indigenous language survival

[jess tauber]

Richard Zane Smith has some interesting points. In my work on ideophones, I've found that their semantics is often concerned with loss or lack of control of animate, rational entities. Tucker Childs has written extensively about educated or city living speakers of ideophone-rich languages in Africa no longer in command of these systems, under pressure from Western-style prejudices against ideophone use. But I wonder if there is more going on here, having to do with adoption of a different attitude toward life and a person's place in it, with increasing use of high-tech contraptions that may increase one's control over one's environment, other persons, etc.

Along a different line, Yahgan, down to one fluent speaker but now the subject of new efforts to save it thanks to Yoram Meroz and real grant money, has been restructured to be more in line with English and Spanish. Apparently nearly gone are the complex bipartite constructions with instrument/bodypart prefixes and position/path suffixes, and extensive serialization. Use of auxiliaries and preverbal clitics has expanded at the expense of the old inflectional suffixes, some actually borrowed from English and Spanish. Yahgan already was in the throes of a switch from OV to VO typology when first described in the 19th C., but exposure to the European cultures seems to have accelerated these changes.

It would be really interesting to know how much (and WHAT) is lost when a new world view is adopted in such cases, when it ultimately affects the way the language is used, its structures, etc. On the other hand languages should not be seen as static specimens for the linguistic museum. All this has been argued ad nauseum by others. Does the language do its job? Are the speakers satisfied with it? If the language is on the verge of extinction active use even of a simplified version should be applauded- later on we can then introduce the 'classical' variety and see if there are any takers.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net