Project seeks to preserve world's dying languages (fwd)

Wed Aug 10 16:56:33 UTC 2005

Project seeks to preserve world's dying languages
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-08-10-languages_x.htm

WASHINGTON (AP)  Every two weeks or so the last elderly man or woman with
full command of a particular language dies. At that rate, as many as 2,500
native tongues will disappear forever by 2100.

David W. Lightfoot is helping spearhead a government initiative to
preserve some of these dying languages, believing each is a window into
the human mind that can benefit the world at large.

"If we are going to lose half the world's languages that endangers our
capacity to understand the genetic basis of language," said Lightfoot, who
heads the directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences at the
National Science Foundation.

The foundation recently joined the National Endowment for the Humanities
in the effort to preserve languages.

The project has awarded $4.4 million to 26 institutions and 13 individual
scholars to investigate the status of 70 languages that are believed to be
endangered and to help preserve them. The project is now asking
researchers to apply for additional grants, with the expectation that at
least $2 million a year will be available.

Some experts say there are up to 10,000 different languages left in the
world; others put the estimate thousands lower depending on how many are
characterized as dialects of another language.

Languages aren't just words, linguists say, but a people's way of looking
at the world.

Lightfoot gives the example of Guguyimadjir, spoken by people in the
Australian state of Queensland. They have no words for "left" or "right"
but orient themselves and their world by the points of the compass  unlike
most of us, who see things in relation to ourselves rather than to the
world as a whole.

People in Brazil's Amazon rain forest who speak Piratapuyo say "The cake
ate John" where English speakers would say "John ate the cake"  in other
words, they put the object of a verb first and the subject last.

Such peculiarities feed research on how the human mind works, how it
perceives relations in space, how children learn complex languages so
quickly and easily, Lightfoot said.

These types of research will be aided by one method of saving languages:
by recording their speech, analyzing their grammar, and preserving them
digitally.

Other researchers are interested in a broader range of knowledge that is
more difficult to save. To do so requires encouraging younger people to
learn their language from their elders, preserving not only the words
themselves but unwritten traditions, arts, religion and more.

For example, plants used by traditional healers around the world have led
to the discovery of new medicines, including aspirin. Some small and
declining tribe in Africa or in Papua New Guinea  a country where there
are 820 languages among fewer than 5.5 million people, by one count  may
know something about a plant that could help treat cancer or Alzheimer's.

For decades children in American Indian schools were discouraged from
speaking tribal tongues and punished when they did. That policy has long
been abandoned, but generations were lost to many languages.

Anthony Woodbury, who heads the linguistic faculty of the University of
Texas at Austin, suggests that if the motivation is strong enough, even a
virtually dead language can be revived. He points to Hebrew, a language
learned for centuries only in its ancient written form. A modern version
is now a vital part of life in Israel. Another example: Irish has survived
with political support.

At a conference sponsored by the two federal agencies, the NSF described
how technology helps. Scholars used to embalm a little-known language in a
single book, available in a few research libraries. Now data, including
the actual sounds, will be widely and cheaply available on the Internet,
standardized so it can be compared with data on other languages.

Susan Penfield runs a project at the University of Arizona on two
disappearing Indian languages along the Colorado River, where she has been
working for over 30 years.

One is Chemehuevi, a tongue related to the one spoken by the ancient
Aztecs in Mexico and Central America. She knows only five fluent speakers
and told the conference she was especially proud of one, Johnny Hill Jr.,
who at 51 is comparatively young and also has a good command of English.

She told of training him and other fluent speakers in collecting data on
the language, exploring aspects that have not yet been preserved and
recording material digitally.

As Wade Davis, an anthropologist who roams the world as an
explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, wrote: "Every
language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an
ecosystem of spiritual possibilities."

Starbucks liked the statement so much that the company is printing it on
coffee cups, becoming another voice that is making the case for saving
dying languages.

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