[NDNAIM] Activists . . . Endangered Languages
rwd0002 at unt.edu
rwd0002 at unt.edu
Tue Jul 8 22:18:52 UTC 2008
Quoting "Rankin, Robert L" <rankin at ku.edu>:
>> Willem writes: At least one morphological feature of Modern Hebrew,
>> its typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, is not Slavic and
>> is still productive. That cannot be explained through relexification
>> of a Slavic language.
>
> The morphology is non-concatenative when viewed by a professional
> linguist who sees historical and derivational relationships in terms
> of processes. This isn't necessarily true of the learner though.
> S/he can just plug newly-memorized lexical items into the Slavic
> syntax and happily chatter away. I argued Willem's point with Wexler
> when he lectured here, since he made similar claims for Romanian
> (which retains its Romance morphology pretty much intact). So I
> agree his definition of Israeli Hebrew as a Creole may be extreme,
> but that doesn't alter the fact that what is taught/spoken there is
> very different from Hebrew when it was spoken as a natural language.
> I question whether we can call it "revival".
>
To get back a bit about what Modern Hebrew is. The reason I would
question that it is a revival would rather be that it has never died in
all its spheres of usage. It died as a first language acquired after
birth, but it never died as a language of prayer and as a written
language. The Jewish tradition of Hebrew education was such that there
were always people who could write very fluent Hebrew. All this made
the transition to revived spoken language much easier, and less
artificial. There is no situation comparable with Indigenous Languages
because (with the exception of Maya) there was no Indigenous tradition
of writing.
It is also interesting to think of Latin. We think of Latin as a dead
language, deader than Hebrew, but Latin has had an extremely slow
death. Like Hebrew, Latin ceased as a spoken language long ago, but as
a written and even spoken language of science, religion and scholarship
it continued well into the 19th century. The literature written by
second language speakers or writers of Latin is massive compared to
what was written by the Romans themselves. And Latin is still not
dead: there are still individuals, mostly living within the confines of
the Vatican, who are able to write and speak quite fluently in Latin.
So, if we needed to revive Latin as an everyday language (I am sure
this will never happen), it would be an easy thing to do. But would it
be the same language as what Cesar and Cicero spoke? In pronunciation,
Cesar and Cicero would probably not recognize what they hear as Latin,
but in writing they would probably understand it fairly well, and
certain usages of modern Latinists, comparable to the Lakota "good
morning" example given by Dave Rood, would be very puzzling to them.
To summarize, the case of Modern Hebrew and (potentially revivable)
Latin, are probably not helpful models for activists reviving
languages. But on the other hand, the standards of Modern Hebrew and
Modern Latin are quite high.
When little is documented about the language to be revived, the concern
of linguists (not necessarily shared by Indigenous Activists) is that
the language looks like some sort of Esperanto relexified with native
words.
It is interesting that one of the specialists in the extinct Mutsun
language (a Costanoan language from California, well documented by
Spanish missionaries and by J. P. Harrington) is Marc Okrand, also the
creator of the artificial language Klingon. But despite efforts of
Mutsun activists, there are now more speakers of Klingon than there are
of Mutsun. (Of course, Okrand could be the judge of what is good
Klingon, but he wisely does not comment on such speakers, and he does
not consider himself a speaker either.) I asked a Mutsun activist
about that, and the answer was: "Oh, well, what is happening to
Klingon is an inspiration to us." We don't all feel this way about it.
So our goals for a revived language should approach these of Hebrew and
Latin as far as authenticity is concerned, and we should be cautious
about the temptation to "Klingonize" or "Esperantoize", i.e. simplify
the morphology because the existing documentation of the extinct
language does not tell us what it should be.
So, what is a "sufficiently authentic" revived language, will, to be
sure, be a matter of debate for quite some time.
Willem
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