Sunday, August 19, 2012

Sounds in Oaxacalifornia

The 18th Street Arts Center is currently hosting an exhibition called Prospecting Notes About Sound by Gala Porras-Kim through September 7.  While the indigenous language Zapoteco isn't Indo-European, I'm excited to have a look at it.  Her project is linguistic-based and explores the musical quality of the tonal language, and so could provide some interesting parallels to the pitch-based Ancient Greek.  Additionally, I gather that Zapoteco has several dialectal features, much like Greek did.
I'm also curious to learn whether I can do something similar around Latin, asking students to craft a project that uses the sounds of Latin artistically.  Perhaps it could help students to get a better understanding of how the language sounded, though I think that it'll be more difficult doing a project along these lines with a dead language.  More to come, and I'll have more ideas after I see the exhibition.

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