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Comanche language greeting3/20/2024 ![]() Meanwhile, actual Native languages are dying. But we still get offerings like the 2008 TV movie “Comanche Moon,” in which actors alternate a few words of the Comanche language with nonsense syllables, according to Todd McDaniels, a linguist at the Comanche National College. Producers hired a Lakota-language instructor, and although Kevin Costner’s accent is apparently atrocious and there are a number of grammatical errors, it’s a big step beyond “How!” More recently, Terrence Malick’s “The New World” employed a linguist to resurrect a lost form of Virginian Algonquian spoken at the time of the Jamestown settlement. “Dances With Wolves,” from 1990, is generally viewed as mainstream Hollywood’s first attempt to use Native languages in a sensitive way, even if the results are at times groan-inducing. Some films even dubbed English backward in the soundtrack and played it off as an “Indian” language. But plenty relied heavily on Peter Pan-style “Yip yip yip!” yodeling. Actors playing Plains Indians in huge feather headdresses faked versions of Lakota or Sioux to varying degrees of accuracy, or, as the 2008 documentary “Reel Injun” recounts, spoke random off-script dialogue in their own languages. In the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, cowboy westerns made the occasional half-hearted effort at realism. ![]() How the filmmakers handle this dilemma reveals much about Hollywood’s uneasy, evolving relationship to the languages spoken here for millennia before English. Tonto (who in the original story was Potawatomi, not Comanche) is a central figure in the Lone Ranger story at the same time, with his pidgin dialect, he represents the lamest stereotype of Hollywood Indian. Kemosabe is just part of the dubious linguistic freight involved in remaking “The Lone Ranger” for 2013. In this summer’s version, Tonto makes his own suggestion: “Wrong brother,” he says, referring to a running joke that the Ranger’s brother would have made a better hero. Theories on kemosabe’s origin have ranged from the name of a summer camp attended by Fran Striker, the writer of the series, to an Indian-ish term for “faithful friend,” to a corruption of the Spanish phrase “quien no sabe”-he who doesn’t understand. In a scene from the new “The Lone Ranger” movie, Armie Hammer’s Lone Ranger turns to his Comanche sidekick, Johnny Depp’s Tonto, and asks a question that’s been bedeviling fans and linguists since the series first came on the radio in 1933: What does kemosabe, Tonto’s nickname for the masked man of justice, actually mean?
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