As native languages are lost in droves, ideas go with them (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

[ILAT note: this article may have been previously circulated here.]

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As native languages are lost in droves, ideas go with them
http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/8031044.htm

BY ALEXANDRA WITZE
The Dallas Morning News

SEATTLE - (KRT) - A fisherman from Cornwall and an accountant from
Houston may have trouble understanding each other, but the English
tongue itself is in no danger of disappearing.

The same can't be said for many of the world's native languages.

"Human languages are vanishing as we speak," says K. David Harrison, a
linguist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. The rate of loss, he
adds, "makes the extinction of species look trivial by comparison."

Roughly 40 percent of the world's estimated 6,800 languages may
disappear within the next century, linguist Stephen Anderson said this
month in Seattle at a meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.

Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic will probably maintain
their lock as some of the languages with the most speakers. So why
should it matter if a few obscure languages, spoken by a few people in
remote corners of the world, vanish forever?

"What is lost when a language is lost is a world," said Anderson, of
Yale University.

Native languages, he said, often convey cultural and sociological
information that cannot be articulated in the same way in a different
language. A tribe that loses its language may also lose a storehouse of
knowledge about its members' history and their environment.

Two newly described languages in the Turkic family, documented in
Siberia by Harrison, illuminate the challenges facing those who speak
an obscure tongue.

Last July, Harrison traveled to Siberia to meet with the Chulym people,
who live in six isolated villages using traditional means of hunting,
gathering and fishing. Only 35 people in the community of 426 - and no
one under the age of 52 - could speak the Middle Chulym language
fluently, Harrison found. The rest spoke mainly Russian.

Middle Chulym is a "moribund" language, destined to disappear soon after
its last speaker dies, Harrison reported at the Seattle meeting.
"Passive" speakers may continue to use some of the words for a while,
but they, too, will inevitably die out, he said.

Villagers consider Middle Chulym to be a low-prestige language, so
there's no compelling reason for them to preserve it, Dr. Harrison
said. Attempts to transliterate it into the Cyrillic alphabet, used in
Russian, haven't worked for the same reason.

"People don't feel good about speaking these languages," he said.

When Middle Chulym goes, the villagers will have lost a rich oral
history as well as specific environmental knowledge, such as what
plants to harvest, what animals to hunt, and how to read local weather,
Harrison said. He is working on a new transliteration to create a
children's storybook in Middle Chulym that the villagers can be proud
of.

In similar straits is another Siberian language called Tofa, spoken by
just 40 people in a community of 600. Tofa speakers have a detailed
language for their reindeer herds, with specific ways of describing
animals on the basis of sex, age, fertility, ride-ability and color.

That kind of information just doesn't translate in the same fashion into
Russian, Harrison said.

Sometimes languages vanish by choice.

In the Caucasus, for instance, the relatively complex Ubykh language
disappeared partly because of a tradition that a couple, upon marrying,
should adopt the more phonetically simple language of the pair,
Anderson said. For example, every time an Ubykh-speaking man married a
woman who spoke a simpler language, he stopped speaking Ubykh.

Several linguistic, conservation and religious groups have devoted
themselves to documenting as many of the world's vanishing languages as
possible. But working against them is the fact that nobody knows
exactly how many languages exist.

The Ethnologue database, sponsored by Dallas-based SIL International,
catalogs 6,809 languages worldwide. That number represents a "best
guess" but is essentially meaningless, linguists argued at the Seattle
meeting.

For starters, there's the oft-blurred distinction between what
constitutes a dialect and what constitutes a language.

Languages are sometimes defined by political power rather than by
linguistic definitions, said Laurence Horn of Yale. Cantonese and
Mandarin are considered dialects of Chinese when they are really
distinct languages. Meanwhile, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are more
like dialects than separate languages, he said.

In the end, perhaps it's best to regard all the world's languages as
manifestations of a single language, said David Lightfoot of Georgetown
University.

And that, he said, could be called simply Human.

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RESOURCES

For a survey of the world's estimated 6,800 languages, see
www.ethnologue.com

For photos from a documentary about the Middle Chulym, visit
www.ironboundfilms.com/ironsinthefire.html

For a book-length treatment, see "Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of
the World's Languages," by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine (Oxford
University Press, 2000)

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