How Do You Learn a Dead Language?

Slate ^ | Jan. 28, 2008 | Christine Cyr

[forkinsocket]

Last week, Chief Marie Smith Jones, the only remaining native speaker of the Eyak language, died in her home in Anchorage, Alaska. Chief Jones' death makes Eyak—part of the Athabascan family of languages—the first known native Alaskan tongue to go extinct. Linguists fear that 19 more will soon follow the same fate. Fortunately, starting in 1961, Chief Jones and five other native-speaking Eyaks worked with Michael Krauss, a linguist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, to document Eyak in case future generations want to revive it. How would you go about learning a language that nobody speaks?

It depends. A well-documented language would have a dictionary, grammar book, a body of literature (such as folk tales or religious texts), and, in some cases, videos and recordings that a dedicated student could learn from. Eyak, for example, has all of these. Ideally, the grammar book and dictionary would spell out the sounds of the vowels (and tone, if there is any). If there isn't good documentation, linguists must reconstruct the language using whatever written stories or religious texts remain, and then borrow words, grammatical structures, and pronunciation from closely related languages, patching together their best guess at what they think the language sounded like.

In some cases, a language that's classified as "extinct" is still spoken in certain contexts. Latin, for example, is considered extinct, or dead, but is taught in schools and used in religious ceremonies. A language is generally considered extinct if it's no longer used in daily conversation. To be a living—or native—language, people must use it as a primary means of communication.

[puroresu]

English will be a dead language in the USA if Juan McCain is elected president.

We have a winner for best post of the day!

[goldstategop]

Hebrew was never a dead language - it was a written language and also used for prayer. Eliezer Ben Yehuda revived it as a spoken language by having his wife speak to their first child only in Hebrew. His efforts updated the language to handle scientific content and casual every day expressions. The result of his efforts fell upon fertile ground and by the second decade of the 20th century it was well on the way to become the dominant language of the Jews Of Eretz Israel. Extinct languages on the other hand can't be revived because no speaks them and they would need massive updating for use in the modern world. Ben Eliezer's work took a lifetime and that would take longer for languages no understands anymore.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[ReignOfError]

Dead languages are worth learning if they have a literature--such as Latin or ancient Greek.

Or Hebrew -- which was nearly extinct in daily use, but taught for religious rituals, much like Latin. It was revived as the official language of the present-day State of Israel.

Cornish is a Celtic language formerly spoken in Cornwall, in SW England.

Popular with game hens.

Manx was spoken on the Isle of Man until a few decades ago when the last speaker died. It was related to Irish Gaelic. I suppose it would be useful if you had a Manx cat which refused to respond to commands in English.

Because otherwise, those poor cats would just be chasing their tails. Oh, wait.

A Romance language called Dalmatian

Are you Dr. Doolittle? What's with the need to talk to Manx cats and Dalmatians?

[Does so]

"...English, which has an insane number of linguistic exceptions, phonetic variations per given symbol, hominyms, etc. being a cobbling-together of multiple languages..."

But no English-speaking countries have been at war with one another—for centuries.

[Bender2]

Well, to begin with, you have to be... stung by a dead bee.

[TrueKnightGalahad]

I thought this would be an article on the Dim’s graveyard voters!

[redheadtoo]

It is a spoken language. Or was.

Only when she was speaking to herself.

[wintertime]

ping

[Verginius Rufus]

Of course Hebrew began to be revived as a language of daily life decades before the establishment of the State of Israel.

Another example of a language preserved because of its use for religious purposes, after dying out as a spoken language, is Coptic, a late form of the Egyptian language still used by the Coptic Church. It has an alphabet using Greek letters with some additional letters for sounds not found in Greek.

[SunkenCiv]

Note: this topic is from 1/31/2008. Thanks forkinsocket.