Posted on 07/08/2019 10:53:51 AM PDT by Jagermonster
To stand out in New York City, all Alex Paz has to do is open his mouth.
The Queens resident is one of only a handful of people who speaks P’urhépecha, an indigenous pre-Columbian language spoken in southern Mexico. P’urhépecha is not only rare, but also one of a kind, linguistically unrelated to any other known language.
“There are things that can only be said in my language,” says Mr. Paz, who’s been working with linguists to preserve P’urhépecha.
Mr. Paz lives in the most linguistically diverse neighborhood on earth. With as many as 800 distinct languages spoken throughout this sprawling borough, Queens has a diversity of tongues and dialects unprecedented in human history.
Linguists estimate that up to half of the 7,000 languages spoken today are likely to die off by the end of this century. Most will succumb to the homogenizing effects of global capitalism and digital media, as well as the efforts of leaders who believe a single national tongue will strengthen cultural cohesion. It’s not simply nostalgia that motivates efforts to preserve the world’s dying languages, linguists say: Every spoken tongue is rich with the experiences of humanity.
Queens is the perfect place to pursue preservation efforts. “This neighborhood in particular is like, I would say, the Noah’s Ark of languages,” says Daniel Kaufman, executive director of the Endangered Language Alliance.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
A lot of the languages are spoken by people who need deporting, though.
Myself, I principally speak the Queens English — and by that I mean P’urhépecha, an indigenous pre-Columbian language spoken in southern Mexico.
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:D
“There are things that can only be said in my language,”
Might seem that way to an Ohioan...not so much when you live there. The number of languages spoken there may not have been 800 when I left in 02, but it was far more than I was willing to continue to endure. I lived there for 57 years and the increasing rapidity of its devolution was breathtaking
True. We can usually get by with a smattering of Polish, Ukranian, Italian, Yiddish, German, Chinese, and Spanish.
Almost as many as were spoken in my small (28 unit) apartment building.
Some cultures are best allowed to go extinct, along with their languages.
“Do you know anyone who speaks Mustangi?”
“Nay.”
“Oh, sorry, never mind.”
mark
My question is whether or not Mr. Paz is literate in Spanish? I know first hand of a high school student in the Bronx who had recently arrived from Mexico, spoke an Indian language and spoke minimal Spanish. He was illiterate. If you’re Mexico why not have the American taxpayer pay to educate teenagers like this?
I can type 75 words a minute in P’urhépecha. Unfortunately, these words have no corresponding words in English, so I can’t tell you what they are.
Making members of a dead leader’s entourage human sacrifices at his funeral was not limited to cultures in the Americas-the Vikings did it, the Egyptians did it-on and on and on-and it seems logical that the unfortunate attending physician would suffer the fate of his patron...
“Most will succumb to the homogenizing effects of global capitalism and digital media, as well as the efforts of leaders who believe a single national tongue will strengthen cultural cohesion.”
That certainly was what happened to Hittite, Tocharian, Minoan...
No political bias here.
Um, no.
There are many languages today with fewer than 10 speakers, almost certain to become dead languages in the near future. The last speaker of one of the Celtic languages (Manx) died a few decades ago. The last speaker of one of the Romance languages (Dalmatian) died in 1898. Many endangered languages are spoken only by older people--the children are not picking up the language.
Digital media was the last nail in the coffin for Tocharian (both A and B).
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