Tecumseh Speech

[Magdalen Dano]

You try to force the red people to do some injury. It is you that is pushing them on to do mischief. You endeavour to make destructions, you wish to prevent the Indians to do as we wish them to unite and let them consider their land as common property of the whole you take tribes aside and advise them not to come into this measure . . . .

You want by your distinctions of Indian tribes in allotting to each a particular track of land to make them to war with each other. . . . Since my residence at Tippecanoe we have endeavoured to level all distinctions to destroy village chiefs by whom all mischief is done; it is they who sell our land to the Americans. . . .

I was glad to hear your speech you said if we could show that the land was sold by persons that had no right to sell you would restore it. . . . These tribes set up a claim but the tribes with me will not agree to their claim, if the land is not restored to us you will soon see when we return to our homes how it will be settled. . . .

Do not believe that I came here to get presents from you if you offer us anything we will not take it. By taking goods from you you will hereafter say that with them you purchased another piece of land from us. . . .

This speech helped organize the Ohio Valley Confederacy, this united Indians from the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Winnebago, Menominee, Ottawa, and Wyandot nations. Not only did this confederacy help unite the scattered and unorganized tribes,but this confederation was believed to be the only way for American Indians to successfully hinder white settlements from continuing to expand.

This Confederacy successfully delayed white settlement in the region for a time.The confederacy forced white Americans to deal with all tribes as one. It is easy to pick on a tribe of few than it is a nation of many. This cultural embargo that Tecumseh envisioned was not as popular among all tribes as you might think. Many tribes from modern-day Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi held on to American products and customs. For American Indians to obtain white goods, they would participate in the fur trade. Consequently this trade caused food to become scarce in the Native lands. This lack of food and supplies would weaken the Confederacy and eventually result in its failure. Citation 2

Native American history can be an interesting conundrum for many teachers since it can be difficult to find the voice of native people over the abundant voice of white people speaking for, or about, Native Americans, often with misguided interpretations. One of the earliest accounts we have of Native American resistance is a speech made by the famous Shawnee, Tecumseh, when he spoke to the Osages in the winter of 1811-1812.

After qualifying at the regional and area levels, Tecumseh students Addison Taron, Chloe Kelsey and Maci Flowers competed in the Oklahoma State FFA Speech Contest in Stillwater on April 28. Taron performed the FFA Creed; Flowers spoke in the Plant Science Division; and Kelsey won second place for her speech on Ag Policy, according to the Tecumseh FFA Facebook page. Photo provided.

The site is secure.
The ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

For four decades, the inability of nonhuman primates to produce human speech sounds has been claimed to stem from limitations in their vocal tract anatomy, a conclusion based on plaster casts made from the vocal tract of a monkey cadaver. We used x-ray videos to quantify vocal tract dynamics in living macaques during vocalization, facial displays, and feeding. We demonstrate that the macaque vocal tract could easily produce an adequate range of speech sounds to support spoken language, showing that previous techniques based on postmortem samples drastically underestimated primate vocal capabilities. Our findings imply that the evolution of human speech capabilities required neural changes rather than modifications of vocal anatomy. Macaques have a speech-ready vocal tract but lack a speech-ready brain to control it.

* At the battle of the Holy Ground, which occurred some time after, the prophets left by Tecumseh predicted that the earth would yawn and swallow up General Claiborne and his troops. Tecumseh refers to the Kings of England and Spain, who supplied the Indians with arms at Detroit and at Pensacola. The British officers had informed him that a comet would soon appear [ed. The Great Comet of 1811], and the earthquakes of 1811[ed. the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812] had commenced as he came through Kentucky. Like a consummate orator, he refers to them in his speech. When the comet soon after appeared, and the earth began to tremble, they attributed to him supernatural powers, and immediately took up arms.

Ride from Montgomery, Alabama to Tallassee, Alabama. Near Tallassee, on the banks of the Tallapoosa River, is the historic meeting place of the Creeks called Tuckabatchee (many different spellings) where Tecumseh gave his speech to the Creeks. Try AL-229 north and AL-9 south to get feel for the traditional homeland of the Creeks.

Copyright: 2020 Matzinger et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data as well as the Praat scripts and R scripts used for data processing and analysis can be accessed at the Open Science Framework: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/JC7EF.

When speaking a foreign language, most non-native speakers can be readily identified by their accents, which are often distinctive depending on native language. To understand how different accents arise, and also to help second language learners to eliminate them to improve intelligibility, it is essential to know which aspects of spoken language contribute to non-native speech production.

Here we introduce an experimental procedure which integrates and modifies methods from previous studies, safeguarding against potential confounds, to focus on the specific contribution of pauses to foreign accents in speech production. We compared the pausing behavior of L2 speakers of English to the pausing behavior of L1 speakers of English, reading out the same scripted text at different speech rates. We measured multiple characteristics of pauses: pause-to-utterance ratio (total pause time in relation to total speaking time), the mean duration of pauses, the number of pauses that speakers made, and the positions in the written text at which they occurred.

By having all speakers read the same written text, we could exclude the influence of morpho-syntactic factors (e.g. word length, word structure, and syntactic structure) that might underlie previous findings of language differences in pausing. Also, we reasoned that the cognitive load involved in reading a text is reduced compared to free speech. Thus, by using written text as a prompt, we aimed to limit the occurrence of vocal hesitations resulting from a lack of L2 fluency to distinguish fluency from foreign accent per se.

We tested non-native speakers with two different L1 backgrounds, namely German or Serbo-Croatian L1. Typologically, both English and German belong to the Germanic language family, and are stress-based languages [51], whereas Serbo-Croatian is a Slavic language [52] and is not stress-based [25]. This selection of L1 speakers thus would allow comparison of pausing by English native speakers with those of L2 speakers with an L1 background more (German) or less (Serbo-Croatian) similar to English. However, this comparison was not included in the final analysis due to a low sample size of Serbo-Croatian speakers.

Summarizing, we used a standardized procedure to compare pause patterns (pause-to-utterance ratio, pause duration, pause number, pause positions) of native speakers of English and two non-native English speaker groups reading out the same text at three different speech rates. Previous work leads to several hypotheses and predictions.

We obtained speech samples from 41 participants of three different first languages: English native speakers (13 participants; 7f; mean age: 35.2) and non-native English speakers with German (18 participants; 10f; mean age: 29.5) and Serbo-Croatian (10 participants; 6f; mean age: 25.9) as their first languages. Participants were university students or staff recruited individually at the University of Vienna. All non-native English participants were advanced learners of English, who did not have diagnosed reading or speaking difficulties, self-assessed themselves as being proficient in English (equivalent to CEFR level C1) and reported in post-experiment questionnaires (see S1 Appendix) to be concerned with English regularly both in the productive and receptive domain (e.g. in the university or work context, media exposure).

Nonetheless, and crucially, in a native language recognition test with our pool of speech samples, five English native speakers (m, mean age: 41.2) could still detect all non-native speakers due to their distinctive accents. This native language recognition test ensured that our non-native speakers qualified for the study: being identified as non-native in the accent recognition test suggests that certain features of native and non-native speech production differ. These might potentially include deviations in pause patterns.

The language recognition test was implemented using the software package PRAAT (Version 6.0.36, [56]). Raters listened to a speech sample of each participant reading out the target text (see below) in casual speech tempo. The task of the raters was to indicate if they believed the speakers to be native speakers of English, German or Serbo-Croatian. The raters controlled the timing, moving to the next speech sample as soon as they were sufficiently certain about their decision.

c80f0f1006