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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=patb42@sbcglobal.net href="mailto:patb42@sbcglobal.net">Pat Benabe</A>
</DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=goodtracks@peoplepc.com
href="mailto:goodtracks@peoplepc.com">Jimm Goodtracks</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Friday, September 21, 2007 2:13 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> languages</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><A
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/18/AR200709180"><FONT
size=3>http://www.washingt<WBR>onpost.com/<WBR>wp-dyn/content/<WBR>article/2007/<WBR>09/18/AR20070918<WBR>0</FONT></A><BR><FONT
size=3>1751.html?nav=<WBR>hcmodule<BR><BR>Vanishing Languages
Identified<BR>Oklahoma Is Among Places Where Tongues Are Disappearing<BR><BR>By
Rick Weiss<BR>Washington Post Staff Writer<BR>Wednesday, September 19, 2007;
A12<BR><BR>Oklahoma has earned the dubious distinction of being one of the five
worst<BR>"language-loss hotspots" in the world -- places where native languages
are<BR>going extinct the fastest -- according to an analysis released
yesterday.<BR><BR>The Sooner State's inclusion in the global top five is a
reminder,<BR>researchers said, that the United States has a long history of
linguistic<BR>diversity and that the problem of language extinctions is not
limited to<BR>distant lands.<BR><BR>Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken,
about half are expected to<BR>disappear in this century, said K. David Harrison,
a Swarthmore College<BR>linguist and co-director of the Enduring Voices project.
That collaboration<BR>between the National Geographic Society and the Living
Tongues Institute<BR>for Endangered Languages of Salem, Ore., assembled the
latest statistics on<BR>global language loss.<BR><BR>While previous analyses
have focused on individual languages that have just<BR>one or a few surviving
speakers, Harrison and his colleagues took a<BR>geographic approach, identifying
where in the world languages are<BR>disappearing fastest. Oklahoma and nearby
areas of the American Southwest,<BR>it turns out, have an extremely rich
linguistic fabric because of the many<BR>Native American tribes that were
corralled there in the 1800s.<BR><BR>Today those languages are disappearing by
the month, and with them a<BR>treasure trove of ecological insights, culinary
and medicinal secrets and<BR>complex cultural histories, including mythologies
that can teach a lot<BR>about universal human fears and aspirations, Harrison
said.<BR><BR>"It may seem frivolous, but mythological traditions are attempts to
make<BR>sense of the universe, and the different ways that the human mind has
tried<BR>to grapple with the unknown and the unknowable are of scientific
interest,"<BR>he said.<BR><BR>Following in the footsteps of early colonialists,
but carrying high-quality<BR>digital video and audio equipment instead of guns
and trinkets, the<BR>Enduring Voices project has launched a number of
expeditions to document<BR>dying languages, about half of which have no written
form. Where there is<BR>interest in preserving those tongues, it has helped
create teaching<BR>materials for use in local classrooms.<BR><BR>The venture's
analysis, based in part on scholarly research and presented<BR>in a telephone
news conference yesterday, took three factors into account<BR>in identifying the
"hotspots": The diversity of languages spoken, the<BR>number of living speakers
and how old they are, and the extent to which the<BR>languages have been
documented.<BR><BR>Among those on the brink of extinction in Oklahoma is Yuchi,
a language<BR>native to the same-named tribe from Tennessee and believed to be
unrelated<BR>to any other in the world. It is spoken by just a handful of elders
because<BR>youngsters in government boarding schools were punished if they
veered from<BR>English. Yuchi tales tell of Earth's creation from water with the
help of a<BR>crawfish and the emergence of the tribe's forebears from a drop
of<BR>menstrual blood in the sky.<BR><BR>The other four hotspots are:<BR><BR>¿
Northern Australia, where project members recorded the last known speaker<BR>of
Amurdag -- a man who remembers about 100 words that he last heard spoken<BR>by
his now-deceased father.<BR><BR>¿ Central South America, where the Kallawaya of
Bolivia have for at least<BR>400 years maintained a secret language about
medicinal plants.<BR><BR>¿ The Northwest Pacific Plateau, where there is but a
single woman who can<BR>still speak Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once
spoken on Oregon's<BR>Siletz reservation.<BR><BR>¿ Eastern Siberia, where a high
proportion of the 23 known tongues are<BR>unrelated to any other languages in
the world.<BR><BR>Language can reveal a lot about how a culture organizes
information. In the<BR>Paraguayan Lengua language, for example, the word "11"
means literally<BR>"arrived at the foot, one," meaning "counted 10 fingers plus
one toe." The<BR>word for "20" means "finished the feet."<BR><BR>In Siberia's
Nivkh language, each number can be said 26 ways, depending on<BR>what is being
counted.<BR><BR>About 80 percent of the world's people speak 83 languages, while
about<BR>3,500 languages are spoken by just 0.2 percent of the world's
population.<BR>Attempts to commune with those minorities can turn
unintentionally comedic,<BR>said Gregory Anderson, co-director of the Enduring
Voices project.<BR><BR>Talking to a woman who is one of the 20 remaining Bardi
speakers in<BR>Australia, Anderson once mispronounced an "r," which resulted in
him<BR>asking, "What kangaroo are you from?" instead of "What country are
you<BR>from?"<BR><BR>No interpreter was needed to understand the Bardi laughter
that followed.</FONT><BR></FONT></DIV>
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