How the Cherokee Language Has Adapted.

Eduardo Avila reports for PRI on a heartening success story for one of the better-known Native American languages:

From the printing press and the typewriter to today’s readily available digital technologies like computers and smart phones, the Cherokee language is fully functional thanks to the help of tireless advocates and activists.

As one of the most actively used native languages in the US, the Cherokee language is spoken by populations in North Carolina and Oklahoma, as well as other states across the country. While more people are now able to write the Cherokee language with syllabics — written characters that each represent a syllable — retaining and encouraging more speakers of the language continues to be a high priority. And the use of technology has been one way to attract increased interest.

A new animated video produced by the Cherokee Nation Education Services and the Language Technology Program tells the story of this adoption of new technologies over time. Narrated by the Cherokee hero Sequoyah, who created the first Cherokee syllabary in 1821, the video introduces viewers to some of these breakthroughs.

The five-minute video is in Cherokee (with English subtitles) and is a lot of fun to watch; I just wish my Aunt Bettie were still alive, because she loved everything Cherokee and would have gotten a huge kick out of this. Thanks for the link, Trevor!

Comments

  1. Whoever did the animation has evidently never seen a typewriter in action: the carriage is shown moving from right to left and then returning to the right! (Cherokee is written left to right, like Latin script.)

    There was no mention of the shift to using upper and lower case letters which is now in progress. As happened with Latin and Greek, the original caseless script is becoming the upper case; the lower case letters will mostly have the same form except for being smaller, as in printed Cyrillic.

  2. Um, excuse me? If the typing point is stationary, of course the carriage will move from right to left if the language is written the other way.

  3. Yes, I misstated the problem, which is that the carriage is moving from left to right as letters are typed, and then returns to the left, notwithstanding that the carriage return lever is on the left side as it should be. So the animator has seen a static picture of a typewriter, but has not seen it in motion.

    (The limited animation also means that the carriage returns without the lever being touched, which exacerbates the problem.)

  4. I once had the bright idea of “teaching myself” Navajo.

    Might as well have tried to teach myself Martian. What a brilliant, complex language.

  5. @Shelley

    I took a look at a text on Navajo once. I put it back on the shelf and walked away, very, very quietly.

  6. Ah, the lost arts. (I confess I hadn’t looked at the video.) But then the only typewriter I still own is a 1913 Oliver my father found on a shelf in a closet in an office building about to be demolished in the Sixties.

    To wander off completely: Have we or LL ever discussed the pronunciation of “typewriter” with three syllables, presumably out of confusion at a silent “ew”?

  7. How else would you pronounce it other than with three syllables?

  8. Ксёнѕ Фаўст says

    There was no mention of the shift to using upper and lower case letters which is now in progress. As happened with Latin and Greek, the original caseless script is becoming the upper case; the lower case letters will mostly have the same form except for being smaller, as in printed Cyrillic.

    Lovely how a dominant culture doing something makes it seem like it must be a great idea.

  9. Aargh, I meant FOUR syllables: “type-a-writer,” which I associate with older people (than myself, i.e. mostly dead).

  10. Huh, never heard that one — thanks for mentioning it.

  11. Shelley, John Roth: I mentioned this on some other comment thread here at Casa Hat some time ago, but it is worth repeating: Edward Sapir himself spoke of Navajo (and Athabaskan languages more generally) as the “sonuvabitchest” language he had ever encountered. So don’t feel bad, either of you: when Edward Sapir finds a language difficult, there is no shame for any of us normal mortals to find it impossible.

    A related story which some dwellers of the Hattery may find amusing and informative: I was chatting and drinking with a scholar of Athabaskan languages once, and after a few drinks we both found that we had a common distaste of data-free theoretical linguistics, leading said Athabaskanist to tell me that the frustrating thing about being an Athabaskanist in a Department of Linguistics dominated by theoreticians was the knowledge that data from various Athabaskan languages could easily knock down ALL the competing theoretical schools within the Department…indeed, after yet a few more drinks, we came up with a great idea for a monograph in cultural anthropology: a comparative study of Shamans in traditional Athabaskan-speaking communities versus theoretical linguists: which of the two groups is the more impermeable to empirical evidence? I think you may guess what we thought the conclusion of such a study would be…

  12. I thoroughly agree with you, and that without knowing the first thing about Shamans in traditional Athabaskan-speaking communities.

  13. The video is cute but it is strange how little use of Cherokee there is on cherokee.org… The chr-us and the en-us versions of the lang tech section seem to give exactly the same content.

  14. I’ll stick my oar in on the writing issue. I remember being very excited when I was driving through Gallup, NM, and heard Navajo on the radio. I was impressed with adaptation to what the speaker on the video calls “technology”. But later when I discussed this with an Athabaskanist he told me that Navajo radio announcers do not read Navajo copy, but have English copy in front of them and translate on the spot. He said that even though Navajo has had a linguistically sound writing system (alphabetical, not a syllabary) since the 40s, the people themselves tend not to use it. Why, no one seems to know. It seems to have little to do with the question of native origins, since both the Northern or Cree Syllabary (missionary origin) and the Cherokee Syllabary (native origin) have been very much used in the past.

    Perhaps the only generalization possible is that syllabaries do better than alphabets, regardless of the phonologies of the languages.

  15. Perhaps the only generalization possible is that syllabaries do better than alphabets, regardless of the phonologies of the languages.

    Can you expand on this? “Do better” means are more widely used? Is this specifically in the context of Native American languages or in general?

  16. David Marjanović says

    I once showed the Wikipedia article on Navajo to someone as I was trying to find out if the word Anaasází is a verb form (there is after all a verb prefix a- mentioned on the page, and the language generally doesn’t do nouns much), and which one. They found it interesting, but said they couldn’t read on because their brain overheated.

    Spoiler: I haven’t found out either.

    Anyway. I think I can hear some of the tone system in the video; that’s about the only similarity to Navajo that Cherokee has. 🙂

  17. David Marjanović says

    the Northern or Cree Syllabary (missionary origin)

    That origin was soon forgotten in favor of a story where the system was simultaneously supernaturally revealed to two people at opposite ends of the Cree-speaking area (which almost means opposite ends of Canada).

  18. I have a dim memory of reading that the Vai syllabary was revealed in a dream, but googling, I discover details much more germane to the thread

    In recent years evidence has emerged suggesting that the Cherokee syllabary of North America provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary in Liberia. The Vai syllabary emerged about 1832/33. The link appears to have been Cherokee who emigrated to Liberia after the invention of the Cherokee syllabary (which in its early years spread rapidly among the Cherokee) but before the invention of the Vai syllabary. One such man, Cherokee Austin Curtis, married into a prominent Vai family and became an important Vai chief himself. It is notable that the romantic “inscription on a house” that first drew the world’s attention to the existence of the Vai script was in fact on the home of Curtis, a Cherokee.

  19. @ fisheyed Yes, by “do better” I meant “tend to be more widely used”. I was speaking only of Native American languages, and merely suggesting a hypothesis based on the examples I gave. I’m aware of two notions about the relative success of NA syllabaries: (1) the relative immunity of syllabaries to dialect differences (and in the case of the Northern or Cree syllabary, even language differences) and (2) esoterism.

    @ David Marjanović Quite so; ignorance of origins is surely a factor. On the other hand the Navajo (alphabetic) system originated in a governmental intervention involving a linguist working with a native speaker in the 30s, but I doubt that many Navajos today are aware of that origin. Yet the system tends not to be used.

  20. the relative immunity of syllabaries to dialect differences (and in the case of the Northern or Cree syllabary, even language differences)

    I apologize if these are well-known topics but I really don’t follow. How are syllabaries any more immune to dialect or language differences than alphabets?

  21. fisheyed, minus273:

    Thanks for the information on Curtis; what a fascinating story!

  22. It’s complicated.

    In general, the spelling is treated as fixed wherever possible, even though the pronunciation may vary. The word ᎥᏝ ‘not’ has the standard reading vtla (note that v is a vowel, a nasalized schwa, in Cherokee transliteration). In Eastern Cherokee, however, it can be read this way, or as v:tsha, with an Eastern Cherokee accent, or even as kehsti, using an Eastern Cherokee dialect word. This is analogous to reading the written English word isn’t as /ɪzənt/ or /ɪdənt/ or even /eɪnt/. In some cases, matters are more complex: the Eastern Cherokee word tikv:tsaltohti ‘frying pan’ cannot be transcribed in syllabics, because there is no way to write the /l/ without a following vowel. When a Cherokee was asked to write it down, he hesitated between the forms tikv:tsalotohti, tikv:tsalvtohti, tikv:tsalatohti. He finally settled on the last, because of its morphological relationship to tikv:tsalahka ‘he is frying’.

  23. (Note that coda /h/ and /ʔ/ are not transcribed in the syllabary.)

  24. @ fisheyed I’ll have to over-simplify, since there are several kinds of syllabaries. I’ll try to give one kind of example.

    A user of a syllabary conceives the syllable as the smallest unit; (s)he cannot write anything smaller than a syllable. Take my name. Let us say we are using a syllabary which has a symbol which we can abstract as the syllable {ken}. Now in the Southern US, where I spent half my youth, I was called what a Northerner would hear as /kɪn/ (due to Southern neutralization of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before a nasal). The syllabary user will still write {ken} because (s)he cannot write anything smaller than a syllable. Thus there is no way to differentiate between the phonemes /ɪ/ and /ɛ/: phonemes are not written; syllables are written.

    So the syllabary is immune to the dialectal difference between /ɪ/ and /ɛ/.

    John Cowan’s explanation above using actual Cherokee is better (and typical *grin*).

  25. So the syllabary is immune to the dialectal difference between /ɪ/ and /ɛ/.

    RIght but that only works for syllables that can’t be transcribed. In the same way that an alphabet couldn’t be used to write the dialect difference either if it didn’t have symbols for the different sounds.

    As John Cowan’s English example shows, alphabets also are used to spell words that are pronounced variously. I don’t get why syllabaries should be more “immune” than alphabets when there is standardized spelling and variant pronunciation.

  26. relative immunity was what I wrote. Implicit principle of the syllabary: “Close enough!”

  27. David Marjanović says

    reading the written English word isn’t as /ɪzənt/ or /ɪdənt/ or even /eɪnt/

    …I’ve never noticed /ɪdənt/. That’s an intriguing form even for theoretical reasons.

    Let us say we are using a syllabary which has a symbol which we can abstract as the syllable {ken}. Now in the Southern US, where I spent half my youth, I was called what a Northerner would hear as /kɪn/ (due to Southern neutralization of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before a nasal). The syllabary user will still write {ken} because (s)he cannot write anything smaller than a syllable.

    The pen/pin merger? If the system has different characters for {pen} and {pin}, and some people pronounce them the same, then they’ll either learn the etymological spelling, or they’ll use the characters interchangeably, or they’ll abandon one in favor of the other. All three solutions are widespread in the use of alphabets.

  28. Ксёнѕ Фаўст says

    The Omniglot page on Navajo says: “Unfortunately this alphabet was not popular among the Navajo, partly as a result of their anger at Collier’s policies on livestock reduction, which led them to distrust his literacy drive. ” So maybe it’s (largely) not for reasons intrinsic to the alphabet that it didn’t gain popularity.

  29. It’s a Southern U.S. pronunciation. Note that at the phonetic level it’s pronounced with nasal plosion, like button.

  30. “…I’ve never noticed /ɪdənt/. That’s an intriguing form even for theoretical reasons.”

    David, it’s a sound shift in those varieties. Those varieties pronounce “business” as “bidness.”. I have also hard “wudn’t”, as in “Wudn’t he the one who….”

    In Korean final -s in the orthography is pronounced as a stop. (Final -t has shifted to -l.) So this may not be so anomalous a development.

  31. “Gubment” for government also fits the same pattern.

  32. Implicit principle of the syllabary: “Close enough!”

    How is this any more or less the implicit principle of syllabaries than alphabets? Are these generally accepted views among linguists?

  33. David Marjanović says

    “Gubment” for government also fits the same pattern.

    Yes, but at least one publication on Kluge’s law has claimed that this isn’t supposed to happen to [z], “because there is no way to occlusivize” it or some such reason. 🙂 Beautiful theory slain by ugly fact and all that.

  34. Hahahaha! How I love watching theories explode!

  35. (Final -t has shifted to -l.)
    It’s a little more complicated. Final -t shifted in -l only for Sino-Korean words. In fact, Korean borrowed some kind of Northern Chinese, which, just like Northwestern Chinese preserved in Tibetan and Iranian loans, had -β, -r and -ɣ for -p, -t, -k. Etymological -t gained by analogy the -s ~ -t alternation from etymological -s, and so is today written -s, too.

  36. WOW! Internet is incredible. I watched the video, and its strange for an european like me watch the evolution from Cherooke to English.

    Love this Blog.

  37. David Marjanović says

    the evolution from Cherooke to English

    The what now?

  38. I’m afraid that chap is a spammer, but I enjoyed that phrase so much I deleted the spam URL and approved the comment. Glad someone noticed!

  39. David Marjanović says

    🙂

  40. One advantage of syllabaries over alphabets is that they can be developed by fairly naive orthography creators. Except in insane languages like English and Georgian, it doesn’t seem to be too hard to break down one’s hitherto unwritten language into syllables and come up with a symbol for each, whereas phonemic analysis from scratch requires what Peter Daniels calls sophisticated grammatogeny, probably with the help of linguists nowadays. So wherever writing appears in a culture by stimulus diffusion alone (that is, where the creator is not literate in some other language), it tends to be a syllabary.

  41. David Marjanović says

    Sequoyah famously tried to invent a character for every word first, soon found that too much effort, and then settled for syllables.

  42. Is there anywhere a person might see some of Sequoyah’s experiments along those lines? I’d love to learn more about his approach to single-handedly reinventing hanzi.

  43. Just to close this out: fisheyed as been thinking of theoretical differences between syllabaries and alphabets (and there he is right), while John Cowan and I have been talking about the way syllabaries have actually developed (and there we are right).

  44. JC: Except in insane languages like English and Georgian, it doesn’t seem to be too hard to break down one’s hitherto unwritten language into syllables and come up with a symbol for each, whereas phonemic analysis from scratch requires what Peter Daniels calls sophisticated grammatogeny, probably with the help of linguists nowadays.

    In the history of (I think) Icelandic there is a person known as “The First Grammarian” since his name is unknown. I think he was a monk, literate in Latin, and he single-handedly invented a spelling system for Icelandic, explaining his principles as he went, such as how he differentiated long from short vowels, and other details. In other words, he was a born phonologist!

    syllabaries

    The Cree syllabary is known and used by many older Cree speakers. I have seen some of them using it to take notes. The syllabary is very economical and easy to use because Cree does not have many vowels and consonants, so that a few simple shapes oriented in four different directions are enough to write the language. It was later adopted for use by Inuktitut dialects, for which it is less suitable but has become traditional with a few tweaks. Syllabaries would have been quite unsuitable for the majority of languages on the Northwest Coast, some of which have lots of consonants (some of them very unusual), fearsome clusters, and hardly any vowels.

  45. Pāṇini and the First Grammarian don’t count. They were probably travellers in time. The invention of the first consonantal script and of the Greek alphabet were also spectacular achievements, but I’m less sure the Doctor was involved.

  46. PG: Sure, I just meant that “modern linguists” are not always necessary. Many people in the past could have become modern linguists if they had lived in the modern period.

  47. Quite so, PG. Time travelers? Sometimes I wonder. Not only linguistic ones.

    I have seen some of them using it to take notes.

    Marie-Lucie, yes, a colleague of mine knew a touch-typist who could do more than 60wpm typing Cree syllabary.

  48. If the First Grammarian was a time traveler, it was from the past: he’s a very typical scholar of the 12C Renaissance, just a bit late, as befits such a very peripheral European country. (By the way, he’s given that romantic-sounding name because he wrote the First Grammatical Treatise, which in turn is given that name because it appears first of four grammatical treatises in the Codex Wormianus.)

  49. Codex Wormianus being another excellent name.

  50. Olaus Wormius, vulgo dicitur Ole Worm: Dane, theologian, medicus, embryologist, runologist, collector of curiosities, reputed translator of the Necronomicon into Latin. He proved that unicorn horn was just narwhal horn, that lemmings were ordinary rodents born in the ordinary way, and that birds of paradise have feet, though they were commonly mounted without them in order to impress the gullible. He married a woman named Fincke; in modern times, his children would doubtless have been called Worm-Fincke.

    On the distressing side, I find that there are 200,000 ghits for Cherooke [sic, see spam above], most of them referring to the Jeep model. For all too many anglophones, spelling is altogether a black art.

  51. he’s a very typical scholar of the 12C Renaissance…

    Well, I read the Treatise and was quite impressed by his application of the minimal-pair test. Of course there were other linguistically talented people who seem to have been born well ahead of their time. John Hart, for example, or Jan Kochanowski, more or less Hart’s contemporary and the greatest Polish poet of the 16th century, who wrote a small treatise proposing a reformed spelling system for Polish. He also used minimal pairs consistently to optimise the system, and ended up with a neatly phonemic alphabet. Like the other proposals, it was never implemented, but the book is very useful for today’s historical linguists.

  52. David Marjanović says

    wrote a small treatise proposing a reformed spelling system for Polish

    That’s fascinating! I had no idea – and neither does en.wikipedia in spite of having an article on the man. While pl.wikipedia mentions the issue, it offers neither examples nor any further discussion…

  53. David Marjanović says

    Oh! en.wikipedia has a link to the real thing!!!

  54. What do you think of it?

  55. David Marjanović says

    Me? I don’t understand enough Polish to really follow the discussion, or even what è is supposed to be… Kochanowski is consistently the one, though, who says “this letter is two/three things” and then explains them. The one whose proposal diverges the most from contemporary tradition or the modern standard, and who seems to go into the most phonetic detail, is Górnicki…

    …who then went on to transcribe a few Church Slavonic psalms in ?Ukrainian pronunciation in his proposed orthography, and had them printed at the end of the same booklet. Your favorite Bible quote is there!

    Quare fremuerunt gentes. Pſalm. 2.

    WOskʊiʊ ſſatassa s̓ia iazycy / i lʊdyie po ʊccyssá
    s̓iá tccetnym. Pred stassa Caryie / zemstyı / ı knıazy
    sobrassa s̓ia wo kʊpe ná hospodá i ná chrystá ieho.

  56. I think it is not only in Polish, but a PDF in Fraktur, and so there is no hope that I will ever read it. Unfortunately.

  57. David Marjanović says

    It’s Google Books, not a pdf, and the Renaissance typefaces (several!) are fairly harmless. But, yes, Polish. (Seems very similar to modern Polish to me, language-wise, but I can’t necessarily tell!)

  58. What I meant was that since my Polish is nil, and since OCR and machine translation of Polish Fraktur will probably never exist, I can download the PDF, but I can’t do anything with it except stare blankly at the pretty consonant clusters.

  59. since OCR and machine translation of Polish Fraktur will probably never exist
    Or do they?

  60. David Marjanović says

    the pretty consonant clusters

    Interestingly, they’re mostly rendered as ligatures, and the italic typeface consistently gives us sz as ß!

  61. Kochanowski is consistently the one, though, who says “this letter is two/three things” and then explains them.

    The vowel system was larger than today, since the reflexes of early Polish long and short non-high vowels contrasted qualitatively. The three e‘s were /e/, /ɛ/ and /ɛ̃/. There were also three a‘s (approx. /ɑ/, /a/ ,/ɑ̃/) and two o‘s (/o/, which according to Januszowski has a strongly rounded onglide, [ʷo], and /ɔ/). Kochanowski was the least pedantic of the co-authors of the booklet. He advocated the use of an acute accent over vowels only to disambiguate minimal pairs. Górnicki’s proposal was indeed the most radical (and had no influence on later orthographic practice).

    Other curiosities: palatalised labials were definitely distinct phonemes (they could occur word-finally and before consonants), so e.g. ḿ was used for /mʲ/. I like the symbol used for the counterpart of Czech ř (which at that time was a trilled fricative also in Polish) — an elegant ligature of r and z. Someone go tell the IPA.

    Of course Kochanowski was first and foremost a poet, and his interest in a spelling reform was something of a hobby. His serious poetry (especially his translation of the Psalms, and the threnodies written after his daughter’s death) is much venerated, but I love him most as the author of hundreds of short epigrams. Most of them haven’t aged at all: they are still hilarious. He was for some time the titular (and secular) vicar of the parish where I live now. As far as I know, he never visited the place, but the local paper mills secured him a decent income.

  62. Can you give any examples of Kochanowski’s epigrams?

  63. Oh, God, brief humorous poems are the hardest thing to translate. And I have to warn you that many of them are rather bawdy. I’ll check if I can find a good professional translation of any of them.

  64. Wow, Milosz has twenty pages on Kochanowski in his History of Polish Literature! He writes:

    A short occasional poem was called in Kochanowski’s time in Italy a frasca (literally, “little twig”); thus a collection of his short poems in this genre, published in 1584, received the name Fraszki. All of them are distinguished by conciseness of form and concentration of material, but their character varies from anecdotes, humorous epitaphs, and obscenities to pure lyricism. Combined, they form a sort of very personal diary, but one where the personality of the author never appears in the foreground.

    He quotes several, the shortest of which is “On Human Life”:

    Everything that we think is trifles,
    Everything that we do is trifles,
    There is no certain thing in the world,
    In vain men take so much care.
    Virtue, beauty, power, money, fame
    Will pass like the grasses of the fields.
    We and our order will be laughed at
    And into a sack we will be cast like puppets after a show.

    Fraszki to wszytko, cokolwiek myślemy,
    Fraszki to wszytko, cokolwiek czyniemy;
    Nie masz na świecie żadnej pewnej rzeczy,
    Próżno tu człowiek ma co mieć na pieczy.
    Zacność, uroda, moc, pieniądze, sława,
    Wszystko to minie jako polna trawa;
    Naśmiawszy się nam i naszym porządkom,
    Wemkną nas w mieszek, jako czynią łątkom.

  65. David Marjanović says

    I like the symbol used for the counterpart of Czech ř (which at that time was a trilled fricative also in Polish) — an elegant ligature of r and z.

    There are two in the different typefaces, and both of them are ligatures of r and z! One is a ligature of r and a z with the shape of ʒ but the size of з, their top strokes continuous; the other is ŗ.

  66. OK, since I can’t find a good rhymed translation, here is my own amateurish attempt. Note: Kochanowski spent several years serving as royal secretary in Cracow. Among his fellow courtiers there was a certain cosmopolitan humanist called Doctor Pedro Ruiz — a lawyer, a poet, and a professor of the University of Cracow.

    To Doctor Ruiz the Spaniard

    “There’s our good Doctor, making off to bed.
    He will not dine with us – or so he said.”
    “We’ll find him later, lords, leave him alone!
    Meanwhile let us make merry on our own.”
    “The feast is over. Shall we wake him up?”
    “We will, upon my soul, with flask and cup!”
    “Open up, Doctor, open up, I say!”
    The Doctor didn’t, but the door gave way.
    “God grant you health. One drink will do no harm.”
    “Be it but one,” says Ruiz in alarm.
    One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine –
    The Doctor’s brain was soon afloat in wine.
    “‘Tis hard,” he muttered, “to live in this wise:
    Sober to bed, a drunken man to rise.”

    O Doktorze Hiszpanie

    “Nasz dobry doktor spać się od nas bierze,
    Ani chce z nami doczekać wieczerze.”
    “Dajcie mu pokój! najdziem go w pościeli,
    A sami przedsię bywajmy weseli!”
    “Już po wieczerzy, pódźmy do Hiszpana!”
    “Ba, wierę, pódźmy, ale nie bez dzbana.”
    “Puszczaj, doktorze, towarzyszu miły!”
    Doktor nie puścił, ale drzwi puściły.
    “Jedna nie wadzi, daj ci Boże zdrowie!”
    “By jeno jedna” — doktor na to powie.
    Od jednej przyszło aż więc do dziewiąci,
    A doktorowi mózg się we łbie mąci.
    “Trudny – powiada – mój rząd z tymi pany:
    Szedłem spać trzeźwio, a wstanę pijany.”

  67. You really are too modest. This is really good!

  68. I agree!

  69. Trond Engen says

    So do I. I just wish I could read Polish and enjoy the comparison with the original, or at least grasp enough to see what you do. Google Translate takes you only so far.

  70. Today I logged on to the website for my health insurance and I noticed at the bottom of the page they had a note in six different languages saying roughly “if you need help in language X, call us”. The six languages were Spanish, French, Chinese, Tagalog, German, and Navajo. I don’t live anywhere near Navajo Nation so I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen this language (or possibly any Native American language) in the wild. I wonder how many Navajo take them up on their offer.

  71. marie-lucie says

    I too agree with that translation.

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