Posted on 01/02/2007 6:25:46 AM PST by Valin
In the rush of the holiday season you may have missed that a white buffalo was born at a small zoo in Pennsylvania. Only one in 10 million buffalo is born white, and local Native Americans gave him a name in the Lenape language: kenahkihinen, which means "watch over us."
They found that in a book, however. No one has actually spoken Lenape for a very long time. It was once the language of what is now known as the tristate area, but its speakers gradually switched to English, as happened to the vast majority of the hundreds of languages Native Americans once spoke in North America.
The death of languages is typically described in a rueful tone. There are a number of books treating the death of languages as a crisis equal to endangered species and global warming. However, I'm not sure it's the crisis we are taught that it is.
There is a part of me, as a linguist, that does see something sad in the death of so many languages. It is happening faster than ever: It has been said that a hundred years from now 90% of the current 6,000 languages will be gone.
Each extinction means that a fascinating way of putting words together is no longer alive. In, for example, Inuktitut Eskimo, which, by the way, is not dying, "I should try not to become an alcoholic" is one word: Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga.
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
Say that three times fast.
Cunning linguist ping!........
NO!
FYI
If anyone is interested (or if anyone is not interested)
Story of Human Language
(36 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Course No. 1600
Taught by John McWhorter
Manhattan Institute
Ph.D., Stanford University
http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=1600&pc=Search
"I never met a person who is not interested in language," wrote the bestselling author and psychologist Steven Pinker. There are good reasons that language fascinates us so. It not only defines humans as a species, placing us head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators, but it also beguiles us with its endless mysteries. For example:
How did different languages come to be?
Why isn’t there just a single language?
How does a language change, and when it does, is that change indicative of decay or growth?
How does a language become extinct?
Dr. John McWhorter, one of America’s leading linguists and a frequent commentator on network television and National Public Radio, addresses these and other questions as he takes you on an in-depth, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language, showing how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today.
An accomplished scholar, Professor McWhorter is also a skilled popularizer, whose book The Power of Babel was called "startling, provocative, and remarkably entertaining," by the San Diego Union-Tribune.
The London Times called him "a born teacher." And Steven Pinker, best known as the author of The Language Instinct, offered this praise for the book: "McWhorter’s arguments are sharply reasoned, refreshingly honest, and thoroughly original."
Discover How Linguists Think
For the past century linguistics has been one of the most exciting and productive fields in the social sciences. In the process of telling the story of language, Professor McWhorter introduces you to some of the current controversies in the discipline:
Noam Chomsky has famously argued that the ability to use language is innately specified in the human brain. What is the evidence for and against this hypothesis?
The popular media have widely reported that words from the world’s first language have been reconstructed. Professor McWhorter looks at the reasoning behind this work and the objections to it.
One of the most enticing ideas of 20th-century linguistics is that language determines the way we perceive the world. But is this really true?
The Ebonics debate of the mid-1990s focused attention on Black English. What is the nature of this dialect and where did it come from?
Professor McWhorter also briefs you on the recent connection made between an obscure language of Nepal and the language family of Papua New Guinea, which may represent the oldest documentable historical relationship between words, extending back as far as 75,000 years.
In discovering how linguists think, you will begin to see language in an entirely new way. You will learn that everything about a language is eternally and inherently changeable, from its word order and grammar to the very sound and meaning of basic words.
That’s why Professor McWhorter describes language as "like one of those lava lamps from the 1970s. It’s not marching toward an ideal, and it’s not slowly going to the dogs. It’s always just variations of the same thing—endless morphings."
A Wealth of Examples from a Teacher Passionate about Language
In an interview with the New York Times on October 30, 2001, Professor McWhorter said this about himself: "Languages have been a passion since I was a small child. I used to teach them to myself as a hobby. I speak three and a bit of Japanese, and can read seven."
In this course, he includes these languages and many more as examples. Anyone who has ever studied a language will surely find it discussed—along with Albanian, Armenian, Turkish, Sanskrit, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, Korean, Tagalog, Maori, Fijian, Samoan, Gullah, Hopi, Mohawk, Navajo, Yupik Eskimo, Quechua, and Welsh, as well as Latin, Greek, German, Russian, French, Spanish, Swedish, and many others.
It’s remarkable how much one language sheds light on another. For example, the ancestor language of English is Proto-Germanic and the ancestor of that is Proto-Indo-European. A curious transformation took place in the consonants of Proto-Germanic, in which Proto-Indo-European p became f; d became t; and so on with other consonant pairs. Hence, Latin pater is English father, and Latin decem is English ten. This rule is called Grimm’s Law after its discoverer, the same Jacob Grimm who collected folk tales.
Such patterns make relationships among different languages clear and make learning these languages much easier.
(snip)
My Gaelic professor for her summer fieldwork documented the death of a particular Scottish Gaelic dialect.
The Scottish Gaelic that is taught in school is standardized from Skye Gaelic. She was documenting the substantially different dialect spoken by isolated fishing villages on the east coast of Scotland. Those folks had been forcibly moved there at the time of the Highland Clearances to develop a fishing industry instead of tending sheep on the land from which they were removed . . .
It's very interesting, and it's sort of sad that a distinctive dialect is being lost, but on the other hand these people are no longer uprooted and isolated from the rest of the country. So on balance it's not something to decry.
OTOH, Scottish Gaelic as a whole is dying as an actual spoken language. The census shows more people speaking it (due to its being taught in school) but fewer and fewer of those are native speakers. They simply have a smattering (as I do myself). What my prof said was that if a language isn't spoken at the breakfast table, it dies.
With all these languages dying out, it's a good thing God wrote the Bible in English
Not just English but Elizabethan English.
"Yet the extinctions cannot be stopped, for the most part. Trying to teach people to speak their ancestral languages, for example, will almost never get far beyond the starting gate. Some years ago, I spent some weeks teaching Native Americans their ancestral language. To the extent that the exercise helped give them a feeling of connection to their ancestors, it was time well spent.
However, it was clear that there was no way that they would learn more than some words and expressions. Languages are hard to learn for adults, especially ones as different from English as Native American ones. In Pomo, the verb goes at the end of the sentence. There are sounds it's hard to make when you're not born to them. For busy people with jobs and families, how far were they ever going to be able to get mastering a language whose word for eye is ‘uyqh abe?"
I see this when I go to Ireland, The government has been trying to promote gaelic for years..with a notable lack of success.
The story of the Tower of Babel answers at least those two questions.
Wonder how many languages were (inadvertently) destroyed by anthropologists traveling to "study" far-flung tribes.
He was making me nervous, so I handed him a beer and moved to another car.
At least in Ireland there are some enclaves in the west where Gaelic is still spoken as a first language. I don't think there are any left in Scotland. I was fairly fluent back in the 80s when we visited the West Highlands, but I had a hard time finding somebody to talk with!
"If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for the schoolchildren of Texas!"
A wise move on your part!
How much longer until French is no longer spoken?
The only villages that seem to have success in utilizing their own language are the ones completely cut off from white man's Alaska. They are able to preserve their culture at expense of good & bad of modern world; often they choose this route too.
Alcohol has a way of making it into every village, no matter dry or wet. So you also find that some of villages that suffer the greatest problems (child abuse, violence, deaths from alcohol probs) are the ones that remain cut off from white world; no economy; nothing to do to keep busy; many of members suffer from alcohol addiction. Dying places.
I'm not too sure about the evidence "for," but the evidence "against" is that Noam Chomsky argued it.
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