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Acúmmááwi ís tuccóómeʼ tsiy̓í, t̓iwííci ís tisy̓í. Ó tissi alííyaacíʼ tisy̓í. Aaq̓u áániimi pʰóc iicístawí ís íliiq̓aatáké tsiy̓í, ma winílláátiwí wa Bruce Nevin íliiq̓aatáké tsiy̓í. Qa ís iikááci u háw̓aaso sasúúlaʼáya.
After earning linguistics degrees at the University of Pennsylvania (BA 1968, MA 1970) I started analysis of Sapir's Yana texts for a PhD dissertation. Long story skipped, this led me to Pit River country in 1970. 1971, some parents compelled the public school administration to use state funding properly (Johnson-O'Malley Act), so they hired me as half a teacher aid to teach Achumawi K-12. Insane? Yes. By 1974 I had helped those parents organize and fund a Community Center project with language and culture components. Then life took me sharply elsewhere. 1986, married with a daughter, commuting 2+ hours a day in Massachusetts, I resumed degree work at Penn, earning the PhD. in 1998 with a dissertation on the sound system of the language, with about a third of my data in a 1980s Shoebox database. Over the next two decades, with SIL help, I converted this to CELLAR, then LinguaLinks, then FLEx. Began working with community language activists about 2009, with DEL support (fellowship 2012, NEH grant 2016, NSF grant 2019 now entering its second year of three) employing a few community language activists. Got almost all archival data into the database integrated with my own notes from 1970-1974 with some of the last fluent speakers. Now developing the morphological analysis, with revelation after revelation about how this astonishing language works. Connor, Paul, and Lisa are picking this up and running with it.