I rarely do this, but this is a cause dear to my heart. And Bren would approve.
This is for real—an attempt to save languages around this planet from extinction. In historical memory, for various cultures, the sun has gone down on various languages forever, starting with the last two Etruscan speakers, in about 80 BC; 1676, the last born Cornish speaker, in Britain; and in this last century, many, many of the world’s languages went extinct, with the history, the world view, the legends, the traditions and culture that are embedded in a language.
Sometimes the elders get the notion to withhold the language from the young, to make them live in the Outside World, that somehow they’re both protecting the old knowledge and trying to help the young survive. The ELF tries to get the cooperation of the elders to sanction the transmission and teaching, with an assurance of respect for the traditions. The site is: The Endangered Language Fund.
As a classicist by training and a devout lover of linguistics in general, thank you for this link! My mother-in-law, whose parents are Finnish, was not allowed to learn the language. They did not want their kids to have one foot in the old world, but she often feels the loss of that part of her heritage. I cannot imagine it in a language that is endangered.
As a foreign language instructor and a linguist, by trade, I deplore the loss of languages. Merely codifying them and writing out the tribal languages is not enough. There needs to be a fresh generation speaking these languages for them to survive. I have taught my children to read my own language and the language I teach in the hope of developing the love of languages in them. For the most part, I have been successful.
Bilingualism has never hurt anyone. I recommend it highly.
From a person who do have a small language as her native tongue I fear the cultural entropy of a one-language situation. No language has a one to one relationship with any other language; it carries its own set of idioms and cultural/ideological constructs. A colleague of mine who have lived in France for a long time (but now is back in Sweden) says that whenever he speaks French he has to change mindset. I think that describes it well. So when a language dies a culture dies. Normally I wouldn’t be too upset about that. The universe isn’t static, and that’s a good thing. But I do think a mono-cultural society is bad for humanity – we need options, we need diversity, to be able to find survival paths.
And we’re now on the fast road to US English as the lingua franca of the modern world.
I too recommend bilingualism. Getting to understand other cultures can hurt but it’s a huge gain!
Well and thoughtfully said as always, Busifer.
Thank you.
This is a little off topic, but here’s a movie you may find interesting. In some ways it reminds me quite strongly of some of your stories.
Meek’s Cutoff
Summary: The year is 1845, the earliest days of the Oregon Trail, and a wagon train of three families has hired mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. Claiming to know a shortcut, Meek leads the group on an unmarked path across the high plain desert, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage. Over the coming days, the emigrants face the scourges of hunger, thirst and their own lack of faith in one another’s instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer crosses their path, the emigrants are torn between their trust in a guide who has proven himself unreliable and a man who has always been seen as a natural born enemy.
Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rhNrz2hX_o
From the review in Salon:
NYT review:
I am quite ambivalent concerning 2nd languages. My parents used Yiddish so their children would not understand what they were discussing – and as a result we didn’t and don’t.
That English, if not Chinese, will increasingly become the lingua franca may bring us together.
I also believe that cultures survive because of their own inherent worth.
I’m not as optimistic regarding the survival strength of small cultures – I live in one and can see with my own eyes what is happening.
I don’t say every culture is worth saving, or every language. But diversity is a must – of that I’m pretty certain. Mono-culture is death. But perhaps our survival is BECAUSE we are good at creating adversity?!
If we get to a virtual one-language situation different the existence of different cultures would result in different words and meanings, which in all practical reality mean we talk different languages. Just try to disseminate what a “pepper” is (recently done, initiated by an Aussie linguist, live on Librarything Talk/Green Dragon. Lots of interesting results across the English speaking community).
False siblings are the devil in language 😉
Darwin, however, does not protect, say, the Burgundians against the Huns. But your thesis that a common language promotes peace is one I do believe in. The fact that English, like Latin, can be spoken comprehensibly though very badly, is in its favor.
Re Yiddish, however, I had the chance to take a little Hebrew from the cantor at the local synagogue, a matter of curiosity on my part, and an invitation; and I was in there with mostly much older folk, who, yes, talked in Yiddish, especially when they wanted to discuss what on earth I was and why I was there…not unkindly, but sometimes amusingly, because I was definitely out of pattern; and the punch line to various jokes tended to be in Yiddish. Well, I was not a language major for nothing, and finally they told one that was just too funny, and I fear I couldn’t restrain a smile. It embarrassed the poor folk, who stopped speaking in Yiddish in my vicinity. [Yiddish is kind of a moving target, a conglomeration of words picked up from this and that language, not always the same word, combined with words that are core-culture…it enables people from different countries to understand enough of each other’s speech to get the gist.]
Most of the Native American laguages are in danger of fading away. Only a few try and teach their language to the younger generations. One interview I saw indicated that there are only about 300 speakers of Chiricahua Apache left and only a few elderly members are fluent.
My Great Grandfather was born in the US, but learned Irish Gallic as his first language, and English second. However he never taught his children or grandchildren. I for one wish he had. I have studied Welsh as it was the closest I could find to Gallic at the University near me. I have tried to study it some on my own, but its is difficult to do it from Irish/english dictionaties and text when you have never heard the words spoken. Plus I cant roll an R to save my life. I have read that Gallic was in danger of extinction in Ireland so they instigated a manditory program in the irish schools. I don’t know how well it works, I don’t think many Irish children are becoming fluent in the old language, but at least they get some exposure to it.
I know a number of people that clame English is fast becoming extinct here in the US and the practice of emailing and texting is hastening thet extinction. Its like the line in the “My Fair Lady” song: “In America they have not used it for years”
Blatant spelling error. Sorry about that.
Hawaiian is alive and well, and has a number of speakers, both native and non. One thing to note is the ability of pidgin, or trade language, to revitalize a language, by allowing one language to adopt concepts from the other. Native Hawaiians had no word for ‘cat’, as they didn’t have any until cats arrived with traders and missionaries in the 1800s, but Pidgin developed the term ‘popoki’ (maybe a bastardization of the Hawaiians hearing the missionaries call cats ‘poor puss cat’ –> popoki). Now popoki is standard Hawaiian for cat.
Popoki. I love it.
The Spanish word for horse, ‘caballo’, is not the proper or admiring Latin word for a horse: ‘equus’. Maybe equus (EKwus) was unpronounceable by the natives of Spain—or they mistook when some Roman yelled “istem caballum aufer!” Tr: Get that nag of yours outa here!
The Turks had conquered Constantinople (another mouthful), and allegedly modern Istanbul got its name when a boatload of Greek fishermen were detained by a Turkish patrol. The Turks asked “Where are you going?” and the Greeks answered: “To the City.” In Greek that’s Ees teyn POL, or Istanbul, since in Greek b and p aren’t much different.
Coincidentally, The Economist has an article on English fluency world wide:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/04/english
I’m all for saving endangered languages, if only to keep English pure.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” –James Nicholl
Aloha!
I can also really appreciate the loss of culture – I was listening to Radio Australia and hear an dynamite native version of Waltzing Matilda – really cool.
Which Koori language was it? And is it on Auntie ABC’s web site?
I love languages. My parents must have seen some interest there, because early on, I liked things connected with language, the alphabet, calligraphy, history, and the wordplay they both loved. I had good language teachers: Miss McAdams in junior high, Miss Seegar in high school, and an eccentric Frenchwoman, Dr. Hunting, who’d married an English speaker. Each encouraged me actively. Also, my American Heritage Dictionary had an article on Indo-European, complete with a lexicon..That and the Encyclopaedia Britannica really intrigued me in high school.
So the shrinking pool of world languages, being gobbled up by mass media and larger world languages, doesn’t surprise me. A great many won’t make it: overrun or absorbed by the winning culture/language. Yet they may leave behind words and concepts that get imported as “substrata.” That’s an intriguing thing, how the conquering language is changed. (Modern English is neither exactly Saxon nor Norman.)
Some few endangered languages, including a too small number of Native American Indian languages, are gaining just a little. They may grow and survive…somehow…against vast odds. That takes intestinal fortitude. And stubbornness.
But then there are other language communities: Spanish and Asian langs and a few others are growing here in the US, and having an effect on the English superstratum.
Or take English dialects: Right here online, we’re all exposed to non-US or to US dialects. Regionalisms, ethnic communities, class distinctions, all get mixed into something not quite like we started with.
Or –There are some, like old-time Appalachian Mountain speech, such as my dad’s parents and he and his siblings spoke (or still speak) has words and grammar usage similar to other country/old-timer speech, but with unique tbings that date back all the way to the first colonists. (“Hit” instead of it, for example.) But with modren media and people mkving away or moving in, those old ways, a rich dialect, are in danger of being lost.
How about the odd borrowing going on between English and Japanese? They borrow as readily as English borrows from others.
Add in people inventing new words to suit whatever purpose for new times.
Oh, and add in people inventing languages for fun and stories.
The whole process is mixing a big pot. It’s fascinating.
…But when we lose a language, we lose a history, a culture, an artwork made and shapex by thousands over centuries, and another way of looking at the world.
P.S. I have *got* to review my French and Spanish. I went to write something very basic the other day, and was shocked I couldn’t remember for certain how to spell a word properly and wasn’t sure if my memory was right for a point of grammar or for a vocb. item. But my reading skills are still close to their former levl.
The grammar point: Passé composé, with être verbs, agreement of the past participle, is my memory correct that the p.p. Should agree with the direct object of the verb? Will check my grammar book tomorrow, and may get that in ebook for portability.
— To flex my liang. Muscles and test talent …and memory…I decided to try a little Japanese. I’ve discovered my attn span lately is less than a fruit fly’s. But a grammar précis and a few examples taught me more than the dip into a prior book. If I’m not careful, I’ll have a smattering of a completely non-European language soon.
An interest in mahendo’sat, of all things, has led to me picking up a couple of books and apps on Hindi and Sanskrit, and it’s infectiously interesting. Alien and yet vaguely familiar, because it’s Indo-European. — Hoping to work more on the Dwvanagari this weekend.
I keep hoping to find portable lang learning resources: text plus audio plus maybe video, but so far, things are very old and expensive packages, or strictly online, not a good provision for download. I keep meaning to do an aggressive google hunt or ask help from lingiist or librarian friends, but haven’t yet done so.
My ears are bigger than my stomach?
BSC: être verbs have agreement between subject and Past participle always. In avoir verbs the past participle agrees with the direct object agrees it proceeds the past participle.
Ah, thanks, M. Spence. Hmm, It’s been about a week ago. I think I had it right even so. I believe it was… (Sur les livres) … Le livre premier est arrivé hier, et ces livres sont arrivés hier aussi. (On peut estimer quels livres sont arrivés la semaine passé, n’est-ce pas?)
So I got it right by instinct, but when I asked just now, scrambled it. I wonder if I would’ve noticed the d.o. avoir agreement issue; guessing yes; my instincts seem to be mostly on track.
Still, review’s needed.
This is one of many reasons why I miss my old job. My former employer was in the business of developing, collecting and distributing language corpora. Mostly we were interested in economically or strategically important languages. However, while I was managing publications, I’d take in outside contributions from people doing language preservation work. We might not have sold many copies of such corpora but we would maintain them in the collection and many of our subscribers were libraries. That meant that a few lesser known and spoken languages got into manage collections. I don’t know if they’re as friendly to this sort work now I’m gone.
Waltjim Bat Matilda by Ali Mills. It can be found by looking on line. I have ordered the CD from the Australian firm.
On conserving language – as the internet and other media rushes faster and faster, even inter-generational communication gets fractured. Consider – if you look at some of the books of the 19th century, many had quotations at the head of chapters in English, Latin, and even Greek – who knows the context today except for some classical language scholars. Even closer, I call the device you use to keep food cold an ice box even though we never had one – but my Mother and Grandmother used the word. I hope that my children and perhaps grandchild will carry on but if not then another link with the past will be lost.
We did not read the same books our children read. Is culture any different? To preserve a language frozen in time is just a museum piece – of interest to scholars but not really useful.
I am sorry if I am running on or stepping on anyone’s toes.
Thank you.
When I was in university the first time (way back in the early 1970s), my professor, Dr. Boleslav Povsic, taught several languages, including Latin and Greek (both koine and Attic). He told us that if we wanted to learn about a culture, it was necessary to learn the language. Not just the words, but why they say something in a particular way, i.e., the idioms. Russians ask about wood chopping, Italians ask about standing, etc., These are oversimplifications, but the idea is that a culture reflects itself in its language. That’s why it’s so difficult for people who learn a second language from books, etc, and never get the feel of the language from a native speaker. I am all for keeping those languages alive, especially those languages which have no written counterpart, and use an oral history to teach the next generation. I would hate to see all of that experience and knowledge lost because the last speakers died and never taught anyone else the language.
I often wondered why Sesame Street started teaching Spanish words to kids. Not any longer, I do understand the reasoning. I have struggled to learn Japanese, which is a relatively simple language compared to Attic Greek. I just don’t get it and while I know a few words, I cannot speak a sentence that makes any sense to a native speaker. Must be the language center of my brain is turned off or something.
CJ, thanks for sharing the site.
Language is mindset. I used to amuse myself back in college, because we had to take a batch of psych exams that wouldn’t count or come back on us —we were in fact studying psych exams, and it was pretty boring—I decided to translate the questions into Latin and to answer them via translation. And French. The results were, shall we say, different—when in Latin the word “I” itself is iffy, and when you ask about emotional words, there is no English for “pietas” or even the French “foi”: both can be translated ‘faith’, but those words pass each other like ships in the night, freighted with a world of meaning as they go. The mode of thinking and viewing the universe is quite different. And that is only one out of hundreds of words without English equivalency. It is useful to be able to switch world views. A diplomat needs that skill. A social worker or a teacher can well use it. So can an investigator. I’ve been working a little on Chinese and Japanese. There’s a whole lot going on there.
There are times I cannot think of a word I want. I switch languages to stalk it.
At times a memory of places I’ve been eludes me: I cannot readily think of the English word for what I see in my head. If I sit and think for a while, I will get it. But the memory is stored in, say, Italian. And yes, occasionally, though rarely, I dream in other languages. Living in one language is something I can imagine, because I did until I was, oh, about 6, but after that, I sure wouldn’t trade the experience.
Just out of curiosity, CJ: how many languages are you conversant in? I know that you have taught Latin, and you have translated a couple of stf novels out of French. You mention Italian. How many others are passed the “working a little” phase?