[wordup] Language Diversity

[Adam Shand]

From: http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp

Imagine how different politics would be if debates were conducted in 
Tariana, an Amazonian language in which it is a grammatical error to 
report something without saying how you found it out - as Alexandra 
Aikhenvald tells us its speakers tell her. Tariana is in danger of 
dying. With each such disappearance we risk losing insights into 
different ways of thinking. Aikhenvald told Adrian Barnett about the 
race to record languages

Tell us about recording a dying language...

A student of mine found an old man who said, "Yes, I speak Baré" - an 
Amazonian language that we thought was extinct. I checked that he knew 
the few Baré words I knew, then I sat down and talked with him for two 
months. Senhor Candelário was a great man. He would tell hunting 
stories, and stories about his life.

His mother had been the only person he could speak Baré with. After she 
died he kept it alive by talking to himself when he was drunk. So the 
language had been almost literally pickled in alcohol until I recorded 
it. When I left we both said: "See you again". Six months later I got 
news that he had died.

So Baré died with him?

A language doesn't fall over a precipice, it sort of slides into 
oblivion. A few people know five Baré words here, 20 there. Some become 
"rememberers", that is, they can proudly recite poems or stories at 
length, but have no idea what they mean. At that stage all the 
concepts, the elegance and the embodied world view have gone. You just 
have shards. So functionally, yes, Baré is gone.

Isn't it dangerous, travelling to these remote places?

I suppose it is, but because I am a woman and alone, people trust me 
and I can get information that would probably be impossible otherwise. 
I did once have to run away from a drunken miner. But that was in a 
town. In the more remote villages they like me, I have respect and I am 
safe. I have also been adopted into families.

And the environment?

I have seen snakes. People think that if you go to these places you 
must be some kind of Indiana Jones character but I am not. I grew up in 
a big city. I can't swim. I can't even ride a bicycle.

That makes you sound braver still,canoeing on jungle rivers...

Maybe just lightheaded. I don't think about it. I can't possibly learn 
to swim. But it's incredibly fascinating to discover a whole language. 
Of course, when I come back I usually have some sort of infection or 
stomach disease. But eventually I get better and then I want to go 
back.

How do you explain what you are doing?

When I was preparing a bilingual dictionary of Tariana - another 
Amazonian language - and Portuguese I gave a workshop and about 300 
people came. I showed them this very poor, very old Tariana grammar 
book and explained that I wanted to do a more truthful one - I said, 
"Your names will be on it because it is a community book". And they 
said, "Oh yes, then we can teach our children better. This old book has 
many mistakes. Our language will be like Portuguese, it'll be a proper 
language."

And what does that mean to them?

In that area you are identified with your father's language, and if you 
speak a borrowed language like Portuguese instead, you are a lesser 
person. But with a dictionary they can say, "Now, I am learning my 
father's language back" and this gives them some security and 
confidence. They start to speak it with pride and not apologetically. I 
find that very rewarding.

What happens then? You can hardly say to most people, "So, tell me 
about your transitive verbs..."

I always do whatever the people in the village are doing. If I didn't 
join in they would treat me differently. When I hear something 
interesting I either ask a direct question or I get them to tell me 
stories. I ask questions and people say, "Oh, how did you know that? 
OK, we will talk to you more".

Once I asked, "Can I use this word this way?" and the response was, "Of 
course, you're foreign, you can say a wrong thing. But I can't say 
that."

What's the most difficult language you've come across?

It took me 10 years to get the grammar of Tariana. Of course, Finnish 
is probably harder.

How did you become fascinated by languages?

I grew up in Moscow, in what was supposed to be a monolingual society, 
but in the street I'd hear all sorts of different accents and speech 
patterns.

Then we used to go to Estonia for our summer holidays. If you spoke 
Russian to an Estonian they ignored you but if you learned some 
Estonian they were very nice.

Also my great-uncles and great-aunts were Jewish, educated people 
originally from Ukraine, and I was intrigued by the consistent language 
mistakes they made.

And at school?

When I was 11 and I was rebelling, I collected the phrase "I don't want 
to go to school" in as many languages as I could find. I had it in 52.

What languages did you study formally?

At university I started on Balto-Finnic languages, as I already knew 
Estonian. Then my supervisor said, "With your name, the authorities 
will never let you be a mainstream scholar in the USSR". I should study 
something obscure. I had a Jewish name and Russia was very 
anti-Semitic. I looked around, became fascinated by Hittite and the 
Anatolian family of languages, and that became my master's.

A colleague recommended Berber for my PhD. It was the classic colonial 
situation: the French linguists had dismissed these languages as "just 
dialects", so there were some 14 languages that no one was studying.

How did you get from north Africa to the Amazon?

Perestroika started, thankfully, and I saw this job in southern Brazil. 
I got it, then found that many Brazilian linguists are extremely 
possessive of "their" languages. But there is this huge Arawak language 
family, spanning South America, whose members are as different from 
each other as English is from German and are as different from members 
of other language families as these are from Hungarian.

So few linguists study Arawak languages that you can just pick and 
choose. I decided to go to the least explored part, which is where 
Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia meet. I arrived at this tiny border town 
and within a few days of just walking around I heard two languages that 
were supposed to be extinct.

How do you reach the more remote groups?

I arrive in the town, some people will pick me up and we go upriver in 
one of their canoes. I think they cooperate partly because I am not 
Brazilian. There is a lot of institutionalised racism in Brazil and as 
a foreigner I am seen as being outside that. It helps immensely. And 
these people are trying to protect their cultural traditions and 
languages against encroaching linguistic dominance - this international 
monolingualism.

Why is it important to preserve these languages?

First, to learn about how people communicate and how the human mind 
works. What are the categories that are important enough for people to 
express them in their languages?

If these so-called "exotic" languages die, we'll be left with just one 
world view. This won't be very interesting, and we'll have lost a vast 
amount of information about human nature and how people perceive the 
world.

Second, without their language and its structure, people are rootless. 
In recording it you are also getting down the stories and folklore. If 
those are lost a huge part of a people's history goes. These stories 
often have a common root that speaks of a real event, not just a myth. 
For example, every Amazonian society ever studied has a legend about a 
great flood.

What's your favourite example of a big difference between languages?

In English I can tell my son: "Today I talked to Adrian", and he won't 
ask: "How do you know you talked to Adrian?" But in some languages, 
including Tariana, you always have to put a little suffix onto your 
verb saying how you know something - we call it "evidentiality". I 
would have to say: "I talked to Adrian, non-visual," if we had talked 
on the phone. And if my son told someone else, he would say: "She 
talked to Adrian, visual, reported." In that language, if you don't say 
how you know things, they think you are a liar.

This is a very nice and useful tool. Imagine if, in the argument about 
weapons of mass destruction, people had had to say how they knew about 
whatever they said. That would have saved us quite a lot of breath.

And what about different types of vocabulary?

The story about Inuit words for snow is completely wrong. That language 
group uses multiple suffixes, so you can derive not 50, but 150 words 
for snow. But the Tariana do have a lot of terms for ants. It is 
important to know that some bite and others are edible, for instance.

Do languages hold any surprises for you?

I had been working with Tariana for nine years before I came across the 
word for "purple". I was astounded. I did not realise there could be a 
word for purple in a language that does not distinguish between green 
and blue.

Such things get languages described as "primitive"...

There is no such thing as a primitive language. Many tribal people now 
speak several languages. They can often learn English or Portuguese 
much more easily than incomers can learn their language.

People complain about irregular verbs in Portuguese, but that's nothing 
compared to the irregular verb structure in Navaho, for example. I've 
known missionaries say, "These Indians, they are just making it up ad 
hoc. They are just doing it to be difficult and to keep us out." Such 
people do not appreciate the level of sophistication and complexity 
some of these languages have reached.

How do you decide when to stop gathering information?

With Tariana I stopped when I was not finding any new verbs. There were 
still more names for birds and ants. But I could not identify all of 
them anyway. And there are so many languages to work on. A dictionary 
means that the language is not completely lost and it empowers those 
who speak the language to preserve their cultural identity. That's 
good.

How many languages have disappeared in the last century?

About 60 or 70 per cent of linguistic diversity in the north-western 
region of Brazil has gone in the last 100 years. On the Atlantic coast 
of Brazil it's worse - about 99 per cent - and around the world the 
figure is 60 to 70 per cent. It has been very rapid.

Is there a lost language that you would love to have spoken?

Oh, yes. So many, so many...

What language do you dream in?

If I dream of Tariana, they speak Tariana. Sometimes I dream of 
Estonia, and they speak Estonian. In my nightmares, people speak to me 
and I understand, but I can't answer...