A Mother-Son Duo Translating Astrophysics Into Blackfoot

Whenever her son detects a strange force rippling in the fabric of spacetime, such as a gravitational wave or binary black hole, Sharon Yellowfly begins the delicate work of translating the vocabulary of his work—astrophysics—into Blackfoot, an indigenous language. Right before the announcement deadline, Yellowfly completed a full translation of the press release into Blackfoot , one of the 17 languages it appeared in. Blackfoot is an agglutinative language, meaning its words are sculpted out of morphemes (linguistics’ smallest building blocks) that can stand on their own, even if removed from the word, according to Eldon Yellowhorn, a professor of First Nations studies at Simon Fraser University.

Source: www.atlasobscura.com