September 30, 2007

Sholbit. The end of another language is nigh; only one living Elem Pomo speaker remains.

This is what she sounds like.

posted by es el Queso 16 years ago
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein speculated about what kind of meaning a personal language might have, if it even made sense, if only one person spoke it. Fortunately old recordings were made to validate this one.
  • I seem to have read critiques of Sapir-Worf that say that when a language dies we don't in fact lose a unique way of seeing the world. I may be recalling that wrong, but anyway if you think about the untranslatability of poetry, it seems to me we certainly lose something, so keep passing that Elem Pomo on, Loretta.
  • :(
  • Well, we may be losing Elem Pomo, but we've gained l33t, so I'd say we broke even.
  • Can you imagine being the only one left who can speak the language of your family/people? How sad. I would imagine have that link to the past disappear would be very isolating. Sure, maybe your nieces and nephews and/or the rest of the tribe speak English, but you've lost a critical link to your past. Abie, I may be no linguist, but in MY not so humble opinion, if a language is lost, we HAVE lost a way of looking at the world, and that should be self-evident. For one thing, loss of the language means you have lost the majority of the stories, history, and world view of the tribes/cultures affected. Maybe that wouldn't be true for a group of people with an extensive written language, but let's face it, those of us with large libraries are in no danger. Sure, there are many, many Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest, but one tribe whose language is lost may have a name, description, and use, for a particular plant that no other tribe has that knowledge of. When that language dies, that plant name is gone--and along with that goes the description and use. It's all gone--the poetry, history, mythology, song--I'm sure there are other things that go hand-in-hand with the loss of language. I'm sure they'll make as many recordings as possible, but one individual's speech is still limited in relation to the whole language. It's spelled Sapir-Whorf, with an h. Not that I sweat the small stuff, may have been a typo, but if that LanguageHat dude stops in here.... He gets sorta grouchy about language stuff. Dunno what he's like about hats.
  • Sure, there are many, many Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest, but one tribe whose language is lost may have a name, description, and use, for a particular plant that no other tribe has that knowledge of. When that language dies, that plant name is gone--and along with that goes the description and use. I'm sure Sapir and the other Boasians would agree, which is probably why the annual reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology were written in both English and corresponding traditional dialects on a page by page comparison. With the loss of interest in native communities for studying their own heritage these volumes might be part of the last remaining record in the loss of these distinct ways of seeing. I personally see a loss of culture in a loss of language. Culture, as Leslie White would say, is an extrasomatic means of adaption for humanity. So language, while internalised and given personal license to some extent, is the prime communicator and connector for ways of living.
  • Fortunately we now have a permanent storage medium of practically boundless capacity in the Intentents. For exapmlepedia, the Wikibrary.