Linda Kelsey is the last living fluent speaker of Elem Pomo, which you can hear her speak in this podcast, in between the bits of clueless condescension from the white reporter, who expresses surprise that the Elem Pomo language did not ossify in 6,000 BCE, but in fact contains words for such objects as motor vehicles.
(Do not read the comments to the Chronicle article unless you need a reminder that San Francisco is not a haven from hateful ignorance. This is actually good advice for any article on the Chronicle’s site.)
Those of us who speak more than one language at all fluently will know this: each language offers ways to think about things, to express things in one’s mind, that are unique to that tongue. And Orwell knew this:
“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.”
(Thanks to The Theriomorph for reminding me of that passage recently.)
Some estimate that half the world’s languages are threatened with extinction, the majority of them spoken by indigenous people, at least a hundred of them in home ranges less than a day’s drive from Pinole Creek. Each language gone extinct takes its unique senses with it: there lie thoughts that will never live again in neural flesh.
I wonder sometimes if one reason for the current spiked hatred of immigrants is fear of alien thought, el miedo de los pensamientos que resisten la traducción en inglés. Xenophobia looms large, of course, but one hears so many complaints from the Know-Nothings about being forced to “press 1 for English.” The same people who despise immigrants from Asia, or Latin America tend also to despise those of us who speak casually in English words of more than three syllables, whose facility with language is sufficient to allow us to write a mediocre haiku in less than a day of effort, or in fact even to know what a haiku is.
One need not be a linguist, nor a Native Rights activist, to mourn the looming loss of Elem Pomo, though those are both fine things to be. One need only be in favor of thought.
Having grown up with American English, I didn’t really understand my own language very well until I studied ancient Greek. I’m not sure if it is due to any concepts embedded in Greek so much as that the effort of learning forced me to think about meaning.
Recently I had a conversation with a friend about the problem of marking radioactive waste burial sites. How to inform people 10,000 years in the future that they should not dig there? He had not considered the problem before and said “put up signs”. Even if you can make a sign that would remain intact that long, what should it say, and how? We are now faced with the problem of communicating with people in the distant future, so language evolution (the work of ethnographers) is a non-trivial study to say the least.
There are also insights the field might give us into communicating with people in our own time, across or even within cultural boundaries. And, making an educated guess about the extent to which our thoughts are shaped by the language we use to handle them. Not exactly fuzzy academic stuff when miscommunication can have civilization-destroying consequences.
democratizing information is a good thing. i’m not nostalgic for the past. i’m glad that these people are taking an active interest in their culture and history, but what are we to do? languages evolve. how many neighborhood dialects vanish overnight having only lasted a week? i don’t mean to compare that to an 8,000 year old tongue, but what makes one more valuable than the other?
as much as i mourn dead languages, i would genuinely prefer that we chose less ways of distinguishing ourselves superficially from each other. this is babel in reverse.
if more of these distinct tongues are disappearing, is it because we all mix more efficiently? that does not make me sad. what makes me sad is how it happened, through thoughtless european dominance. but i no more wish to arbitrarily make children learn their parent’s tongues than their gods, just because of that history. i am sad myself that i am not fluent in other languages, but that isn’t because of the inherent worth of the grammar (even though i ascribe to the sapir-whorf hypothesis), but because i wish i could talk to that many more people. we lose poetry and all the other detritus of fine minds in these cultures because we’ve lost the ability to understand it. that is what i fear. but i fear it in the same way i fear technology one day locking away all our knowledge.
i don’t mean to be contentious, i’m just curious how one gets involved to save dying languages?
These hills I see have names I’ll never know
Really beautiful title, Chris, thanks for this post…and great links, spyder. Here’s another:
The Rosetta Project in San Fransisco,
DOF@#1:...the above project is sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, which makes a point of contemplating the kind of questions you just outlined—you know those guys?
(Also: I can’t help it—I look at your nickname DOF (on your site) and I see “Degrees of Freedom.” )