Volkswagen acquires the Hochank language

[Heike Bödeker]

At 13:36 27.10.03 -0600, Henning Garvin wrote:
>Languages deserve to be described on their own terms, from the inside out
>rather than from the outside in.

Sounds good, but is hard to achieve, and it's a bit like reinventing the
wheel, too. Nevertheless, a paper like Sasse's "Der irokesische Sprachtyp."
(ZS 7/2, 1988, 173-213) fascinated, because he speculated about what a
description of Cayuga might have looked like, had it been written by a
Cayugan Dionysos Thrax. Still, when I started being more concerned about
people than language(s), I more often ended up with thinking the more
interesting question would have been: "Why was there no Cayugan Dionysos
Thrax?"...

One should bear in mind that there are indigenous grammar writing
traditions which aren't as good as Arabic, Tamil or Sanskrit grammars, but
even are sad caricatures of these, like Tibetan mimicks Sanskrit
grammatical tradition, and, still worse, Mongolian both. This is just as
bad as to even worse than anglocentric writing.

>A study or description of true value will try to capture the language as
>it is, not its relation to linguistic theory.

Even though I frankly admit to having gone through phases of
theory-tiredness, there is no theory-free description. But surely e.g. a
treatment like (a hypothetical) "On the typological position of Hocank"
would clearly be targeted at a typologist audience, and hopefully be of
"true value" to typology, just not for didactic purposes.

>The last thing you need to know about a language on the verge of
>extinction is how it is the same as a host of other languages.

Nevertheless, this might be one of the interests a typologist could have in
preserving an endagered language. I also wouldn't underestimate the
insights typology or also historical-comparative linguistics can offer to
descriptive work (which should underlie teaching).

All the best,

Heike

"Um . . . whether the banana leaf touches the thorn or the thorn hits the
banana leaf, it's always the banana leaf that gets hurt!" (Jayakanthan,
Trial by Fire)