LL-L "Language varieties" 2001.11.09 (03) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 09.NOV.2001 (03) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Dear Lowlanders,

Below I will present to you the end of an article.  I think it fits in with
one of our discussion threads and may be of use to some of you.  Please note
that I am not presenting it to you to make a point in a discussion, just as a
written piece to think about.

Best regards,
Reinhard/Ron

===

"Kenneth Locke Hale, a master of languages, died on October 8th, aged 67"
(_The Economist_, November 3rd, 2001, p. 89)

<cut>

<cut> He sought to rescue languages that were dying out. One Indian language
at its last gasp was spoken by the Wopanaak, the tribe that greeted the
Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. It is now spoken again by several thousand people
around Cape Cod. A Wopanaak who studied under Mr Hale is preparing a
dictionary of her language. "Ken was a voice for the voiceless," said Noam
Chomsky.

Mr Hale could converse in about 50 languages, perhaps a world record, although
he was too modest to claim one. But some tongues, such as Australia's Lardil,
died with its last seven speakers. Mr Hale was the last person on earth to
speak some languages. Hundreds are disappearing, he said. "They became
extinct, and I had no one to speak them with."

How much did Kenneth Hale contribute to an understanding of the apparently
innate human capacity for speech? He made a number of what he called "neat",
discoveries about the structure of language, and had an instinctive sense of
what all languages had in common. After his retirement from MIT in 1999, he
said he would "really get down to work", an ambition he was unable to achieve.
And linguistics itself is a fairly recently <sic.> discipline. He is likely to
be remembered by "The Green Book of Language Revitalisation", which he helped
to edit and which was published shortly before he died. It was warmly
welcomed, especially by those who may be a touch aggrieved by the spread of
English, which is blamed for brutally sweeping other languages aside.

A scholarly argument surfaces from time to time about the desirability of
keeping alive languages that, in medical parlance, are brain dead.
Occasionally the argument turns nationalistic. For example, is what Mr Hale
called the "revitalisation" of Welsh merely a nuisance in Britain where,
obviously, English is the working language? Kenneth Hale had an indignant
answer to that question. "When you lose a language," he told a reporter, "you
lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It's like dropping a bomb
on a museum, the Louvre."

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