In Siberia, a race to preserve a dying language (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

In Siberia, a race to preserve a dying language

http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/business/index.ssf?/newsflash/get_story.ssf?/cgi-free/getstory_ssf.cgi?f0028_BC_WSJ--Siberia-Language&&news&newsflash-financial

By JEANNE WHALEN
The Associated Press
3/26/04 9:02 AM

The Wall Street Journal

LUKASHKIN YAR, Russia -- Lyuba Parnyuk had traveled thousands of miles
across frozen swampland to make an elderly woman sing, but the sun was
going down, and the young linguist's tape recorder was still empty.
Outside, her Siberian snowmobile driver was cold and hungry. "Please,"
she pleaded. "Just one song."

Sitting next to her in the remote cabin was 71-year-old Elizaveta
Sigilyetova, one of the last living speakers of a rare dialect of
Khanty, a regional tongue nearly overwhelmed by Russia's slavic
majority. Forced to speak Russian since her school days, the petite
grandmother was slow to remember her native language. But finally,
fiddling with the tails of her headscarf, she filled the room with a
hoarse melody:

"Ankel wajah qimlen semkan lalten pa qit' qaskin ninet."

"The eagle owl with sad eyes sings that all the men and women have
gone."

Delighted, Ms. Parnyuk scribbled down new words and coaxed a few more
songs from her hostess. It was a coup for the 22-year-old graduate
student, who braves blizzards and voyages to the farthest corners of
the taiga to document little-known languages before they die out.

Based in Tomsk, an oil and university town lined with 18th-century log
cabins, Ms. Parnyuk and her colleagues at Tomsk State Pedagogical
University are fighting a global epidemic: Linguists estimate that
two-thirds of the world's 6,500 languages will disappear this century
as the increasingly global economy and culture promote a few dominant
languages.

A crossroads of migrating peoples since the Stone Age, Siberia's forests
once echoed with the songs and legends of the Saams, the Karels, the
Veps and Moris, and dozens of other tribes. Their remoteness helped
preserve their cultures for centuries, but Siberia's Russification over
the last 50 years means the last generation of about 30 language groups
is now dying off.

To many -- even to some native Siberians -- the drive to preserve local
tongues seems futile. Yet every time a language is lost, thousands of
years of culture, religion and medical knowledge die with it, linguists
argue. They worry about the disappearance of Pongyong (in Nepal),
Arabama (in Australia) and Lower Sorbian (in Germany).

"If you wait another two years in this region, it'll be too late," Ms.
Parnyuk said after her recording session, sipping tea in the kitchen of
a nearby Khanty family.

Ms. Parnyuk's travels took her to three remote villages along the Ob
River, a shallow waterway 2,000 miles east of Moscow that once
supported thousands of Khanty. The tribe is distantly related to the
Finns, Estonians and Hungarians, who migrated west from Siberia 40,000
years ago. Some linguists also see links to native Americans.

For centuries the Khanty fished and hunted rabbit and moose near the Ob.
Their language had no alphabet but was rich with legends about
mammoths, shamans and pagan gods. Awestruck by bears, the Khanty
invented a whole separate vocabulary to describe the animal and its
body parts.

Slavic missionaries turned up in the 18th century to preach
Christianity. Then the Russian Revolution brought lasting change. Bent
on forging hundreds of ethnic minorities into one Soviet citizenry, the
Bolsheviks herded Khanty children to boarding schools and adults to
collective farms, where they were forced to speak Russian. When the
Soviets discovered oil in Siberia in the 1960s, millions of
Russian-speaking workers invaded Khanty land to drill wells and build
cities.

Demoralized, most Khanty either assimilated into Russian life or took to
drink, typically vodka or moonshine. "Russians tell us to this day that
we weren't literate, we couldn't read or write. Well, OK, they brought
culture, literacy and education, but they also destroyed our way of
life," says Klavdia Demko, a Khanty activist who helps arrange Ms.
Parnyuk's travels.

In the 1950s, a distinguished Soviet linguist named Andrei Dulzon began
meticulously documenting indigenous languages, traveling by motorboat
to remote settlements along the Ob. Today, at the university in Tomsk,
surrounded by stacks of Mr. Dulzon's vocabulary-card files, graduate
students compile dictionaries, write ABC books for kids, and train
teachers to keep up the languages in rural schools. They set out on
expeditions as often as possible.

Andrei Filtchenko, a Tomsk linguist finishing his Ph.D. on Khanty
dialects at Rice University in Houston, once walked 40 miles through a
bog to visit two elderly Khanty hunters. Navigating the knee-deep water
in rubber boots, he finally reached a log house sitting on a shallow
lake. Delighted by the company, the hunters regaled him with tall tales
about bears.

"Ninety percent of my language data comes from bear stories," says Mr.
Filtchenko, who developed an interest in indigenous people after
reading "The Last of the Mohicans" as a child.

Khanty superstitions pepper every journey. Last summer, Mr. Filtchenko
cut himself while swimming. The wound swelled. The next day, several
Khanty led him to a sacred log cabin where he laid a piece of cloth and
a few coins before a wooden deity inside. "The cut healed in one or two
days," he says.

Ms. Parnyuk paid for her recent two-week expedition herself, keeping
costs to under $250. She stayed with families and often hitched rides
with drivers such as Father Alexei, an orthodox priest who drove her
from village to village in a 1979 Moskvich, the Soviet equivalent of a
Ford Escort. The priest's rattly car broke down twice and finally
plowed into a snowbank.

In Lukashkin-Yar, population 600, Ms. Parnyuk cruised from cabin to
cabin on a snowmobile in the minus 40 degree temperatures. She found
only three remaining Khanty who could speak the regional dialect, known
as Alexandrovskoye. They helped the linguist correct a draft of a
Khanty dictionary and filled her notebook with legends.

After her tea break, she zoomed off to another elderly informant, a
retired oil worker who had chatted at length with her the previous
summer. Ducking into the door of his disheveled hut, she found him
sitting in his undershorts, drunk on moonshine. "Tell us about all the
oil fields you've explored," she said gently. But realizing it was no
use, she left a package of food and departed.

The Tomsk linguists hope to finish their Khanty dictionary by 2008. Ms.
Demko, the activist, has offered to raise money from local Khanty to
help sponsor the book. "We are all counting on Lyuba," she says. But
she admits young Khanty such as her nephew, a computer programmer, are
more interested in studying English.

Ms. Parnyuk, who now speaks Khanty better than many of her informants,
has few illusions that her work will restore the Alexandrovskoye
dialect.

Still, she adds, the Khanty have remarkable faith in renewal. "When they
bury someone, they put broken things in his grave," she says. "They
think that in the next life, all broken things will become whole
again."

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Word Play

Khanty ways of saying "bear":

"Ih" -- Bear, as hunters would say it

"Pupi" -- Bear, as women or children would say it

"Qaqi" -- Bear, a sweet nickname that means "little brother"

"Worong Qu" -- Bear, meaning "man of the forest"

"Mae elle ih welsim" -- I killed a big bear