Barriers That Are Steep and Linguistic

[Kara Brown]

Good morning!

Here's a contribution from today's New York Times to
contribute to our ongoing conversation about Georgia.

Kara Brown

Department of Educational Studies
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC

******
August 24, 2008
The World - NYT
Barriers That Are Steep and Linguistic
By ELLEN BARRY

Two weeks ago, when Georgian troops began shelling
Tskhinvali, Eduard Kabulov couldn’t stop thinking
about the trouble he had taken to learn Georgian: its
base-20 counting system; its ridiculous consonant
clusters (“gvprtskvni”); its diabolical irregular
verbs.

Mr. Kabulov, who is 22, had grown up in a valley where
South Ossetians have coexisted with Georgians for many
centuries, but that didn’t make it any easier.
Ossetians speak a language related to Farsi; Georgians
speak a language whose closest relative, some
linguists say, is Basque. Mr. Kabulov’s friends were
so hostile to the Georgians and their language that he
kept his studies secret. He sounded bitter, talking
about it.

He hasn’t opened a textbook since Aug. 8.

The languages of the Caucasus explain much about the
current conflict.

Some 40 indigenous tongues are spoken in the region —
more than any other spot in the world aside from Papua
New Guinea and parts of the Amazon, where the jungles
are so thick that small tribes rarely encounter one
another. In the Caucasus, mountains serve the same
purpose, offering small ethnicities a natural refuge
against more powerful or aggressive ones.

As a result, there is a dense collection of ethnic
groups, the kind of arrangement that was common before
the Greek and Roman empires swept through the plains
of Europe and Asia, shaping ethnic patchworks into
states and nations, said Johanna Nichols, a linguist
at the University of California at Berkeley.

Medieval scholars concluded that the Caucasian groups
scattered when God wrecked the Tower of Babel. Since
then, generations of linguists have made their
painstaking way into the mountains to document such
tongues as Svan, Ubykh, Udi, Tsova-Tush and Bzyb.

As the field gradually explained how the world’s
languages shade into one another, the Caucasus
remained “a residual problem area,” said William J.
Poser, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the
University of British Columbia. Though the Caucasian
languages fall into three main groups, so far none has
been decisively linked to any other language on earth.

The riddle of the Caucasian ethnicities became
suddenly relevant this summer, when local hatreds in
South Ossetia opened up into the biggest rift between
Russia and the West since the cold war. The Georgians
and the Ossetians both claim to have arrived first in
South Ossetia — a land that Georgians sometimes call
“Samachablo,” that is, the property of the Georgian
Machabeli family, according to a report on the
conflict by the International Crisis Group. Ossetians
regard the valley around Tskhinvali as their homeland;
Georgians disparage them as “guests.”

A war between the two groups in the early 1990s
divided them almost surgically. Young Georgians
stopped learning Russian, the lingua franca for the
entire region in Soviet days; young Ossetians did not
learn Georgian. Older people, who spoke both,
pretended not to.

Magdalena Frichova, who monitored the conflict in
South Ossetia for 10 years for the crisis group,
recalled watching local officials wait, poker-faced,
for a translator even when it was obvious that they
understood. Over time, people began to struggle with
languages they once spoke fluently.

“They consciously make an effort to forget it,” she
said. “I’ve heard that over and over again. You can
actively make choices of what you hear and what you
remember.”

Of course, there was never anything neutral about
languages in the Caucasus, where great powers have
tried again and again to expand their reach.

The Soviets so discouraged work on small linguistic
groups that in the 1960s, the first complete
transcription of Svan — work that took at least 10
years to complete — simply went unpublished, said Anna
V. Dybo, a Caucasian expert at the Russian Academy of
Sciences.

This dynamic continued after the breakup of the Soviet
Union, and she recalled her horror at hearing Dzhokhar
Dudayev, the Chechen leader, cite work from her
institute in support of Chechen independence, during
the build up to a bloody war with Russia.

“At those moments, you feel like the inventor of the
atom bomb,” Dr. Dybo said. She was so wary of her work
being used politically, she added with some amusement,
that she learned to write in intentionally abstruse
language, so that “no one knows what I’m talking
about.”

That feeling of political risk has returned in
post-Soviet Georgia, say researchers who document
minor languages there. The resistance to their work
may be couched in scholarly courtesy, but behind it
lies a muscular assertion.

“A language is the prime indication of the existence
of a people,” said George Hewitt, a University of
London scholar of Abkhaz, the language spoken in
Abkhazia, another separatist region of Georgia. “If a
language dies, the culture dies as well. The people
will become assimilated.”

One more question to be answered in the calm that
comes after the end of fighting: Dr. Dybo has yet to
hear from a library in Tskhinvali, which held a
magisterial lexicon of the Ossetian language that was
compiled over the course of many years. It’s a single
manuscript, never transferred to a computer.

She is not sure, she said, but she thinks it burned up
on Aug. 8. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/weekinreview/24barry.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=barriers&st=cse&oref=slogin