Listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/projectenable
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, take a photo of language pretending to hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa - but what language doesn’t know until too late is that I deliberately framed it wrong so it just looks like language is standing in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa holding its arm out like a little teapot.
Earlier this year I attended a dictionary conference - yes! Heaven is a place on Earth, Belinda Carlisle must also have been to the Dictionary Society of North America’s biennial conference. I learned a lot and met some very interesting people working in lexicography, and over this and the next couple of episodes, you’ll hear from some of them.
Content note: this episode contains fleeting references to medical conditions including cancer and COVID, but not any descriptions or experiences thereof. It’s an upbeat episode about a great project combining science and lexicography.
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On with the show.
STERLING MARTIN: My PhD thesis was looking at embryonic development using C. elegans, which is a type of worm.
HZ: Cool.
STERLING MARTIN: Basically, we studied worms as a way of teasing apart different genetic networks to figure out what can help an embryo develop and then apply what we learn into like other organisms such as mice and humans and as fish.
HZ: So how did you go from worms to lexicography?
STERLING MARTIN: That's a really good question.
My name is Sterling Martin. I'm currently a postdoc research associate at Washington University in St. Louis, and I'm one of the cofounders of Project ENABLE, where our goal is to help create science words in the Navajo language. So people can learn biology who are non scientists, but English is also not their first language.
Growing up, I've always had an interest in science and that's something my family helped nurture. Also just growing up, there weren't many Navajo words in science. Then I went to undergrad at the University of Iowa and my parents were like, "Oh, what are you doing?" And I worked in a research lab, so I could get some bench experience, and just trying to explain to them what I was doing scientifically, I could tell they weren't really catching on to what it meant. This continued all the way until grad school. I've always was looking for ways to give back as a Navajo person.
And then COVID19 hit, and a lot of indigenous communities were hard hit because communicating these novel - I'll say novel - science terms to them was just an issue. So that's where we finally got together and we were like, "Hey, let's try to contribute something." And that's where ENABLE came from.
HZ: What does ‘ENABLE’ stand for?
STERLING MARTIN: Oh yeah! ENABLE stands for Enriching Navajo as a Biology Language for Education.
HZ: Go to Project ENABLE’s website enablenavajo.org, and you’ll see a bilingual lexicon of science terms - Diné to English, and English to Diné - Diné Bizaad means the Navajo language.
HZ: So when you were starting it, what were the first steps and what were the priorities at the beginning of the project?
STERLING MARTIN: I guess number one would be just finding what words we were going to use to translate, and then second step we did concurrently was trying to find a Navajo linguist, somebody who speaks the language, but can also translate these words. So those were the two priorities we had.
HZ: How did you choose which words?
STERLING MARTIN: That’s a really good question. Originally coming into this being so naive being like, "Oh, we can just hit the ground running," we got an AP science textbook that's used in like high school curriculum and we just went to the back of that and picked all those words. But then after doing some research, Susana Wadgymar, who's the other co-founder - she's a professor at Davidson College - she did some reading and actually found in the literature that middle school is where that transition from using general terms to more specific complex terms, that kind of transition is when students start losing interest in science. So we took a step back for two reasons: one is because the literature was saying maybe this isn't the best place to start if you're trying to educate people. But also: a thousand words for one person to try to translate? We were like, “That's not going to happen.”
HZ: Yeah. So how did you narrow it down?
STERLING MARTIN: From that list, we ended up getting in contact with some high school teachers on the Navajo reservation, describing the project to them and saying like, "Of these words, can you pick high priority words and then like rank them?" And then from that is where we got originally about 150 words that they were like, “These are the words that we could use in our classroom to help teach students and community members science.”
And then from there, as we were going through the word list, making the definitions and the example sentences, some words come in pairs. If you have a proton, you need an electron, so we had to make sure we had those. We had some words in, like, the cell cycle that we just needed to put all of them in. And then from some words, when we had the definition, we were like, "Well, we need to define this word." So that's how we ended up getting 250 at the end.
HZ: It sounds like it evolved further than COVID vocabulary. Because I was just thinking, do I know what protons and electrons would have to do with not getting COVID? I don't!
STERLING MARTIN: Yeah. Originally we were going for COVID, but then after seeing what the teachers picked, we were like, “Maybe this should just be a general science dictionary for everybody to understand and get a basis for science.”
It's a community effort. We didn't go in saying, "You need these words," we actually asked people back home, "What would help you best?" The big thing about this is it wasn't a one person effort or a one team effort. Everybody contributed something to it. I'm a biologist. I have no training in linguistics, but yet we were able to help in our own way with language revitalization, and I think that's something beautiful in that everybody can do something.
HZ: Multiple generations of Sterling Martin's family were involved in the project.
STERLING MARTIN: Yeah, my mom was a big help because she worked at the hospital so she was able to track down some resources for us. And then we got my grandma and my dad on board because just having more people involved who speak different versions of Navajo is important. My mom speaks like the Arizona variety and my dad speaks the New Mexican, so having those two be able to make sure they can both understand the word; and then my grandma, who's like been speaking Navajo her entire life, going in to make sure that she still understands what the basis of the word is, was important.
HZ: Sterling and his family spent three days recording themselves saying the science terms for the Project ENABLE lexicon. And they received a useful prompt from another member of the team, web developer Ira Fich.
STERLING MARTIN: We went to the recording studio, and we recorded the Navajo words and then the English pronunciation of it because Mr. Fich brought up like, "You all hear these words every day, but I don't know how to say some of those words," and I was like, "That's something we forgot about."
HZ: They have now recorded all the words in Navajo and English and the recordings are being gradually added to the dictionary at enablenavajo.org. You’ll hear some of them later this episode.
STERLING MARTIN: There are over 300,000 Navajo members. A majority of them live on the Navajo Reservation, which covers Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. And I think about half of those speak Navajo, although not everybody is fluent. The people who are fluent tend to be like my grandparents’ generation and my mom and dad’s generation. And then a few people from my generation grew up speaking Navajo. And then beyond, underneath me, the younger generation, I'm not too sure what the language is like then - but I know there's been a big push for language revitalization.
HZ: And it's a language that has hitherto been passed down orally only, is that right?
STERLING MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah. So I think that that was one of the big reasons why, with having the written website, we wanted to have things, audio; that way people could understand. Because that's something why it took us a little longer, when my family and I were recording the words was, we would read it the best we could and try to catch, like, "This sounds like this" and then go from there. But having the literal translation, it was like, “Oh, we know this Navajo word, so now let's build off of it and then put it all together.” And it's like, does that make sense?
HZ: The project’s Navajo words were coined by linguist Frank Morgan.
STERLING MARTIN: We ended up going with Frank Morgan as our linguist because he's actually somebody who's worked on multiple translation projects like this, so he would have the background to know what words to use and what words not to use. That was one of the big things was not using sacred terms, so terms that have sacred meanings to us. And this is also where having somebody like Frank Morgan, who grew up like that and has been working on this for probably, like, his whole life now, can steer away from. And then I think that's also why having my mom, my family involved, too, was like, “Hey, can we run this by you?” as another way of screening to make sure nothing fell through the cracks that would upset some people.
Early on in the project, Frank sat down with my family, who I call the ENABLE linguistics team, and he kind of went through his process of like, "This is how I'm going to approach it, does this make sense to you?"
HZ: Did all the generations agree on what he came up with?
STERLING MARTIN: I think so, yeah. They were thoroughly impressed with what Frank said. Some of the words, they were just like, "Wow. This makes, like, perfect sense for us."
HZ: Direct translations are not necessarily the most communicative terminology, so Frank sought more expressive terms for Navajo.
STERLING MARTIN: So one of his big things was, certain words - science words come from like Greek and Latin roots, and he's like, "I'm not going to do that, because that doesn't make any sense for me to translate those words because they'll be nonsensical to us." Like chromosome: chroma means colour and soma means body. So that originally comes from the dyes they use to stain DNA, so that was their word for it. But do you just say ‘colour body’ again in Navajo? That frame of reference is lost. So then Frank described actually what a chromosome looks like: like a nest of DNA.
HZ: That's pretty cool. I was thinking how the terminology in English is not exactly intuitive. I don't think making people understand stuff was a huge priority, generally.
STERLING MARTIN: Yeah! I mean, even back then, not everybody spoke like Latin and all these things. So like only the higher echelon of educated people would probably know what these words mean.
HZ: Yeah, that seems intentional.
STERLING MARTIN: Yeah.
HZ: How did you translate ‘DNA’ itself? I could not even say what DNA stands for.
STERLING MARTIN: DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. Doesn't really mean a whole lot of stuff, you're just talking about the chemical properties of like DNA. The word ended up being "strands of life".
PROJECT ENABLE RECORDING: iiná bitł'óól
STERLING MARTIN: That's what it means to somebody who speaks Navajo, and I think it does a really good job of illustrating, like, these are the strands that make up life.
HZ: The English word 'bacteria' derives from the Greek 'bakterion/βακτήριον' meaning a small stick or cane, because that's what they thought the first observed bacteria looked like. Which is interesting in its way, but doesn't tell you anything about what bacteria actually do or what they mean to humans. So the Navajo word Frank Morgan came up with to mean 'bacteria' as well as 'viruses' -
PROJECT ENABLE RECORDING: chʼosh doo yitʼínii
HZ: - literally translates to 'bug you can't see'. Which gives you a bit more of a hint about what you're dealing with, bacteria-wise. And then that word gets folded into the term for ‘antibiotic’ -
PROJECT ENABLE RECORDING: ch'osh doo yit'íinii bee naatseedí
HZ: - meaning a substance that kills the aforementioned bugs you can’t see. As for another very small thing, 'cell', there were already a few Navajo words for it, so it gets multiple entries in the Project ENABLE lexicon.
STERLING MARTIN: Like if you just click on that, I think we have... one, two, three, four different ones. And the reason why that happened was because different projects, wanting words for different things, came up with their own words and then those being buried in these hospital pamphlets. So we put them all up there.
PROJECT ENABLE RECORDING: hinááhts'óóz
HZ: That’s the formal word for cell. Means "slender primal unit of life."
PROJECT ENABLE RECORDING: hinááhts'ózí
HZ: This is a shorthand of the formal word. It means "small primal unit of life." Then there's:
PROJECT ENABLE RECORDING: ats’íís bik’ǫ́ǫ́’
HZ: "Need a microscope to look at it" - literal translation "body its seed"
PROJECT ENABLE RECORDING: ats'íís bitł'óól
HZ: "Refers to DNA in cell. Often used when talking about cancer". Literal translation: body strand.
STERLING MARTIN: So one of these comes from a cancer dictionary, so Frank was telling us that this word was made with that in mind, like describing cell in terms of cancer.
HZ: Ooh, I like chemical. “Something that does not change.”
STERLING MARTIN: Yeah, so I think that like gets at the property of 'chemical', right?
HZ: Yeah, but I never thought of it that way - because I suppose I never had to.
STERLING MARTIN: Let's see... so there were some words that just made people laugh, like carnivore is meat eater, but the word carnivore for us, you're describing like - how would you say it? That process of how meat eaters eat, like tearing, so it's like butchering. So it like translates weirdly to like “butcher, animal that butchers that eats”. That was one of those words like when we were recording them, I'm like mom, dad, and grandma just could not stop laughing for like five minutes.
HZ: That's pretty cool. That's a success.
STERLING MARTIN: ‘Proton’ - I think that is one of my favourite ones, because you have to talk about the positive charge of the proton, but how do you go about doing that in a way that makes sense to people? So the way Frank did it, which I think is beautiful:
HZ: “Atom with a charge laid by the path of the sun” - meaning clockwise.
STERLING MARTIN: The Navajo aspect of it is, you're talking about the directionality of the sun so you're going clockwise and in our culture that has positive associations with it. So you're using, I guess, that idea of positivity to be like, “This is a positive charge.”
HZ: That's so beautiful. And then electron gets something much less poetic.
STERLING MARTIN: Yeah!
HZ: "That which surrounds an atom."
STERLING MARTIN: But I think that makes sense because you have electron clouds. So when you look in a science book, you'll see electron clouds tend to make up a lot of these chemical diagrams.
HZ: I thought 'catalyst' was very poetic as well.
STERLING MARTIN: Oh yes. "Means by which the spark is created."
HZ: Yeah. Wow. Beautiful.
STERLING MARTIN: Yeah, when we got these words and we were going through them together to make sure that the translation made sense scientifically as well, it was like, “Whoa!” When we started testing these words with other people back home, my uncle very much was like, "Wow, if this is how science was taught to me growing up when I was in school, I could totally see myself be a scientist right now." And that really, brought a tear to my eye and made me really sad because they say science is for everybody, but this is I think one of those things of, like, it's not.
HZ: As well as coming up with the scientific vocabulary, Project ENABLE had to figure out how best to make it available so that anyone who needed it could access it.
STERLING MARTIN: One of the reasons why we went with our website EnableNavajo.org was everything - at least to my knowledge, everything has been done in paperbacks; so that created some issues with who has them and also how do you disseminate that. And I know my mom worked at the IHS hospital on the reservation and she's like, "Yeah, we've had people come in and make words, but we can't find the dictionaries." So I think that was one of the reasons why we chose the website: that way people, anybody could access it and you didn't have to worry about limited availability.
HZ: It made sense for the project to be online, not a physical book; but then it was a priority for the team's web developer Ira Fich to build enablenavajo.org that you don't need much data or a fast internet connection to use it.
STERLING MARTIN: That was a big thing. Going back home to like the reservation, I won't have access to my phone, I won't have access to my email because there's low service. Not everybody has internet. Really the only places to access the internet back home would be like at schools, if you go to school, or your work computer. So with that in mind, Mr. Ira Fich, actually was like, "I can develop something for you that won't use as much data." So basically if you go to the website, you see only just the words appear and then there's that little + button, so if you click on that, it expands it. That's a way of not just sending everything through all at once. And then it stores that in the cache of your phone, so next time you want to go revisit that, it's already stored there, so it's not pulling more data to try to pull it up for you. Having this being on the website that Ira Fich created and developed to work in areas of low internet service and cell phone, people who are in the deep part of the reservation, who are going out to do health visits, have told us that they use our website and it's been very helpful for them to be able to explain in our own language to their patients, “This is what's going on.”
HZ: Another thing Project ENABLE had to account for is not every technological device coming preloaded with the Navajo font.
STERLING MARTIN: Oh yeah, yeah. You can download the Navajo font onto your computer so you can type things up in Navajo. But then if you send that document to somebody who doesn't have the Navajo font, it just comes up as gibberish; like you cannot understand it. So they've made this thing called the Navajo keyboard that gets around that. I'm not too sure how it is, but it works. So that's something Mr. Fich had to work around because some of the words we got from Frank were in the Navajo font. So he created a conversion tool which we're going to put up on the website, so if you just copy and paste, you can take the gibberish and then make it back to the readable Navajo words. That's something a lot of people have talked about, was a lot of these government documents that were translated into Navajo use the Navajo font. So when you download it yourself, you just kind of get the gibberish version.
HZ: Did the project have the results you hoped with COVID information? And what other kind of unexpected results did it have?
STERLING MARTIN: I think this leads into a second part of the project. Now that we've wrapped up this part, one of the things you want to do is try to see what are the impacts? We want to get metrics of what the impacts of these words were; that way we can actually have some hard data behind us to say like, yes, these words are having the impact we're thinking, or maybe they're not really having the impact, and how are ways we can change that, and what direction can we go into?
HZ: Any things that you're thinking, "I wouldn't mind doing this next"?
STERLING MARTIN: I think one thing we're interested in now is creating illustrations for some of these words because this was something, as scientists who are just so close to this project, we see these words every day and we know what they are, but something Mr. Fich brought up is like, "You know, as a non scientist, I'm typing this word, I don't know what it means and I don't know what it looks like." So we're working on illustrations, that way we can also put them next to the word, so when people click on the word, they can see what a nucleus looks like.
HZ: How has it felt for you to work on this project?
STERLING MARTIN: I think I've loved it. Growing up back home and raised in like the Navajo tradition, um, and then going into science, which has been like fully Western education, I've always felt a disconnect. I've never felt whole, for lack of a better word. There always seemed to be two separate identities, my Navajo side and my scientific side. But I think just having ENABLE and these words to be able to talk about what I am, who I am - because I don't think there was a word for 'scientist' until Frank made that word - just made me feel so much better to be able to talk to people about who I am and what I do. So, I think it's helped me be whole.
HZ: What was it like working with your family on it?
STERLING MARTIN: I thought it was a lot of fun, seeing them finally understand where I'm coming from as a scientist, and then seeing them grow as well. And I think one of the nice things was, something I've seen back home is more and more English is starting to take over our daily lives, so just being able to talk about science, something that affects all of us in Navajo, and just being in the recording studio speaking Navajo, was really nice, and it's something I've really missed.
HZ: Did you miss the worms?
STERLING MARTIN: Um, yes, I really do. I miss the elegans. They were really nice and I understand more now why they are considered a quote unquote 'model organism'.
HZ: That's really nice.
STERLING MARTIN: Yeah, and I think that's one of the things is now with modern science we can actually start start studying different animals to learn how they do biology to help us understand the world around us a lot better.
HZ: Sterling Martin is a scientist and one of the cofounders of Project ENABLE. Find out more about the team and their work at enablenavajo.org, where you can browse their lexicon. And you can donate to the project to contribute to the website’s running costs and the creation of more educational resources - donors receive a special sticker. Go to navajobiology.square.site, and I’ll also link to it at theallusionist.org/projectenable.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
veridical, adjective: truth-telling; coinciding with fact; (of a dream or vision) corresponding exactly with what has happened or with what happens later; seemingly true to fact.
Try using ‘veridical’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, the music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com and the podcasts Neutrino Watch and Song By Song where they have almost completed talking about every single song released by Tom Waits.
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