Vanishing Voices: What Else is Lost (fwd)

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Vanishing Voices: What Else is Lost

by K. David Harrison
http://www.science-spirit.org/articles/Articledetail.cfm?article_ID=453
November December 2004

Dongur. It’s a powerful word. It means “male domesticated reindeer in
its third year and first mating season, but not ready for mating,” and
it allows a tribe of nomadic reindeer herders in Siberia to identify
and describe with a single word what would otherwise require a complex
construction. But the Tofa are giving up their ancestral tongue in
favor of Russian—the dominant, national language that doesn’t have a
remote equivalent to the word dongur. And the Tofa are just one of
hundreds of small communities whose language is endangered. When
working with such groups, it’s hard to keep from wondering not only how
knowledge is encoded in language, but what exactly is lost when these
small languages vanish.

Some linguists, including Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, have spoken of
language in the technical, cognitive sense as consisting mainly of
words and rules. An English speaker, for example, has in her lexicon
the word “hat,” which is simply an arbitrary string of sounds she has
learned to associate with an object you wear on your head. She also has
a rule of morphology that tells her the plural is “hats” and a rule of
syntax that says when there’s an adjective, put it first—“red hat,” not
“hat red.” And she has certain cognitive structures, not learned but
thought to be genetic. The knowledge that nouns and adjectives are
different types of things and that one modifies the other, for example,
allows her to understand that red describes a type of hat, but hat does
not describe a type of red. This cognitive view, while not incorrect,
bypasses much of the knowledge that language actually contains.

Languages abound in “cultural knowledge,” which is neither genetic nor
explicitly learned, but comes to us in an information package—rich and
hierarchical in its structure. Any English-speaking child may know the
word “uncle,” but what does she store in her head as its meaning? An
uncle may be a mother’s brother, or a mother’s sister’s husband, or
perhaps just her parents’ adult male friend. The English-speaking child
has no explicit linguistic information to indicate these are distinct
positions in the kinship tree. Why not? We could speculate that since
it was not culturally crucial to distinguish these positions, the
language did not do so. While our mind readily grasps the various
concepts of “uncle,” English provides no ready-made, unique labels to
distinguish them. Conversely, in cultures with more socially important
kinship relations, there exists no general word for “uncle.” Five
different types of uncles would have five completely different labels.
By simply learning these labels, the child implicitly learns that these
are distinct kinship roles.

Kinship systems are just the tip of the iceberg. By simply knowing the
word dongur, the young Tofa reindeer herder has, at the tip of his
tongue, the ability to pick out from the herd and identify a specific
set of reindeer. Tofa reindeer herders who have switched to speaking
Russian can still talk about and herd reindeer, but they lack the
labels to do so efficiently. Knowledge their ancestors accumulated over
centuries, knowledge that is very specifically adapted to the narrow
ecological niche of reindeer herding in south Siberian mountain
forests, has essentially been lost.

At its core, human cognition may be the same—no matter what tongue one
speaks. But languages package knowledge in radically different ways,
facilitating certain means of conceptualizing, naming, and discussing
the world. In the case of the young Tofa reindeer herder who no longer
speaks his ancestral tongue, the human knowledge base—as manifested in
very specific ways of describing the world of reindeer—has been
impoverished. Arcane bits of knowledge vanish under the pressures of
globalization.

But so what? While this may seem like a minor loss in the face of
modernity and progress, we cannot even fathom what the longterm effects
will be. Science should strive to document this disappearing knowledge
while it still exists, and find ways to support communities that wish
to retain their endangered languages.



K. David Harrison teaches linguistics at Swarthmore College. He
regularly travels to Siberia and Mongolia to document endangered
languages and learn from the people who speak them. He is writing a
book called When Languages Die.


Related story:
Lost In Translation