Our colleague Norvin Richards had not one but two papers published last week!
The first, entitled “Reconstructing Stress in Wôpanâak”, appeared in the International Journal of American Linguistics. Here is the abstract:
Wôpanâak (also called Wampanoag, Massachusett, Natick), the original language of much of eastern Massachusetts, is known to us from a variety of seventeenth, and eighteenth-century documents, which mostly do not indicate the position of word-level stress. We do have one poem in Wôpanâak, a translation of the book of Psalms into verse. In this paper I present a description of the rules for stress in Wôpanâak, based largely on an analysis of the metrical version of Psalms.
In social media comments, Norvin thanked the members of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project “whose work on this language has been a constant inspiration for me” — and described the paper more informally this way:
It’s about how to figure out which syllable to stress in words in Wôpanâak, the language of the traditional owners of a lot of eastern Massachusetts. Figuring this out is a challenge, because the language spent over a century not being spoken at all, so we know it from 17th- and 18th- century documents, mostly religious documents, which don’t indicate stress. Fortunately, there is one surviving poem in Wôpanâak. Unfortunately, the poet in question was not a terrific poet, and the meter is very uneven. Fortunately, the poem is also very long! So if you are sufficiently stubborn, you can scrape together enough information to figure out the system.