Talk:Red Thunder Cloud

impostor?

". . . if he spoke the language after all of the native speakers died out, and nobody else could do so, then SC can't see what's wrong with identifying him as the last speaker of the language prior to his death. If the author seriously means that only people who are genetically related to the original language group count as ‘speakers of a language’, then it's impossible to distinguish between speech and race. Given that SC has friends of a variety of races whose English is uniformly better than their command of their ancestral languages — many of which they have only learned in school — your host thinks that this opinion is ludicrous. Aside from legitimizing crude ethnic slurs (like insinuating that people of Asian ancestry can't keep their ls and rs straight), this implies that there is something false or inferior about people learning to speak a language that wasn't spoken in their home growing up. SC thinks this is patronizing and bigoted . . . ." [1] —Tamfang 00:19, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

He claimed to be a "the last native speaker", but he wasn't native thus the imposter category. 148.63.236.141 20:58, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Also, his competence in the language is seriously doubtful, reading Goddard's account. While he did claim to speak the language, it appears that he was really stretching the definition of what it means to speak a language: In two or three hours of elicitation he obtained a couple of dozen Catawba words and somewhat fewer numbers, covering slightly more than three pages of a small exam book. His recollection years later was that Red Thunder Cloud knew considerably more than this, "between 100 and 250 words, ... numeral count up to ten, and occasional short expressions." That's a very generous standard. I wouldn't count anyone as a speaker of a language, not even a half-speaker, at best a rememberer, if all they can do is chucking out a couple of dozen words, numbers and perhaps short expressions, but no morphosyntax, which is necessary to productively use a language and lead at least conversations on simple topics – which apparently even John Davey was able to do in Cornish, although he's not usually credited as a speaker; at the very least, he was able to reproduce words and phrases, and at least one text not known from any other source, the rhyme. West didn't even know any coherent texts in Catawban, apparently. Also, it's unclear where West acquired his (extremely limited, according to my standards) knowledge of Catawba from. If he really gleaned the words from books, rather than learning them from other native speakers, I could be the last speaker (or even last native speaker, if we loosen our standards like that) of a helluva lot of languages thought to be long extinct very quickly and easily. So, learning a language means learning a couple of words and perhaps stock phrases by heart? Not even coherent texts, much less grammar/morphosyntax or productive use? Standards this low are doubtless the reason for the proliferation of polyglots. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:51, 4 October 2011 (UTC)