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 ...
I strongly advise parents to encourage their children to learn a foreign language at the earliest age possible. Many schools give mini-courses in Spanish, French, German and Latin, and then the child can choose in middle school and high school what language to pursue. Foreign language study develops mental facility and fluency of expression in the student's own native language also.
THAT my friend is a very good idea! The younger the better, as from what little I know as a child gets older it gets harder for them to learn a new language.
I had to take a French class in high school...what a disaster that was.
Five years of high school French looked great on my applications for college. I also had two years of high school Spanish. Colleges like the fact that a student sticks with a language for four full years; this predicts future success in college because it shows you can set a goal and fulfill it. They also like to see two years of a second language, it shows the student committed to mastering the basics of that second language.
I suspect it is mainly due to metabolism, but also cultural, in the same way that it is in Inuit villages: not a lot to do, drinking is easier than working on problems.
This has been the case in Africa, as well, where drinking is a BIG part of the problem.
There are a lot more geeks speaking Klingon than there are eggheads speaking Esperanto.
Swedish could be number one on your list.
I can pick up a hooker in any language you name.
Arabic might be very handy to learn, at the very least to translate the imams' incitement to violence sermonized at mosques.
******
Yes, and a smattering of Mandarin Chinese familiarity in one's acquaintenceship would be useful as well.
In the same vein as McWhorter's point, regional accents are dying out in America. Children everywhere sound virtually like neighbors. Their parents may still have hometown or rural accents, but regular travel and TV seem to have wiped them away from anyone under about 25 years old.
Great article and it echoes exactly my thoughts on this subject.
LOL! I think you can pretty much call a language dead if there are fewer fluent speakers than Klingon.
How come diseases are always "brought in" but the natives never have diseases of their own?
The natives do have diseases of their own, but chances are that those diseases are already disseminated in the wider world. Each "native" situation is isolated in a tiny area and the disease pool that the locals are exposed to is mostly a small segment of the worldwide disease pool. Diseases that normally do not thrive in the isolated portion of the Amazon, say, come in with outsiders and fire through the new human group until that group dies out or the survivors develop immunities. It happened in history over and over in Eurasia as the groups normally not in contact with each other came into contact. It was not quite so serious, except in the case of the black Death and certain other plagues because there was trading back and forth in tiny amounts going back thousands of years that kept the diseases circulating. Disease swapping in the Americas in the early colonial period was mostly one way probably at least in part, because the Eurasian population was much larger and more widespread and had thus encountered far more of the diseases available in the world. The disease swap worked the other way in Africa with the colonials much more likely to die off than the locals. The African diseases, however don't seem to get a foothold much outside of Africa, or have escaped that continent so late that modern medicine keeps them more under control, like West Nile virus.
Lenni Lenape/Garden State Ping!
Mingo language ping from western PA.
American English is doomed.
;-)
Also, keep in mind that in the Western Hemisphere, we only have three languages that are spoken widely: English, Spanish, or Portuguese. The only reason an American would have for learning German or Italian is if they wanted to go live in Germany and Italy, or wanted to read Gunter Grass or Dante in their native languages. Other than that there is ZERO practical reasons for learning German or Italian (or even French for that matter) if you are an American. It makes more practical sense, IMHO, to learn Mandarin Chinese than most European languages.
Speaking of which, when was the last time you heard somebody say "23-Skidoo" or "bee's knees" anywhere?
I know. I was just being a smart aleck about the “breakfast table” comment. Sadly; fewer and fewer families gather for a meal around the table.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.