I wonder if this would be true for Native languages

[Richard Zane Smith]

Revitalizing Lifeways of sustainability should probably be our focus.
Linguists have to learn that EVERYTHING in a culture is connected together.
Technology is as basic as starting a fire with friction by spinning a
spindle into a dry piece of cedar.
"Primitive" is often a degrading word. How many hundreds of people are
involved in the making of a box of matches and getting that box delivered
to us? This illustrates a weakness within ultra-technology
ONE person uses sustainable technology with two pieces of wood,a spindle
and fireboard
can do the same task that now takes 1000's to deliver our cardboard box of
dry matches.
Matches that are made useless when wet. A simple fireboard thats wet is
revived by sunshine.
Which is the truly superior (and sustainable) technology?

A HIGHtech driven world seems bent on creating *further complexity* to
solve problems.
(thus more fragile and more dependent on experts) tinier and tinier becomes
the computer chip.
 HI-TECH gadgets are cool (just bought a zoomH4n) but their work life and
shelf life is undetermined.
Our Languages have got to get back under our skin, under our fingernails,
in our joints. It needs to
stop being treated as "classroom special"  it needs to become like a
sunrise, a sunset,
or a callous on our hands from turning the spindle, as the rising smoke
makes our eyes tear up.

ske:noh
Richard Zane Smith
Wyandotte, Oklahoma




On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Rudolph C Troike/LingFacultyRetired/UA <
rtroike at email.arizona.edu> wrote:

> Rolland's rant is right on the mark -- don't apologize! The 70's were a
> great
> period of optimism and hope, once the Viet Nam war was over, but brought to
> an end by the Reagan Revolution. Certainly great things seemed possible,
> and
> were, but the possibilities were rarely realized, or at least sustained.
>
> Germane to Rolland's point that language loss is just a symptom, some of
> you
> may have seen the program "The Corporation" on LinkTV -- it you haven't you
> should try to find it on LinkTV.org. In the early part, the narrator tells
> of her experience living with an isolated group high in the Himalayas, who
> carried on a millenia-old self-sufficient and self-satisfying culture,
> until
> the government built a road into the area so that the 'benefits' of
> commerce
> and 'civilization' could be brought to the people. The result has been a
> loss
> of self-sufficiency, dependence on imported foods and drinks, division of
> the
> egalitarian society into better-off and poor, development of crime, etc.,
> etc.
> And of course, a decline in the language, as the national language and
> English
> (for tourists) intrudes and marginalizes the language along with the
> culture.
>
> As the program shows, the massive international financial and commercial
> forces act as a juggernaut which overwhelms local traditional cultures
> (even
> long-established cultures like the Chinese -- most young Chinese have lost
> a huge amount of everyday traditional Chinese culture, so it is not just
> small traditional societies which are caught up in this gigantic process).
>
> How to resist -- to fight back? Rolland and Richard and others on this list
> have been there, and bravely done that, but it takes more than one, though
> the perseverance of one person can change the world. We can't stop techno-
> logical change or urbanization, both alienating forces vis-a-vis
> traditional
> technology and culture, which also erode language vitality when the
> language
> is seen as no longer functional. If one said that English should only be
> used
> for talking about pre-Industrial Revolution topics, and vocabulary should
> be
> limited to that in use in 1500, the language would quickly become moribund,
> retained only be antiquarians and used only in religious services and for
> Shakespearean plays. If a Native language is actively made functional to
> use
> for currently relevant purposes, young people can see it as meaningful and
> worth learning.
>
> The history of English itself shows that openness to borrowing vocabulary
> does not pose a threat to the language itself. Native English words are
> still dominant for use around the house and for family matters, but in any
> advanced text, 80% or more of the vocabulary is borrowed. In Bolivia and
> Peru, Quechua (and Aymara) still enjoys functionality -- despite threats
> from Spanish -- in part because many vocabulary items have been
> incorporated
> over the centuries from Spanish. Functionality -- and the perception of
> functionality -- is a key factor.
>
> I like Cathy's experience of learning how to prepare fish for smoking from
> a YouTube demonstration -- that's embracing and utilizing technology in a
> functional way, not just relegating the culture and language to a dusty
> museum. The ILAT list, thanks to Phil Cash Cash, is THE place to share
> ideas
> and even come up with new ones.
>
>  Rudy
>



-- 
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"Think not forever of yourselves... nor of your own generation.

Think of continuing generations of our families,

think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn,

whose faces are coming from beneath the ground."             The Peacemaker,


 richardzanesmith.wordpress.com

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