{"id":1797,"date":"2010-10-04T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-04T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=1797"},"modified":"2010-10-04T05:32:51","modified_gmt":"2010-10-04T09:32:51","slug":"jessie-little-doe-baird-receives-macarthur-genius-grant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2010\/10\/04\/jessie-little-doe-baird-receives-macarthur-genius-grant\/","title":{"rendered":"Jessie Little Doe Baird receives MacArthur genius grant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jessie Little Doe Baird (SM, MIT Linguistics 2000), of the [W\u00f4pan\u00e2ak Language Reclamation Project](http:\/\/www.wlrp.org\/), has received a [MacArthur &#8220;genius grant&#8221;](http:\/\/www.macfound.org\/fellows\/2010\/baird). Background info on Baird appears in [a 2008 article](http:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/article\/20629\/) in the *Technology Review*. There is [a nice video](http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NEd0MiPUfbw) prepared by the MacArthur Foundation, [a *Boston Globe* article](http:\/\/www.boston.com\/lifestyle\/articles\/2010\/09\/28\/reviving_wampanoag_earns_linguist_a_genius_grant\/), a couple of paragraphs in [an MIT News item](http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/newsoffice\/2010\/macarthur-announce-0928.html), which includes quotes from Norvin Richards, who continues Ken Hale&#8217;s work with the project: <http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/norvin\/www\/wopanaak.html>. Here are Norvin&#8217;s remarks in full:<\/p>\n<p>>This award recognizes many years of enormously hard work in pursuit of a dream. It&#8217;s hard to imagine a better person to receive this grant! I joined the project in 1999 when I joined the faculty here; at that point, joining the project meant meeting regularly with Jessie and Ken in Ken&#8217;s office, poring over 17th-century W\u00f4pan\u00e2ak texts to try to understand what they could teach us about the grammar and vocabulary of the language. I am honored to still be part of the project today, working together with Jessie on a dictionary, a textbook, and a variety of other educational materials. Today, the project offers language classes at a variety of levels, staffed by Jessie and by her former language students, culminating in a summer Immersion Camp at which only W\u00f4pan\u00e2ak is spoken. Children are beginning to acquire the language as well, including Jessie&#8217;s own daughter Mae Alice Baird, raised by Jessie and her husband Jason entirely in W\u00f4pan\u00e2ak.<\/p>\n<p>>The world is currently in the middle of a massive wave of language extinction. Some linguists estimate that 90% of the world&#8217;s languages will vanish in the coming century. The indigenous languages of America are particularly hard hit. Against that backdrop, the success of the W\u00f4pan\u00e2ak Language Reclamation Project is a rare piece of good news. If Jessie succeeds, she will have shown that for languages, &#8216;death&#8217; is not permanent; with enough dedication and hard work, as long as a language is sufficiently well documented, we can hope to bring it back to life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jessie Little Doe Baird (SM, MIT Linguistics 2000), of the [W\u00f4pan\u00e2ak Language Reclamation Project](http:\/\/www.wlrp.org\/), has received a [MacArthur &#8220;genius grant&#8221;](http:\/\/www.macfound.org\/fellows\/2010\/baird). Background info on Baird appears in [a 2008 article](http:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/article\/20629\/) in the *Technology Review*. There is [a nice video](http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NEd0MiPUfbw) prepared by the MacArthur Foundation, [a *Boston Globe* article](http:\/\/www.boston.com\/lifestyle\/articles\/2010\/09\/28\/reviving_wampanoag_earns_linguist_a_genius_grant\/), a couple of paragraphs in [an MIT News [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1797"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1819,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797\/revisions\/1819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}