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"Cynthiae Figuras Aemulatur Mater Amorum" |
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 ...
My ten year old daughter's education includes translating a proverb or two per "school" day out of Esperanto. Like me, she learned this scale-model hobbyist language using that marvelous computerized course created by those brazilian folks. ( http://www.cursodeesperanto.com.br/bazo/index.php?en )
I strongly recommend this course for home schooling families. It's free, engaging, and provides the excitement of easy mastery. The kids can teach themselves, and learn new grammatical structures along the way. Esperanto is a great warm-up language, predisposing the student to expect success when tackling other languages.
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"Cynthiae Figuras Aemulatur Mater Amorum" |
I'm not sure where the author got this claim...it may just have been an assumption on his part, as many of the Eastern Algonquian languages died out long ago...not Lenape though. There were still a handful of native speakers left last I heard in the mid-90s--Lucy Parks Blalock "Touching Leaves Woman" was fluent in the Unami dialect, and she only passed away in 2000:
http://members.tripod.com/~lenapelady/lucy.html
As the obituary mentions, she had started classes in the language. I have a set of Lenape language lessons she made.
Oops...my bad. I got confused. Nora Thompson Dean was "Touching Leaves Woman"; she passed away in 1984.
One thing I found interesting is that, here in North America, we are told that we need to learn Spanish. Well, when I lived in Europe, Spanish wouldn't get you very far outside of Spain. The most common second language at my university in France was English. German and Italian were also popular. Spanish was way down on the list.
That's true even if the speaker is naturally a bass or baritone. There's also a clarity to the enunciation in English that's very distinctive.
I would greet such folks in the Gaelic . . . and I was never wrong. Only problem was they usually spoke a lot more Gaelic than I did . . .
I've seen the above title, and read a bit in it, but not read it. Searching for it turned up Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect by Nancy C. Dorian, which I'd otherwise not seen.
Language Death
by David Crystal
3,450 languages face extinction worldwideLanguage is primarily about communication. Languages that facilitate interaction between societies survive, the rest die. That is the inescapable logic of history. As societies and communities shed their isolation, languages are forced to change and adapt to new situations. The result is not always predictable. When two societies that speak two different languages engage with each other, it is possible for one of them to dominate the other. This leads to the decline, and eventual disappearance, of the other language. In some cases, a new language itself emerges from the interaction of various speeches and dialects. A third possibility is of both the languages enriching each other... Languages evolve, and sometimes transform, by interacting with other tongues. Those which refuse to socialise are fated to oblivion or fall into disuse. The smart languages are those that frequently borrow from other tongues, and thus maintain an ever-expanding vocabulary. Such languages dominate the world. English is the finest example of a language that has expanded beyond its area of origin by being open to change.
Times of India Editorial
Nancy Dorian is my old prof! That's her book!
Small children do not need any sort of "starter" language. Most of them are quite capable of learning 2 or more full-blown different languages with their vocabularies and grammars simultaneously. A small child does not know that he is speaking 2 or 3 different languages. It is all language to him. Certain words and constructions are appropriate for the roundeye and certain ones for the man who looks kind of like Dad, etc. When I say "chao em" to a Vietnamese emigre's child, he speaks back to me in English. His Mom says (in Vietnamese)"No, Pham, say 'chao ong!'" and he child turns back to me and says "Hello" and fully believes he has complied with Mom's instruction. Overseas Chinese children in Viet Nam routinely learn 3-5 languages by the time they are 10 or 12 and may have a several more by the time they are functioning adults. A child that manages to pick up three languages early will learn just about any other language very quickly. That is why our forces in the war used Chinese to interpret whenever they ran into a new tiny group of mountain folks that had a "new" language. The Chinese would squat with a couple of villagers for an hour or three and then it's "well, Captain, what do you want to know?" Any family that can afford a tutor and understands the mental benefits of multilinguality should be teaching children other languages starting at age 2-4. A doctor's family here is doing that by paying a Viet family to day-care for their toddler 3 days a week. The family speaks Viet in the home. The Doctor is a Georgia boy with a Korean wife. The child speaks all three languages, but at a 4 y.o. level, of course.
Are speaking of the august Dr. Chomsky, perhaps?
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.
Curiously, that's exactly what I say when I am drunk.
:')
There's a tendency towards greater simplicity over time. So pidgin and creole languages are examples of how new languages are formed out of older, more grammatically developed languages.
You can see such an evolution in the formation of English out of ancestor languages that were grammatically more complex.
I only speak 3 languages (English, French & Italian) while my pastor, a veritable polyglot, speaks 8 and reads 4 (Arabic, English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Aramaic. He even understands Swedish. He reads Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek).
I spent many years traveling throughout Italy. It was so fascinating to hear the local dialects - each village has its own. One of the dialects I heard, retained elements of the Etruscan language. Today, all children are taught the official language of Italy which is Italian but even that comes in different forms. The purest form is 'high' Italian, spoken in Parma. It is both lilting and poetic.
My present goal is to learn Arabic. The great challenge, however, is learning the alphabet along with the language. Arabic, BTW, is descended from Syriac and Aramaic.
I can curse fluently and pick up a hooker in Korean. Thanks to Uncle Sam. Not that I ever did such a thing when I was stationed there, but I watched others do it.
All I thought about in my off duty time was Moms apple pie, Baseball, and how could I help my Sgt..
That's my story and I'm stickin with it!
related oldie:
'Status' drives extinction of languages
Australian Broadcasting Corp Online | Thursday, 21 August 2003 | Bob Beale
Posted on 10/17/2004 3:45:37 PM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1248057/posts
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