Human knowledge eroded as endangered languages die (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Human knowledge eroded as endangered languages die

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Sunday, February 18, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/02/18/MNGABO729L1.DTL

A tiny community of reindeer herders in Siberia holds intimate knowledge
of the lives, the foraging and the rutting season of their priceless
animals, and it's the kind of information that is vital to anyone
concerned by the loss of human cultures -- and to biologists worried
about the loss of species diversity anywhere in the world.

Of the 426 members of Siberia's isolated Chulym people, only 35 still
speak Tuvan, their ancient language, fluently, and they're all older
than 50. Everyone else speaks only Russian, according to K. David
Harrison, an adventuresome linguist at Swarthmore College in
Pennsylvania. Harrison has lived with the Chulym and hopes to preserve
their vanishing language.

The Chulym can fully describe a "2-year-old male castrated rideable
reindeer" with only the single word chary, and to Harrison, that not
only shows how ancient languages differ from their modern counterparts,
but is symbolic of a worldwide loss in important cultural diversity.

Harrison was among those who addressed the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.
Of the estimated 7,600 languages known in the world today, half are
endangered and could be lost forever within a few decades, he said.

"Many will go extinct," he said, "and there's a compelling social reason
to preserve them, for their disappearance is an erosion of human
knowledge."

The Chulym, for example, have a valuable special knowledge of medicinal
plants, of meteorology, hunting and gathering, Harrison said, and that
knowledge, which they can describe in their own cryptic language, will
be lost to biologists if it isn't reclaimed, he said.

"The extinction of ideas we now face has no parallel in human history,"
Harrison says in the book "When Languages Die," recently published by
Oxford University Press, "and most of the world's languages remain
undescribed by scientists. So we do not even know what it is we stand
to lose."

Like the language of the Chulym, many native tongues exist only in the
spoken form and have never been transcribed. Yet rendering them in
written words is vital for their preservation and -- hopefully --
reintroduction in schools by willing communities, he said.

During the same discussion Saturday, Daryl Baldwin of Miami University
in Oxford, Ohio, offered a more personal view of the issue.

Baldwin is a member of the Myaamia American Indian tribe that has lived
in Oklahoma since its ancestors were forced between 1840 and 1896 to
move from what were widespread tribal lands in Indiana and Ohio to
Kansas and ultimately to the Oklahoma Territory. Just 3,000 Myaamia
live there now, and only 50 tribal members can still use the language
at various levels, he said.

His tribe, Baldwin said, is "economically viable today because of
gaming," but he is deeply concerned by the loss of the tribe's
language, culture and specialized knowledge. So at Miami University --
named for the Oklahoma tribe -- he is director of the Myaamia Project,
an effort to study and reclaim the language, transcribe it for
preservation, and learn from the tribe's elders all that is known about
their traditional methods of cultivating and using plants and other
natural resources.

"Aya ceeki," he said at the AAAS meeting, "myaaamiaataweenki" --
meaning, "Hello to all, this is the way the Miaami speak."

In an interview, he explained that as his tribal language is
transcribed, a double vowel lengthens a syllable's pronunciation and
also its meaning. Thus, he said, "meenaani means 'I drink,' while
meenani means 'you drink.' "

And although his tribe has so few native speakers, the language was
transcribed in the late 1600s by French Jesuits, so at least that
remains, Baldwin said in his address, stressing the vital connection
between his people's spoken language and its identity.

"For some of us," he said, "our language reconnects us to a human
experience shared with previous generations. As a small tribal
community that has been negatively affected by 150 years of oppression
and cultural genocide, the language helps us heal from that traumatic
past by re-establishing continuity and mending a crucial disruption in
our lives."