Media - "Primitive" Khanty language

[Johanna Laakso]

Dear Uralists, and Ob-Ugrists in particular,

the LINGUIST List  (http://linguistlist.org/, Vol-14-60. Thu Jan 9 2003.
ISSN: 1068-4875) just published the following query, based on a book review.
Below, you will find my preliminary answer as well. Those who know more
about the Khanty language, please feel free to react!

Best,
Johanna
--
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
Institut für Finno-Ugristik der Universität Wien
Universitätscampus, Spitalg. 2-4 Hof 7, A-1090 Wien
tel. +43 1 4277 43009 | fax +43 1 4277 9430
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at | http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/
---

Date:  Wed, 8 Jan 2003 09:20:02 -0500
From:  "E. O. Batchelder" <ebatchelder at nyc.rr.com>
Subject:  Media: Khant - "Primitive Tongue"

In the New York Times Book Review for December 15, 2002, in a review
of _The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia_ by Anna Reid, the
reviewer Benson Bobrick states:

Forty years ago, it was still possible to find whole communities of
the Khant, a west Siberian people, where their language was spoken.
Today, only the elderly keep it alive.  Though a somewhat primitive
tongue (in that it lacks a capacity for abstraction), it is evocative
and vivid, with a poetic particularity all its own.  A photograph, for
example, becomes by analogy "a pool of still water"; a hat, "a
wide-crowned tree that keeps off the rain."

Can someone on this list affirm or refute this assessment?

Eleanor Olds Batchelder

----------

Dear Ms Batchelder,

what is written in the NYT BR about the Khanty language (aka "Ostyak")
belongs to the vanishing (as most linguists hope) genre where exotic
languages are mystified in a completely unfounded way: the obvious fact that
the speakers lack words for things that are unknown to them is
misinterpreted as a "lack of capacity for abstraction", and the ingenious
ways by which ad hoc expressions are coined for these new phenomena are
mystified as a special "poetic particularity".

Similar things have been done with all too many "exotic" languages spoken by
"primitive" peoples all over the world: somehow, the Westerners have learnt
to believe that any "different" feature in an exotic language means
"primitiveness". The recent online discussion on the Ricoh ad where Khoi
language was presented as a sequence of simple clicking sounds is another
example.

It is also possible that the author has been misled by the fact that the
Khanty have (or had) a very rich folklore with a "language" of its own, the
poetic expressions of which were turning incomprehensible for younger
speakers in some communities already a hundred years ago.

Present-day Khanty is spoken in two varieties, Northern and Eastern, which
differ from each other so clearly that they could perhaps even be considered
as two separate languages. The number of speakers given in
http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/fu.html is ca. 13.000 in sum. The language
is clearly endangered, and in numerous families or communities it is not
transmitted to the younger generations any more. However, the degree of
endangerment obviously varies, and I have been told that there are
communities where the language could survive, if only the speakers were left
alone...

I will forward your message and my reply to the URA-LIST e-mail forum
(http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/ura-list.html) as well, where
there are many experts of Khanty language.

For the community of linguists and Uralists, I suggest a new campaign: THERE
IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE.

Best,

Johanna Laakso
--
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
Institut für Finno-Ugristik der Universität Wien
Universitätscampus, Spitalg. 2-4 Hof 7, A-1090 Wien
tel. +43 1 4277 43009 | fax +43 1 4277 9430
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at | http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/

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