by the Chinese government in 2004. The story is of a little girl whose mother does not return from gathering plants and ferns in the mountains one day. She imagines all sorts of terrible things have happened (a bear, a snake bite) but the next day her mother returns safely after having to spend the night in a cave due to fog. She has to go straight to the market to sell her plants before they wilt, but the little girl knows her mother will face no danger in town, and will be safely home that night. The illustrations are vibrant and it seems there were made with children from the Truku community. I was fascinated to read more about this indigenous community.

The second is from Ontario Canada- Sarcelle Le chant qui enleve la peur/Te’wayahkerondih ayiatsih (Pare, 2015) is what would be classified as an interlingual dual language picturebooks. Pare retells a traditional Wyandot fairytale wherein a little girl has a close relationship with her mother and then, when her grandmother has died and she is facing difficult times, she dreams to keep in touch with her grandmother. The outer of the picturebook has a front cover with the title in French and Wyandot, a native American Iroquoian language of Ontario, last spoken by people in Oklahoma and Quebec. From what I can tell, this language has no living native speakers, but please correct me if I am wrong on that. In the body of the picturebook the text is completely in French with the word for grandmother borrowed from Wyandot: Ashiouta’a, and one line of code switching when Saracelle (the main character) hears her grandmother saying to her ‘Take your courage and dance!’: Tishek yashe’ta yastawen’cha chia’ tsas! (no page).

So that is the end of week 2. I feel that I am making good progress, and really enjoying this place of work- the people, the books, and the beautiful cooked lunches every day. Tonight I stayed for the 6pm service at the Blutenberg chapel, just to soak up the atmosphere of the beautiful 15th century chapel with frescoes and amazing icons. Of course it was a catholic service, but there were many many familiar parts to it from someone who has been to many many Anglican services over the last few years.

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