Preserving words (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Posted on Mon, Apr. 12, 2004

Preserving words
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/8410415.htm?1c

A Swarthmore professor, worried that so many languages are dying out,
undertook a rescue mission to Siberia.

By James M. O'Neill
Inquirer Staff Writer

K. David Harrison made two tiring plane flights over an ocean and a
mountain range, a daylong car ride on a rutted dirt road, and two river
crossings by barge, all in the search for... words.

And he wasn't sure the words even existed.

Finally, in a handful of tiny log-cabin villages in central Siberia, a
day's drive from Tomsk and more than 2,175 miles east of Moscow, the
Swarthmore College professor found the Ös - a cluster of people last
visited by researchers three decades earlier, who spoke a language that
no academic linguist had ever recorded. Some even doubted its
existence.

Harrison, a Swarthmore linguist, found that only 35 of the 426 Ös
(pronounced oos) people still spoke their native language, Middle
Chulym, fluently. But several were deaf. Others were in their 90s and
unable to speak well. Ultimately, only a dozen Ös could work with
Harrison to record Middle Chulym (pronounced CHUL-um) for posterity.
Middle Chulym is going extinct; as the nomadic people came under Soviet
domination, Russian became the primary language.

Now, Middle Chulym will be preserved on videotapes in a digital archive.
And, at the Ös tribal council's request, Harrison will produce the
first book ever published in Middle Chulym, a children's book of Ös
folklore. Harrison presented his research on the language recently at
the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual
meeting in Seattle.

About 500 years ago, humans spoke 13,000 languages. Today, only about
6,500 languages remain. In a few centuries, there could be as few as
500.

That alarms linguists, who are scurrying to record languages and
describe their grammar before they are lost for good.

"If we let them go extinct, valuable knowledge will be lost," Harrison
said. "Many preliterate cultures have immense knowledge, which they
hand down by way of their language."

Harrison said the Ös have developed unique phrases to impart information
to one another about medicinal plants, history, folklore and religious
beliefs.

Theodore B. Fernald, a fellow linguist at Swarthmore, agreed: "Every
language is a piece of the puzzle about who we are."

Tofa, another Siberian language that Harrison has studied, provides an
example. He said Tofa-speaking reindeer herders have devised a highly
efficient way of sharing information about their herds. They have an
individual word for every conceivable combination of attributes to
describe a reindeer. Using just a single word, a Tofa speaker could
describe, say, a 2-year-old, brown, castrated male reindeer.

Languages also impart something else, less tangible. They reflect
different perspectives on life and the physical world.

The English words snake and fish indicate no perceived connection
between these living things. But in Tofa, the word for snake is
translated as ground-fish. An interesting choice - it helps an English
speaker see the similarity between how a fish moves in water and the
slithering of a snake over land.

Harrison, 36, is in his third year at Swarthmore and the third year of a
five-year grant from the Volkswagen Foundation. "To get a major grant -
that's quite a coup at his stage in this field," Fernald said.

Fernald, who was on the committee that hired Harrison, said he stood out
for "the quality of his research and his sense of social service."

Harrison grew up monolingual in Indiana, the son of a Baptist preacher.
He majored in political science at American University in Washington,
and when he tried to learn a foreign language - French - he fared
poorly.

Unsure about a career, he traveled around Eastern Europe and grew
fascinated with its minority groups. He also discovered that out of the
classroom, he actually did have an aptitude for languages - he tackled
Polish with success.

That sent him to Yale, to pursue his doctorate as a linguist. Ever
since, he has made repeated trips to Siberia and Mongolia, spending
splendidly isolated summers with yak herders and reindeer breeders.

Outside his spare campus office hangs a poster for the Endangered
Languages Project, based at the University of London. The poster, with
a picture of a New Guinea highlander tribesman, asks, "What's on his
mind? You may never know."

Nearby is a brochure for the Endangered Language Fund, based at Yale,
which has preserved texts written in Kuskokwim (Alaska), Jingulu
(Australia), Maliseet (Maine), Yei (southeastern China), Yuchi
(Oklahoma), Shabo (Ethiopia), Ongota (Ethiopia), and other endangered
languages, and has funded dictionaries in Comanche and Tohono O'odham
(both American Indian).

The Siberian languages Harrison works on are dying out because their
native speakers were politically repressed during the era of Soviet
rule. "The speakers were made to feel ashamed of their ethnicity and
languages, and their children were in many cases sent to boarding
schools where they were forbidden to speak their native language or
punished for doing so," he said.

In cases where there is no active repression, speakers may abandon a
language because they perceive it to be small, backward, or not useful
in the modern world. Harrison said linguists still don't fully
understand the process by which native speakers abandon their original
language. "They never call a meeting and say, 'Let's switch.' "

The decision is often made by the children in a minority community, who
feel peer pressure to fit in with a majority culture. Once made, the
decision tends to be irreversible.

Harrison uses a separate office to phonetically transcribe his tapes of
native speakers. A bookshelf sags under binders bearing labels that
read "Yoruba" (Africa) and "Kirundi" (Australia).

Against another wall, an old metal filing cabinet bears a sign: "Wires,
microphones and headphones (oh my!)"

For his stay last summer with the Ös, Harrison and his collaborator,
linguist Greg Anderson, brought a video camera and solar-powered
laptop.

They would often start by asking a native speaker to count, or recite
body parts. Then they would ask the Ös to say specific sentences. The
goal is to collect enough taped samples to identify rules of grammar.

Harrison also listened to the Ös' everyday spoken exchanges. "We'd learn
more that way because they would use sentences we would never have
thought to ask them about."

One of his favorites was uttered by an Ös woman in her garden: "The
worms have eaten my cabbage."

He traveled with the Ös in their dugout canoes, fished with them, and
heard their tales about bear hunting. A PBS documentary crew tagged
along for a show that is in production.

Harrison said native writing systems are rare. The Ös never devised a
written form of Middle Chulym. Luckily for Harrison, one Ös man decided
to keep a hunting journal, and devised his own alphabet, based on
Russian. When he told friends, though, they ridiculed him. Ashamed, he
destroyed the journal.

With this man's help, and using his home-grown alphabet, Harrison is
putting Middle Chulym to paper.

When he returned to Swarthmore in the fall, he made copies of his
videotapes, then sent the originals to a linguistic institute in the
Netherlands, where they are archived.

"The language belongs to the native speakers," Harrison said. "I'm just
the curator."

Contact staff writer James M. O'Neill at 610-313-8012 or
joneill at phillynews.com. To listen to a sound clip of the language, view
a slide show and more: http://go.philly.com/language