Carrie Clarady, a senior research assistant for the university’s Center for the Advanced Study of Language, kicked off the National Museum of Language’s current lecture series Sunday standing beside a projected image of “The Cherokee Syllabary,” an alphabet-like array of the language’s native phonetics.
The museum, which opened in College Park in May, will host presentations explaining the complexities of the Cherokee language, “one of the 300 languages native to North America,” Clarady said.
“The university already has a strong linguistic program,” she added. “I hope to see it one day become a language research center.” In its first month of existence, and in the months of preparations preceding its grand opening, students have already been put to work, researching and drafting lectures for various lecturers.
Clarady spoke to a crowd of about 25 in a room wallpapered with displays of the “founding languages” – Sumerian, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Hebrew and Arabic. Each language’s display contained the alphabets of their influential writing systems, as well as various photos and artifacts.
The museum also hosts an interactive exhibit called “The Name Game.” Going well beyond its icebreaker namesake, the activity allows users to type their names into a computer and within seconds have a printed sheet with such written in four foreign languages: Arabic, Assyrian, Hebrew and Punjabi.
“A large chunk of today’s world is about language,” said Amelia Murdoch, a former employee of the National Security Agency. She said the NSA often did not understand how language and culture were intertwined or language nuances such as different dialects. This ignorance inspired her to found the National Museum of Language, she said.
Murdoch said that while the museum is small – the suite is only about 16 feet by 24 feet – she has big ambitions for it.
“A national consciousness needs to be raised about the importance of language,” she said while sitting at the “activity table” – full of paintbrushes and paper to teach children to draw Chinese characters and bright puzzle cubes with the Arabic alphabets.
Murdoch emphasized that schools did not do a sufficient job teaching students about languages and cultures, and she said the goal of the museum is to help teach visitors though an artistic medium.
“I feel that here we are able to display these ideas in a visual manner,” Murdoch said. “And it has been tremendously successful.”
Though primary and secondary schools have not taught students much about languages, the university has a lot to offer the museum, she added. She said she hopes to rely on the Center for the Advanced Study of Language for guidance, an advantage of the museum’s location.
The exhibits delve deeper into cultures than just the alphabets, though. Included in the displays were religious artifacts, including a Torah and Quran. Murdoch said the museum aims to answer philosophical questions as well as linguistic ones.
“I want to create an organization outside of the school system that will enable people to have questions answered,” she said. “What happens when you have a single copy of something? What happens when you’re able to pass around the word of God on paper?”
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