The Summer Institute of Linguistics, the organization that sponsored Ms. Alicea, has an online database of all known living languages (there are over 7000). You can find it by Googling "ethnologue". It makes for fascinating reading. The entry for Taushiro is eloquent in its starkness: "Population: 1 (2002 SIL). Ethnic population: 20."
Thank you New York Times for publishing this article.
6
Reminds me of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Maybe it is the american and european companies going to exploit natural resources in the lands of people that were living okay without their intervention. The disguise of Christianity as a conquering tool. How one's own interactions with the family dictate your future. The pressure of your culture being wiped out... I think it kinds fits into the realm of magical realism.
Thank you NYT for covering this topic. Also, why doesn't someone raise funds so that the sons can visit their father... that would greatly ease his pain.
5
Another amazing article from the Times! The way the author has captured the Amadeo's pain is absolutely heart-wrenching. It's a unique story of an unbelievably thoughtful and caring person who bears a heavy guilt of being the last and lonely bearer of his culture and language. Amadeo's story has all the hallmarks of a great Greek tragedy!
3
99.9% of all species evolved on the Earth are extinct. Same for languages. It's natural!
4
All those well meaning people stuck in such moral quandaries. A moving and sad story told so cinematically I could almost hear the soundtrack. As I teach myself French, it doesn’t cease to amaze me how much of it is in English, and how close Norman French was to wiping out the languages of the Anglo Saxons. So it goes.
8
I feel deeply sad for Amadeo. His story is about extinction. He is not the last of his species, but he is the last of his kind.
He has no society, no community, no family, no culture, no way of life, no roots. He is horribly isolated on this planet with 7+ billion people. there is not another like him nor will there ever be.
He was born into one world and will die in another world.
He drinks all the time because he is terribly depressed.
i couldn't stop crying when I read his story.
Our language represents our identity. Amadeo has lost his.
8
With respect, the claims made by the authors that Taushiro is a language isolate are – hopefully – somewhat refutable. In fact, a strong argument can be made that Taushiro is not a stand-alone.
As an archeo-etymologist, although new to me, it didn't take long to figure out the roots of Taushiro with reasonable certainty.
By way of a parallel, if a tribe lived in 'isolation' in England for five or six centuries, we might labeled, let’s say, ‘Chaucerian’ mostly unintelligible to even the educated ear. Would that make it a language isolate? Of course not.
What readers of this article might find most interesting is that some aspects of this language appear to be not that old, relatively speaking.
But to parse all this, it is key to know where to look. This leads me to believe that there might still exist relatively similar dialects among neighboring tribes.
However, I fully understand why the authors would make the isolate claim and mourn its passing.
I wish the field researchers success in their endeavors. However we choose to look at Taushiro, they are to be applauded for the courage it takes to do their work.
6
In 1986 I traipsed through the Peruvian Amazon with a fellow North American and a few local helpers. Like an earlier trip to the East African Sahel, I was inspired by encounters with people from "way-back" cultures with little or no exposure to modern life.
These were among the most life-changing experiences in my nearly 7 decades on this planet. What I gained an appreciation for, first and foremost, was the intimacy we could share. I will never forget these friendships.
It is sad that my children will never get to meet such people. It is no longer possible.
5
A fascinating story sprinkled with glimmers of hope, yet filled with tragic on many levels.
What I was left with at the end was a nagging urge to know the answer to this question: Did Ms. Alicea adopt and relocate the 5 children to save them, or did she adopt the children to cleanse her own lingering guilt from placing a 12-year old child bride with the abusing husband Amadeo?
3
On a dugout canoe trip down the Rio Napo in Ecuador in 1972, I was hosted for a couple of days by the folks at a Summer Institute of Linguistics mission. They were gracious hosts, offering us home cooked meals and beds with clean sheets. They flew us out to a village of indigenous converts, and took us night time caiman hunting. They explained that the Second Coming of Jesus couldn't occur until all human souls had heard the Word. This was their motivation for translating the Bible into indigenous languages. I couldn't relate to their mission, not being a christian myself.
They had created a facsimile suburban US community in the wilds of the Amazon, although their houses had screens and stilts instead of glass windows and foundations. All food and necessities were flown in from the states and the missionaries dressed like Ward and June Cleaver. It was all a bit surreal after months of hard traveling.
The local indigenous population lived in the their traditional dwellings, separate from the missionaries.
5
I speak Yiddish; was raised speaking it, as my parents were from Europe. This article saddens me. I know Yiddish won't have 'one last speaker', because the Ultra-Orthodox speak it, and it is studied in universities. Yet I have no one to speak it with, so for me, and my descendants, it will end. My parents are gone, and even those few my age who can speak it (I am 65), speak English. It's so sad when something beautiful ends . . .
5
As a close-up look at the eternal processes of assimilation, extinction, regeneration and evolution that are all part of nature, this story is interesting and moving.
But all those who actually doubt that life will go on for every other human being, exactly as before, without the Tuashiro dialect, are seriously lacking in perspective, and by extension, gratitude for all the good in the world.
They're also intellectually dishonest.
2
<<< Ms. Alicea’s decision to move the children to Puerto Rico remains a shock to linguists who know of Taushiro, arguing that her choice all but guaranteed its extinction.
“I have never heard of an equivalent story elsewhere; in any academic circle, that would have been considered an unethical event,” said Zachary O’Hagan, a Ph.D. student in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. >>>
For starters, this perfectly illustrates why we shouldn’t look to academics—much less those from Berkeley—for ethical & moral guidance. The “linguistics commuity” cares primarily about languages; by their lights, these children apparently had an obligation to remain in their dangerous, primitive, no-future village in the juungle—so as to ensure the continuation of their ‘culture’ (such as it was)!
Typically, this is a stunning, 180° inversion of normal moral values. To the extent that anyone is born ‘deserving’ anything, these children deserved the safest life possible, with access to whatever the world has to offer.
10
That darn website Amazon.com has shown itself to be good for something; but can It prevent the extinction of this little known language? Jeffy should invest heavily into This instead of rockets, spaceships, astronauts and tang!
Sad but all too familiar. Missionaries more interested in saving souls than in saving a language. Or linguists more interested in archival survival (and their
own academic creds) than in live survival. Or governments more interested in rubber than in people. You don't have to go to Pucallpa to watch is. TG
6
pulitzer prize winning material.
bravo for a beautiful, brilliant job.
1
I am not surprised that a Puerto Rican woman from San Lorenzo would have a role to play in the preservation of culture in the Americas.
The mountains of Puerto Rico were home to the Taino indigenous people of Puerto Rico. My mother tells me that my paternal grand,pother was Taino and taught my grandfather how to survive in his surroundings.
All that knowledge was lost after 1898. But what has not been lost is the capacity of Puerto Ricans to understand others whose loss compares with our own.
4
Very sad story, but excellent article to make us realize how much we are changing the world that we live in. Thanks.
2
What a painful and important story this is. It is so fundamentally human, emphasizing the down side of our common nature, that which allows us to devalue our fellows and to overwhelm our cultures with the desire for riches at the expense of love and care for one another and stewardship of the resources of our shared planet. I hope we will find the pathways to our better selves before all is lost to darkness. We must let the Light that is in us all shine.
2
It’s a bit disheartening that do few people recognise the pernicious effects of colonialism in this case. It might seem disconnected, five hundred long years after the arrival of the first Europeans to the continent, but the effects of the conquest and genocide are still felt and new atrocities are committed. The fate of the Tasuhiro people is another instance of genocide. Slowly but certainly. From thousands to a few to one.
9
The writer fails to mention that for the first 50 years after the Treaty of Paris was signed, the US government opened public schools throughout Puerto Rico and sent English only speakers to teach in them. The struggle of the Tasuhiro has been the struggle of five generations of my Puerto Rican family: A struggle to preserve our Spanish language and Puerto Rican traditions, including those handed down to us from our Taino ancestors.
Right now, in Utuado, there is an entire community that has yet to receive assistance to rebuild a bridge that will re establish communications with the rest of the island. US Congress, the ultimate colonial entity that has exploited my family since 1898, has yet to see value in appreciating a culture other than the one they see reflected in their mirror.
The history of Peru and Puerto Rico goes back four centuries. The first Catholic Saint of the Americas was Santa Rosa. Her father was a Puerto Rican who lived in Canta, Peru and to this day is known for his ability to learn indigenous languages of Peru. Her mother was Peruvian . To this day Santa Rosa is venerated for her understanding and love of all Peruvians.
5
Even granting that a language or a culture constitutes a unique way of looking at the world, is it a tragedy when one goes out of existence? If it is, then it is a tragedy that the musical world of J. S. Bach no longer exists. I don't mean that we don't have his works; I mean that the cultural context, performance practice, theory, and what other music would have been heard at the time are no longer extant. That musical world is one in which no one ever heard Sondheim or Stravinsky, and that world is gone.
It is then a tragedy that the unique perspective of the Pythagoreans or any number of Presocratic philosophers is no longer a live option for any thinker to take today.
Every individual has a unique way of looking at the world, so it is then a tragedy when any person dies.
Is the world a museum of unique ways of looking at things, and are we the curators?
4
The last Taushiro speaking person is very precious and should be kept alive and well cared for. He should also be payed to teach others the language. He should also be immunized against the infections which killed his parents. Now there is also a dengue vaccine which is transmitted by mosquitoes. Thank you Nicholas Casey for this interesting story in a remote part of the world. Stories like one without any partisan bias is what makes NY Times great.
3
Creation and extinction are the two sides of existence with change filling the space in between...
Hardy the first language to go extinct...far from being the last. Dare say, in the course of human history, more cultures and languages have gone extinct currently exist.
6
This is the unavoidable, paradigm, example of the bleak and sad ending awaiting cultures .......which fall victim to worshipers of financial economic GODS and eventually vanish into a sterile, homogeneous, and Orwellian GLOBALIZATION.......... losing the cultural diversity that is ESSENTIAL TO SUSTAIN THE HUMAN SPECIES !
Ah, yes. The countless (hundreds? thousands?) tribes, dialects & mini-cultures that have disappeared over the course of human history were all the victims of Global Greed, or Capitalism or--let's just say it--Evil Republicans.
(sigh)
6
JRS....the process and traits are identical,whether monarchist, communist, or capitalist.......and in your MORAL example both Democrats and Republicans can be EQUALLY EVIL if they worship ECONOMIC GODS rather than well being of ALL living things and the biosphere !
2
Wonderful though sad story. Why no crowd-sourcing to raise money to help save languages and preserve dying cultures? I would be happy to contribute to such efforts.
2
This article is about a dying culture and language, but Amadeo Garcia Garcia’s story is equally an exploration of human identity and profound solitude. As the only speaker left of the language that shaped his thoughts and perception of the world, the depth of Amadeo’s solitude is far beyond our reach. What makes us who we are? And what happens when the factors that shaped us and made us who we are disappear? Who do we become when our roots are cut off? Can a tree exist as a lone branch when the trunk has been dismantled?
29
The great languages of the world--English above all, and also Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Russian, and Arabic--are imperialistic languages which, like the societies that speak them, seek to spread their dominance over all the world. Strong national languages, such as Korean, Czech, and Hebrew, can to a limited extent fight this trend, but only within their national borders. The thousands of indigenous languages spoken by tribal groups are in grave danger of disappearing, and hundreds have already vanished, resulting in an immense impoverishment to human culture and our different ways of seeing and interpreting the world. The only practical way to fight the mindset of linguistic imperialism s to support a neutral, easily learned universal second language such as Esperanto, which all peoples of the world can equally call their own. And lest you think this is a pipe dream, be aware that there are almost 1.2 million Esperanto learners on the Duolingo website.
3
Although slightly off topic, this is another perspective of languages.
English is (despite what the French think) the defacto second language of the world, when it should be Esperanto, an artificially created language and for that reason with very simple grammar and no ownership by any country.
2
Only problem is, hardly anyone speaks Esperanto.
2
I’m really glad you covered this story. Thank you NYT for sending your reporter out.
I am saddened to learn of this and it’s a tragedy that so many other
languages have been lost in entirety.
It’s not just small tribes. We don’t even know what ancient Egyptian sounded like. Knowledge is lost when language is lost if it’s written. We didn’t know how to read hieroglyphs until the Rosetta Stone was discovered.
There’s a very good chance that many other languages will not be spoken anymore as English becomes a dominant language.
1
This is deeply profound and moving. It is stories like this that makes NYT special. Although I don't have any concrete solutions to offer to such a complex and difficult problem, it touches me to the core of what it is that makes us human. And I feel our loss as a human race when the last Tashiro is gone.
1
We have way too many languages in this world. No one can speak all of them. Language does divides human population. So maybe extinction of obscure languages is good? Language is part of a culture and culture is created by people and if a group of people goes extinct, everything about the culture dies. Maybe they can leave cave paintings or something that preserves their history but some languages without written format was weak to start with. Dominant culture will dominate in the end. If people wanted to preserve a specific language or any other part of the culture, they have to share it with many people and pass it on to future generations. In America, the native language of the immigrant is probably not spoken by their grandkids because everyone speaks simple English here. No one even speaks like Shakespeare. Most high schoolers wouldn't understand Shakespeare either. Everyone can basically speak English in America but the culture doesn't demand too much communication skills so most Americans can barely read literary works filled with complex vocabulary. Some parts of the English language will survive but it may be absorbed by someone else's cool new language. English and Christianity spread to many parts of the world but their forms are always changing. Changes are inevitable.
3
While I was struck by the loss of this language and this culture, there was a broader story of survival. What about the wife Margarita, who at 12 married this older abusive man? What about her lack of access to birth control and bearing five children that she couldn’t manage? Civilization may have destroyed a language and it’s last survivor, but the culture that supported that language was not conducive to progress. I’m sorry to say, old languages and old cultures are nice to hear about, but not so nice for those that live them. It is no wonder the sons cried upon their return to the jungle, there was no future for them there. It is no wonder the wife escaped a life of daily child-watching and beatings in the jungle. This is not an anthropological story, this is a family story of survival. Place it anywhere else in the world and the focus will not be the loss of a language.
10
Thank you for this amazing story.
"One day when I am gone from the world, I hope the world remembers.”
Now that you made it to the newspaper of record, you will be remembered.
3
NYT needs to get back on a journalistic track and lose this tendency toward clickbait titles of the form: "Intro statement of some state of affairs." followed by, "You won't believe what happened next."
A title should be a neutral statement of fact, not a lure or come on. "Indigenous Language Has Only One Practitioner." A title is not supposed to be a carnival bark.
6
I really appreciated this piece. The ignorance of the readers demonstrates that is important for NY Times to include history and analysis of the imperial violence that led to this result. The readers assume it's an equal competition between cultures and that cultures that disappear deserve to go. In our society we're taught to be blind to colonial violence, and we're taught to rationalize oppression as the fault of the victim.
It's shocking that people would justify this based on languages that were lost over 1,000 years ago. I guess these people would similarly support the loss of Yiddish as the result of the Holocaust. "Jews just should have been more civilized and competitive," these readers would argue, "otherwise the language deserved to go."
The social Darwinism endorsed by so many NY TImes readers shows that we really are in Trump's America, one where eugenics and using military might to get one's way are in fashion.
Instead of taking this man's children away, if the Christian missionaries really wished to help, they could have supported him and his family so that they could have stayed together.
3
Millions once spoke languages like Gaeilge. not just in the British Isles, but in Spain, France, Italy and even the banks of the Danube where Marcus Aurelius died 3/17/180. Today they and their languages are all gone except for the few in the hinterlands of Ireland and Scotland.
8
Such an excellent story. Thought provoking in many ways....
4
It's saddening to see the progress of a language getting lost. The story shows us sometimes preserving a language is not only a group effort but individual's responsibilities, which are sometimes unfair and a burden, especially for an unfortunate family. I feel grateful to hear Taushiro and the language will certainly be remembered.
3
Frankly, Id be more upset to learn something was making us loose knowledge, that doesn't seem to be the case here. It's language, not knowledge.
t
5
"It's a language, not knowledge"
I'm sorry, but this phrase should be attached to the wall of a school...........as an example of "ignorance".
Language IS knowledge. It is the only way we have to transfer informations, memories and knowledge. What is "writing a comment" if not "language" ? What is talking and expressing your ideas if not "language" ?
If you do not use written language, how to exchange knowledge ?
How do you know Taushiro culture if you do not understand their language and the different semantic senses of their words ? Why have they words that we do not use and they do not use words we use ?
Do you think that we now would know Iliad and Homer (not the cartoon...) without language ? It was transferred from one people to the other by vocal heritage.
Each language is a unique knowledge of the world.
You don't understand: the loss of a language IS a loss of knowledge. Each language will have its own unique ways of describing and thinking about the world. One simple example: our English word "insight" is unable to be translated into French. So if the only language the world spoke was French, we would not have the concept of insight. An amazonian tribal language will have ways of describing the flora and fauna of the forest and river, and those descriptions sometimes convey unique aspects of knowledge of their use. Language loss IS a loss of knowledge, always.
2
I still remember reading - decades ago - about the last known member of an avian species singing its unique song and getting no reply. This will join that story in haunting me for the rest of my life.
9
For those who believe that such cultural shifts are unavoidable, please see, "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States," the most recent book by Yale anthropologist, James C. Scott. The disruption of mobile groups by sedentary societies is the central struggle of our time. More and more, people are awakening to the fact that we don't have to live with this modern, globalized lifeway, and indigenous groups offer some of the best alternatives for escaping it.
According to Scott, "“Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never looked so bad—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure... “The wounds the standard narrative has suffered at the hands of recent research are, I believe, life threatening.”
5
how romantic!
1
Languages come and go. The Last of the Taushiro is a tragedy because it's a human story.
Marvelous 'story'.
7
A truly wonderful and insightful story. I've been to Peru, twice. Visited the Quechnya living high in the Andes; their communities seem stable. But alcoholism and abuse are serious issues here.
"Civilization" hasn't dealt well with our fellow inhabitants of Earth.
4
This is a good report. Amadeo’s story is sad..I wish I could go to Peru and work with the linguists and anthropologists to help preserve the cultures and languages. Can the writer give us any update on Amadeo and his dedication to recording his native tongue? And what happened to his daughters?
2
As languages and species and other forms of diversity disappear, we can look to a world that shuns difference and rewards conformity. Culture loss, like species loss, is our canary in the coal mine--- portending a world sculpted by the plutocrats and oligarchs.
8
There is a beautiful movie -- was on Netflix-- called Embrace of the Serpent exploring some similar themes.
Another interesting article on Gizmodo today about what is the ideal population of the Earth.
2
It is also on Amazon prime video streaming.
Languages live. Languages die. Just like concepts. Ideas come and they go. Why get flustered and upset and angry. It is all for the greater good.
4
Angry? Flustered? Is this what you took from the store you just read?
No. This is about appreciation, commemoration, a sense of loss, and a retention of what we can of that which will go. The things we feel and do that make us different from animals.
17
What IS the greater good here, in your opinion? Or do you have the same idea one of my American acquaintances has, that all other languages should slowly disappear and only American English remain? While everyone is entitled to his or her own ideas and beliefs, such contempt for other cultures is reprehensible.
2
Languages and tribal heritages and cultures have been dying for centuries now. Why is this particular one more important?
We are losing entire species of critters in the world's natural environment or endangering them to become close to extinction. We should maybe be more concerned about this.
9
Respect for those things we are losing is not limited to one 'type' of thing, for me.
I think it is likely that many of those who care most about the loss of languages and cultures are those who care most about the loss of species and habitats.
Being a respectful, caring person cuts across all aspects of one's life.
2
It sounds like this gentleman is bilingual. Good for him. Bilinguality will ease his assimilation into the culture that will absorb him. Take note, immigrants to the US.
3
immigrants to the USA have always kept their culture and language; you likely know of:
Columbus Day de facto italian holiday, there there is:
St Patrick's day for Irish celebration
Cinco De Mayo
Mexico holiday
Chinese New Years and more recently many Indian-American's are happy to let us enjoy their Diwali festivities these days and other are enjoyed at sporting events alone with heritage days.
If you are open minded and not sensitive to hearing other languages, there is great time for learning, eating and enjoying... it is fun to learn at lease hello, please, thank you, good-bye.
Enjoy the rainbow
4
He is not an immigrant. He is a native. The Spanish invaded his land and the Spanish language was once the foreign language.
14
I speak three languages fluently and consider it enriching; my family always maintained it was important to learn the language of the country in which we lived while preserving our own. Expecting immigrants to forget their native language is narrow-minded beyond belief. If you want to boil everything down to useful versus useless, I give you the example of a former pupil from Afghanistan who speaks Farsi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Hindi as well as German, English, French and basic Spanish. She was snapped up by a bank for her apprenticeship and they kept her on, as she is able to interact and negotiate with speakers of these languages. Please, Americans, give up your at times very parochial attitudes; you are such nice people, really, but that attitude creates prejudice abroad.
2
So powerful...
An ultimate piece of history..and a common and touching scenario
Frank Troiano
3
Just another tale of an environment, a language and a culture destroyed by the duopoly of Christianity and commerce. This feels unutterably sad because it tells the story from the perspective of a lone survivor. But there are innumerable ways of destroying the world we inhabit, and we are all living in its ruins. It's almost over now.
14
Tragically, you are right! Before folks realize what's happened to them, it may be near impossible to steer this ship clear of disaster.
1
A well reported story.
Yet, I felt it lacked details of what exactly the culture of this tribe is as it relates to their language.
Languages are dying every day - at least that's what I have read.
Fast forward to our computers, computing languages have changed - and some have even died - significantly - but it does not mean it had any cultures associated with them.
In India where I am currently living is an interesting story.
Hindi - the most widely spoken language here - has its own script derived from Sanskrit.
Yet, the fashion is to write Hindi with Latin alphabet. This is especially important as knowing English that is alphabets is highly thought of.
A well known politician here makes speeches in Hindi in parliament no less - written by his aides in Latin alphabet.
Advertising billboards in Mumbai are filled with phrases in Latin alphabets that you can read but not understand.
So, it is not in conceivable that in some distant future - Hindi would still be spoken but written in alphabets that had little to do with its origin.
11
You'd like to bring your third rate English to the world? In the foreseeable future brain that only knows one language would be decaying. It already is. Many students in the US, India and Mexico cannot read and write well in any language...including English, Hindi and/or Spanish. Some of these idiots use number 4 for "for" and/or "U" for you...even in formal emails and written notes. There is a reason why Japanese students, Korean students, Finnish students, Estonian students...excel in math, physical sciences, engineering, reading and even IQ tests. Because they either learn the classroom curriculum in their mother tongue, or they speak or learn many languages fluently, or at least reasonably well.
Pick up a phone and call a receptionist, service provider or anyone in the US and see how incompetent many are, and how poor in communication. They use wrong words. they give wrong information or misleading data. Many cannot even read the notes in front of them written in English. Many cannot talk properly in their own mother tongue, or in several languages.
Now give me the word - exact word, for a green parrot of India in Hindi?
It is thotha, not hara thotha. You know why? Because India has mostly green parrots. Hence thotha automatically means a green parrot. Also, in Hindi the word for ice and snow is the same: Baras. Because there is not much snow in most of India except up north. But Alaskans have many words for snow. Our ecology and values also define our language.
6
"When the green hills are covered with talking wires and the wolves no longer sing, what good will the money you paid for our land be then”
― Chief Seattle
21
And then there is the name he was give. In Spanish: Amadeo ( lover of God).....another strange wrinkle in this tale.
13
This is a fascinating look at global society. I read a lot about this idea of authoritarian ideology. How it is bad and controlling and prevents people from being free. As a pilot, one is required, REQUIRED, to read and speak English before attempting to learn in an aircraft that rises oneself above all the bothersome detritus of the world below. There are standards in order to see what the previous have brought to the new. It is called parenting. Most of the people reading this need some recurring training.
3
I am both a linguist and a person of indigenous ancestry (While Earth Ojibwe). This is a very important story, which was hard for me to read. It has repeated countless times over the past 500 years within what is now the Americas. There are hundreds of communities that may face this same situation in the coming years. The statistics and logic behind the trend towards language death are indeed bleak, as this article and many of the comments demonstrate.
However, there are many stories of hope. Within my own community, which broadly includes nations in multiple US states and Canadian provinces, we have recently celebrated the launching of "Ojibway Netflix". We have immersion schools for children and young adults to attend year round, and summer immersion camps where first speakers share our language. You can get a BA in the Ojibwe language at the University of Minnesota. Children are still learning the language, and the language and culture is always revealing its strength.
I would encourage members of colonizing societies to learn about the language that is or was spoken in the area that you live in. If you are in the Americas, this is an indigenous language like the one described in this article. Just learning and knowing is the first step, as it allows you to acknowledge that you live on indigenous land. There are also many organizations doing the hard work of revitalization and revival in this critical time, and they can use support from people of all backgrounds.
43
Species, languages, peoples come and go on this timeline.....all natural and normal.
6
Just like all the Native American languages (thousands, actually) that were "naturally" and "normally" lost a few centuries ago in North America???
2
A sad story but do we have to go to Peru? How many languages spoken by the indigenous tribes of the U.S. mainland have been lost or are their way to being a memory. And does anyone know why we refer to our indigenous people as "Indians" when they have no connection whatsoever with India?
10
Columbus thought he was finding another route to India.
5
If the only one left who speaks his language is him he must have a good listener.
3
An enlightening and informative article on language, but it sugar coats the role of Christian missionaries in the Amazon. No other factor in modern times (post rubber) has done more to eradicate indigenous peoples and their culture than these ill informed, culturally inept religious zealots on their divinely inspired mission to save heathen natives from themselvs.
Far too late, but the Peruvain government finally woke up and now bans them form entry into sensitive areas like the Manu, where the remaining indigenous peoples are allowed to live unmolested, and seem to get by just fine without the benefit of bibles translated into their own language.
29
He still dreams in his native language: gosh, what an image.
7
I wish NYT had told us something about the author.
3
Amadeo is the last known speaker of his language. Last known to us. The other members of his tribe or anyone else who speaks his language, may still be out there in physical existence. That's A. B. is that if Amadeo is the only one who speaks his language, then it's not a language. There is a logical point behind what I am saying, not just cynical intellectualizing garbage.
5
I don't know anybody who speaks ancient Greek - probably not a language either.
Your logic defies gravity.
7
Andrew, it sounds like you disagree with this definition:
"Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of such a system. "
3
Andrew, your comment is logically similar to: "If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, is there a sound?"
8
A person's first language represents a filter through which they see and understand the world. Creativity stems from that understanding and the richness of a culture follows. When a language dies (i.e. its last native speaker is gone), an entire path of understanding and creativity is gone forever. While a well-documented language can be taught to others, that data filter that was put in place by that language being a person's first language isn't repeated.
4
This data filter is just a legend. Cognition comes first, language second. All humans share the same cognitive capacity. If a language doesn't have a word to describe something, when presented with a new concept, its speakers will simply use a phrase to describe it. But the idea will be there. I know it because I'm a linguist.
2
The depth of languages and their preservation is so meaningful to our understanding of human culture. The human condition is written in our various languages.
And the narrative of this one man, Amadeus, is so poignant and so much a story of our brotherhood. Thank you for this account!
6
Thank you for this powerful and poignant article. While it is in the nature of all things that emerge to eventually pass — whether simple blades of grass or complex societies and civilizations — the harsh fact is that exploitation and domination hasten that process and compound the suffering, distorting a gradual, inevitable, natural process into a nightmare.
The loss of this tribe and every tribe, and the terrible pain of those very last members if the tribe, is humanity’s loss. Our collective humanity is relentlessly impoverished by the greed of corporate profiteers, the brutality of occupation and domination, and its soulless, godless ethos. The great tragedy is how blind we are to this loss, blinded by baubles, religiosity, and lies.
12
A language is a framework for conveying meaning. The people who speak a language invent words for meanings they need to convey, and other words that adjust those meanings with nuance. If you live differently, or think differently, then you will speak differently, and others who hear and understand what you say will learn from your experience. The loss of a language is a loss not of a means of expressing meanings we already are familiar with, but of expressing different meanings. The loss of those different meanings and nuances deprives us of possibilities. That loss of possibility is what we resist when we object to threats to a language, and what we mourn upon the loss of a language.
9
The crosses behind him says it all.
7
Markers of Christianity's ruthless expansion, maybe.
5
My own ancestral language—Manx—was declared a dead language in the 1970s, when the last native speaker died, but now thanks to a revival it is listed as "critically endangered.” About 1,823 out of 80,398 speak it, or at least claim to speak it. The Manx are working on creating a Manx ethnic identity. Still, it’s doubtful a Manx-language novel will ever make the New York Times’ best seller list.
13
Very interesting that some geographic areas had so many languages at one time in such a relatively small area.
The year before I married, I decided I wanted to travel someplace I might once married. I selected Peru, both for Machu Picchu and to see the headwaters of the Amazon. It was 36 years ago this month. Tourism wasn't as pronounced as it is now. I lived in a camp on stilts; piranhas and Caiman were in the river so swimming was dangerous. My guide took me to see tribes that still wore bark clothing. I bartered some large bars of ivory soap that I had brought--knowing money didn't exist in that culture. In exchange I got a blow gun and darts. My Spanish speaking guide showed me dozens of plants used for medicines, including one for diarrhea. He said our camp was about 10 miles from tribes that still did head hunting.
I was astounded that the guide could find his way through the jungle, with zero trails and the sky often not visible. Everywhere around us iridescent blue large butterflies flitted.
This article also reminds me of another trip years later to Easter Island. It was the only Polynesian culture to have had hieroglyphs. And to this day, no one has been able to crack the code of what the preserved hieroglyphs say. The priestly and educated citizens who once used those symbols were eventually taken prisoners and forced into slave labor on the beaches of Peru, where they were forced to salvage seabird guano droppings, to be fertilizer.
13
The story of rubber used in the jungle, then valuable for tires and other things in developed world.....the story of pharmaceutical companies desperately trying to learn about folk remedies/ plants used by jungle tribes.....the story of the developed world massively harvesting mahogany and other valuable woods from the jungle....the story of hearing a rumbling--and it is the beginning of oil exploration, bringing airplanes and deforestation.
These are layers and layers of the many stories hidden still in the Amazon.
11
We have lost many of the languages of the indigenous tribes of North America, too.
10
How sad. Amadeo has lost everything that made him who he was: his tribe, his family, someone who speaks his language. There is nothing that can ease his sorrows.
11
Indeed. No wonder he self medicates with booze to kill the pain.
6
When languages die, it's usually because a lot of people have died first. When it comes to indigenous peoples of the Americas, this story is as old as Columbus. It's not only the culture that goes. Families are forcibly impoverished as they are shoved off their land, as their members are enslaved and raped and killed... It is at least as much a story of the US as anywhere in the Amazon.
17
Yes, story of Columbus. Story of much of Africa. Story of parts of South Pacific, and more.
8
Interested readers might want to know about the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, a digital repository hosted at the University of Texas at Austin: https://ailla.utexas.org/. And, I disagree with Fernando from São Paulo: the death of language is like the extinction of a species. Something precious and irreplaceable is lost to all of us.
18
I'm absolutely flabbergasted and speechless.
This story is so sad and heartwarming at the same time. Beautifully written. I think no one really can understand the pain and despair he must be going through.
I wish him all the best, he really can be proud of himself! I think he did the right thing by "saving" his children.
11
"I'm absolutely flabbergasted and speechless." --- speechless... you must also be one of those lone tribesmen stuck with a dead language. And for someone who is speechless, you are quite eloquent at it. :-)
2
But what a sad choice, and his children paid a huge price in their lives.
1
A classic tale of natural selection hard at work - adapt and evolve or perish. While sad emotionally, necessary for the species a a whole.
6
Greed, occupation and brutality play the central, very ugly part in this story. Natural selection? Don’t kid yourself. The cynical and soulless nature of monstrous corporate behemoths is not simply “natural selection.” It is an ugly display of the very worst of human nature. Are you too so soulless and cynical that you just can brush that off with a flippant shrug?
8
We R Doomed,
How were they to adapt other than they did? They ran and hid from their enslavers and built booby traps to ward off those who would harm them.
I don't see why they are being blamed for choosing to remain a culture of hunter/gatherers.
10
What a thoughtless and cruel comment !
9
The Phoenicians “brought” their syllabary to Greeks; the Greeks borrowed the signs and Hellenized the name of the signs. Most importantly, the Greeks introduced signs for the vowels, making the writing system an alphabet, a writing system in which each sign stands for a component of speech, consonant or vowel. Just sayin’
4
So he played dolls with his future wife who was 12-years-old? Perhaps that society needed to die. I’m more concerned about the end of polar bears & the icecaps melting.
13
gee...a very open minded cultural enriched citizen. Do what do we this honor?
7
How shocking that a Stone Age tribe has different customs than we do. Your callous disregard for the demise of these people and their entire culture says quite a bit about you.
9
And how did that marriage end? No, this was wrong. Her father even had the guy arrested!
2
This leaves the question of whether it would have been better to try to fully integrate these small tribes into the general population and allow them to contribute in a positive sense or leave them isolated to die off?
By leaving them to themselves - which actually isn't completely possible - their way of life stagnates, withering, with the end result of one last member.
Open them up to a larger society. Through integration they can enhance their way of life as they see the need or desire. They can establish new relationships and the tribe can continue in some form. I think the idea of isolating less sophisticated tribes in order to maintain a language is not beneficial to the tribe. When has a language ever been static?
6
What tragic times we live in. It appears the exploiters will win. I hope their children reap the whirlwind.
6
"By leaving them to themselves - which actually isn't completely possible - their way of life stagnates, withering, with the end result of one last member."
This happens when a way of life is denigrated, espoused as backward, heathen, and 'needs to be saved'. So instead of helping it and encouraging it to be more itself, it is destroyed by those who think they know better.
Unadulterated hubris.
9
Who wins, who loses? That will forever be the unanswerable question. Misery through unnatural diseases, other cultural greed, even wildlife is in danger of extinction because of human activity, the list could go on and on b
2
What a sad situation. When we lose a language, we lose the richness of the culture that developed it. I often feel the same way about Yiddish, the first language of both my parents who were born almost 100 years ago.
In some ways it may be easier to communicate in more common languages, but many such languages, English being one, don't convey the nuances of these indigenous languages. I hope they will be preserved for us to learn from, if nothing else.
14
"Where the cumulative experience of the Taushiro people swung alone in a hammock" such a beautiful, painful sentence.
16
My mum left the country of her birth (Jamacia) at the age of 15 to make a life for herself in London.
She worked hard to keep herself and her kids but it was tough and there were many times when there wasn't any money for food.
I still find it hard to understand how she and my now deceased dad managed to get us through those times.
She, of course, had her fair share of racial discrimination during the early years and to be honest she still feels hurt by the experience.
If she happened to be (for argument's sake) White and British
what are the chances that she would have been made to feel welcome
without suffering racial abuse?
I honestly think that the chances would be very slim because that is the way it goes in London.
All people are prone to be in want etc but not all are victims of racial abuse because someone dislikes their skin color, nationality and mother tongue.
Sometimes I think that human society would be less troubled if everyone looked the same and spoke the same.
But would that really make for a better society where people are welcomed and treated with honor and respect no matter what their mother tongue happens to be?
Isn't the root of our troubles due to a reluctance to accept that everyone is equal whether one is black white fat slim able-bodied or disabled, tall short rich or poor?
We all come into life the same way and leave in the same way
so where is the justication for treating one body of people in ways that we wouldn't like to be treated?
9
All this will become easier as races intermingle. Not so sure about religions, though. Glad I will not be here to witness all that. And I have left no children to experience the Armageddon.
4
Love your optimism! :P
People will always find a reason to hate other people. Where I originally come from, some people are willing to stab you for being a fan of a certain soccer team.
4
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
11
So much for survivalists. If these people could not make a go of it, no lone can hoarder with guns will ever make it alone.
11
And no one left to talk to.
7
I think that with the state of our troubled world Greg
the only thing I would say is HELP.
To get some perspective on languages, here are some factoids.
Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country, with over 820 indigenous languages. India comes next with 780 languages. Of these 191 languages are endangered. See for example -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_endangered_languages_in_India
Globalization brings homogenization as well, in culture, foods and languages.
No one can stop it. It is the price of progress!
21
No Jaque, it is the price of greed, not progress. Progress would be to make the forests off limits to industrialization. This speck of the earth's surface would not be missed. When I was in Papua NG, the native people were being displaced by the oil exploration. Huge landing strips were being carved out of the jungle so equipment could be brought in. Why? Greed.
When will we learn to care? When the last English speaker dies?
15
given all our technical wizardry these days, one would think that we'd have developed a way , by this point in time, of preserving such cultures in audio files or similar mechanisms. additionally, could we have not developed new ways to help them preserve their culture, as the enrichment of these cultures on ours and the others it touched (and it did obviously or we would not be reading this story) could then indeed be passed along after the last member of the society passed on?
6
Yes, how sad. I wonder if the “progress” will have been worth the price. Every place is the same, and autocrats rule.
2
Imagine being the last person to speak English and to know the history/traditions of Western civilization. How would it feel as alien ethnographers sat quizzing you on every detail and you knew your own knowledge was imperfect and couldn't describe what was once known by so many fellow Westerners?
The last people often know only a fraction of what was known at the peak of their tribe.
Lost are knowledge of native plants and animals, craft and hunting techniques, and ways of viewing the Earth. Aspirin came from willow bark. Perhaps a similar agent was once known by these people.
Ironic that the missionaries' desire to "save" people for the hereafter causes destroying them in the here-and-now.
The tribe never asked for this genocidal salvation that toppled the thousands of years of their family tree.
17
Whatever our mother tongue is
we are all practically saying the same thing..i.e. HELP us.
2
Yes, imagine if the last person available to describe the history, traditions & accomplishments of Western civilization was any of the commenters here mourning the 'loss' of a language spoken by hardly anyone: these same sensitive souls be hard put to come up with a single good thing produced by Western civilization; they'd be simply at a loss--nothing good to say. A combination of their ignorance and bias.
But they could give your 'alien ethnographers' plenty of romanticized, gushing tales of how wonderfully idyllic life was in any number of primitive societies that they never personally experienced (and in which they wouldn't have lasted a day, their overyl-sensitive psyches inevitably marking them as prey)
What difference does it make if a little used language is lost? One could ask the same thing about a culture if it has nothing to offer in our modern world.
4
I am positive that you are incapable of comprehending the unbreakable bond between a culture and the language that expresses it.
31
It matters because language is one way humans express their interpretation of the world. When a language is no longer in use we lose unique words and phrases that describe the world around us and our place in it. They aren't merely words, but verbal representations of ways of being, philosophies of life. It may seem a culture has "nothing to offer in our modern world," but we can't really know that and it's a pity to lose the possibility of what it may have taught us.
2
To Aaron Adams - What difference does it make if you are lost? Are you of much use to society? Is anyone of us much use to society? Perhaps you are important to a handful of friends and family members but to the rest of the 7 billion of us? Each of us has value to the extent that life itself has value. And each culture and language has value to the extent that it is a member of the family of humankind. If you believe you have value just by the virtue of your existence then every culture, large and small has value as well.
8
It reminds me of when Red Thunder Cloud died, taking the Catawba language to the grave with him:
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/14/nyregion/red-thunder-cloud-76-dies-and...
Alas for all of us, diversity becomes less diverse when these things happen.
23
Am I the only one who was disturbed to read that Amadeo raped a 12 year old girl and that Ms. Alicea helped him get away with it? It is very sad that they language will die, but there is nothing tragic about Amadeo's fate. What about that little girl's father? Did he ever get to see his daughter again after she was stolen from her home? And how hypocritical for Ms. Alicea to say that children come first after helping Amadeo destroy that girl's life. That is the personal tragedy in this story. Other cultures aren't sacrosanct simply by virtue of existing and without regard to their content. No one should be under an onus to respect traditions involving the rape of children; rather, just the opposite.
17
At no point does it say he raped her. It says she fell in love. Look back a few hundred years in what ever country you live in and you will find that girls of that age would have had children. It is a relatively recent thing to say that it is wrong. Biologically speaking girls are the right age when they go through puberty. While I agree it's not right in our society I don't think it's right to judge someone that has no concept of how our world works.
11
That's exactly what I was thinking. Ms. Alicea used Christianity as her reason for taking the children away from their native home because she said that her religion deemed that it was more important to care for the motherless children. However, somehow her "Christianity" had no problem allowing this man to sexually abuse a 12 year old because it was a "cultural norm." Seems self-serving on her part in that it would allow the tribe to grow in numbers.
2
Where did you read that Amadeo raped her? The article says she fell in love with him. Or is that your judgment because she was young? Remember, she was also from a small tribe and many traditional societies around the world had and have people marry that we consider children in Western culture. We now extend childhood well into the 20s and some 30 year olds even live with their parents. When you put Western rules on other cultures, it's called ethnocentrism.
5
Chingachgook to Hawkeye:
"The frontier moves with the sun and pushes the Red Man of these wilderness forests in front of it, until one day there will be nowhere left. Then our race will be no more, or be not us. And men like you will go too, like the Mohicans. And new people will come, work, struggle.
But once, we were here."
19
Thanks for making me think of "Last of the Mohicans." It's my favorite movie and book.
4
I worked for a couple years in a rural Alaska where a branch of the University of Alaska offered classes in the local native language. Out of curiosity I enrolled for 2 semesters. My previous experience with dipping into languages was with French and Japanese where I found that world views did not differ dramatically from American English, however much philosophical or social views might. However the Yupik language views the physical world differently. I think that this is worth understanding and experiencing for its own sake.
The native community has been actively working to preserve their language and the State of Alaska does take an interest, at least documenting the local languages and storing recordings.
37
It is a loss, but is it one that we should mourn? A culture where girls were married at 12 to grown men, and spend their lives being beaten by their husbands, and birthing and taking care of children, many of whom died of preventable causes and treatable diseases. Children eaten by jaguars. Death from infections, measles, malaria, snake bites.
It is fortunate that Amadeo’s children left the jungle and lived. This is especially true of the two girls, who grew up and were educated in Puerto Rico. They have a chance to do something more than live in jungle or, more likely, to be domestic slaves to either husbands or employers.
And even if Amadeo raised his children in the jungle and they managed to survive (a big if), the chance that they would have stayed there is remote. It was a matter of one generation, a generation that will instead have a chance to have what we all take for granted, like basic medicine. There is another word for that kind of loss. Progress.
Languages evolve and die. As the only thing written in Taushiro was “verses of the Bible translated into Taushiro by missionaries,” it is a lesser loss than the loss of many others languages.
24
"is it one that we should mourn? A culture where girls were married at 12 to grown men, and spend their lives being beaten by their husbands, and birthing and taking care of children, many of whom died of preventable causes and treatable diseases. "
You're describing the US -- and the vast majority of the world -- of the fairly recent past.
Yours is the casual racism of the West towards those we call "savages."
7
Your type of thinking is a very dangerous type. It is the type of thinking that guided western imperialism in the previous centuries. The idea that our way of life is superior to everyone's and therefore everyone should live the way we do. It was the call to arms of the white man's burden. I thought a fellow resident of one of the most liberal cities in the world would know better.
7
Michael - society has evolved, and eventually men will become fully domesticated.
Wasn't there a biblical parable where the nation's of the earth decided to build a stairway to heaven. God struck it down and to prevent it from happening created different languages so it would be harder for man to coordinate such an effort in the future. In many ways we have persevered and now speak the same language once more and have yet again decided man is capable of being Godlike in his technical ability to build another stairway. It would seem we are now in for a serious tumble for our efforts and quite possibly being in a place where once again those of us left will be busy creating new languages instead of new stairways. This lonely alcoholic man is a harbinger of where we are all headed.
5
Hokey metaphysics. You're saying we're better off having mutually unintelligible languages to keep us from getting too big for our britches? how about a common language that allows us to work together to make a better world? Yes it's a loss--to understanding how languages work, and to human linguistic diversity--but language evolves according to the needs and the creativity of its speakers. Look at Urban Dictionary. Listen to young people--and see how fecund the verbal jungle can be!
5
Great. Rely on the myth and superstition of religion for an excuse.
5
I agree with foxdog. Speaking a rare language may be of interest to scholars, but the speakers themselves are economically marginalized and often illiterate. Speaking, reading, and understanding a dominate world language is a form of power.
6
This is both tragic and - at the same time - quite simply normal. All cultures, all languages, all people live, perhaps flourish, and die; this is the way of the world. Although we may rightfully mourn our losses, including this one, we must remember to enjoy and celebrate what we have, while we have it.
14
I just wish that life was better than it is Andrew.
I know that life is what we choose to make it
but think about it from another angle.
Is the society that we adults make good enough for the children that are being born and growing up?
Think about the hurtful things we adults put before them with price tags on them such as cigarettes and high-fat high sugar food and drink
and then ponder on the effect it has on their health and lives.
I am convinced that we adults should try to make our societies as best as possible not just for ourselves but for the children too.
Surely that makes sense to you and everyone else?
What do you think?
9
Its up to the government of Peru to invest money into reviving the language then. Thats what happened in NZ to the Maori language as that was dying as well so the government invested lots of time and money into preserving and ensuring the language is not made extinct. Though NZ is a developed nation and maybe the Peru government isnt as well structured like our western world government is. NZ is a Welfare State.
Government research showed many moons ago that the Maori language was becoming extinct so the government invested lots of dosh in the language to revive it.
1
The disappearance of all unique cultures is the inevitable result of multiculturalism and diversity. The question is whether a mix of things is better than a unique thing. You cannot have it both ways. The French are finding this out--they will not retain their French identity if they become more an more flexible and accommodating on admitting non-French. The US, on the other hand decided long ago to become the ever changing culture, so no big deal for us to change.
7
So I guess the effect multiculturalism is non multiculturalism.
1
This Frenchman tells you this : we have admitted loads and loads and loads and loads of foreigners for centuries. France is also made of dozens of smaller provincial cultures which tremendously enriched the country even as centralization tried to choke them off.
The result ? One of the greatest cultures in the world. Since you do not sound like you know much about French culture, let me give you a few French famous writers : Blaise Cendrars, Emile Cioran, Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, William Beckford, Marguerite Yourcenar, Senghor, Cavanna. If you had but a smattering of French literature, you would know those names and know that all of them were foreigners at birth.
Please think before you type. And learn before you think.
7
I no longer blame Bush for this unfortunate situation. It is Trump’s fault for colluding with the Russians.
7
I was in Bolivia on a tributary off the rio Madre de Dios in the early 1990s near the Peruvian border when we came across a small hamlet (chaco). There was a young missionary couple from Minnesota (with two young children) who had set-up a school for the nomadic tribes in the region and were attempting to learn and document the various nomadic tribal languages for posterity. I was amazed by the work they had done and their future plans for ensuring these languages were preserved. I do wonder what happened to that project.
I recall their children (ages 4 and 2) were surprised to see that there were actually other white people in the world besides their parents as we were the first white people to enter their hamlet and they had never traveled more than 20 miles from the hamlet . . . that's how dedicated their parents were to the project. Amazing people indeed.
9
The moral of this great article is not only that a language is about to become extinct, but it is also that a race of people is becoming extinguished. And that's what happens when a tribe keeps to itself and isolates itself from other tribes. It eventually dies away.
Just as no tribe is independent of other tribes, it can be deduced that no city is independent of other cities and no country is independent of other countries.
My personal conclusion from this article is that for us to survive and prosper, we need to cooperate with other peoples and countries.
6
All very well, except when that other culture is trying to enslave you, when they come to your place and change your name and give you a new religion and bring new diseases and your people and culture start to die.
Why should it be only the indigenous tribes who learn the lesson to work together for the good of all?
A language is not just something that carries intellectual ideas and cultural traditions. It is a very creation and a tool of expression/communication of a human being and his/her society. Each language is a part of someone's individual/social identity. When a language is under assault, a human being is under assault as well as his/her nation, community, social ties, family, etc.
Saving native languages is not just about saving cultural heritage --it's about saving families, communities, and societies. It's about the protection of the human rights, dignity and freedom.
16
It's about grant money.
1
I'm bewildered by sheer cold-bloodedness of some of these comments. A man is slowly dying of depression and loneliness on the periphery of a society that's largely unaware of his existence or that of his vanished family. This isn't funny.
Then again, if he were a man living on some remote fjord and with a significantly lighter skin color, you'd consider him more worthwhile.
15
Dear Alexandra,
I think it's a defense mechanism, we can't weep over every tragic occurrence because there are thousands every day. Have to accept the things we cannot change to, and this is one of them.
Also if he was Norwegian and the last speaker of Yngglyrok, I would have said the same things. Racism really doesn't enter into this, I think.
4
That is the sad reality Alexandra and you said it well.
1
I know you are right Dan
but I for one am a very sensitive guy.
It doesn't take much to make me feel down.
I know its not good to be like that
but wouldn't you agree that our troubled world needs more sensitive people who won't just weep with sunken shoulders but get up and try to inspire positive and hopefully lasting change?
That's what I'm like.
1
There is a lesson in everything.
How many years separate this story from the last of all of us, given our inability to learn the warning signs nature has increasingly provided us?
In terms of survival, there is no more critical time in human history than the present.
9
Language loss represents the lost of diversity - a language monoculture is as vulnerable as an agricultural one. It also is a loss of viewpoint - of direct experience translated down through generations. Diversity is the natural state of the world and lack of it, globally, a result of the relentless march of "civilization" to monopolize resources and wealth. What hit me more than the sadness of this story was the deceitfulness of the language "missionary" - saying that they have a spirit that the boa's will not touch is a lie. They knew it and they did it to fulfill their own goals. Christianity is responsible for more deaths and destruction than can possibly be recorded - I hope they pay for their lies and arrogance through the actions of the God they so "adore."
9
A moving, thought-provoking article on the complex, intertwined stories of the family of Amadeo García García and the linguist, Nectali Alicea.
In North America, the international language revitalization movement involves academics and community workers who meet for international conferences on topics such revitalization of language families- Na-Dene languages - a large family of languages that spans Mexico, the USA and Canada. It is a positive story of artists, community workers, local teachers, parents who want their children to speak their language, fluent speakers, and linguists, working together in highly innovative and creative ways to keep language and culture alive.
In her June 2017 NYT article, Catherine Porter described the convergence of language revitalization, culture and technology in the creation of the first Haida-language feature film "Edge of the Knife". With only 20 fluent speakers left, the actors of all ages learned or relearned (as in the case of 73-year-old Sphenia Jones) how to create the complex sounds unique to Haida often using recordings of the elders.
Zacharias Kunuk, a director of the artist collective Isuma known for the first Inuktitut-language feature film, Atanarjuat (2001) described how, "Inuit went from Stone Age to Digital Age in [his] lifetime." Kunuk described how he grew up "on the land" and saw the "last of that era". The new technology he works with now is the same as the oral tradition he grew up with. http://bit.ly/2DWjC11
1
Beautifully written and researched article. Thank you for bringing us Amadeo's story.
2
Not to quibble, but the terms "dialect" and "language" are used interchangeably a couple of times, which can be confusing. Two dialects of a single language have differences in pronunciation and vocabulary but are mutually intelligible (e.g., Scottish and Jamaican English). Two different languages are not mutually intelligible, even if related, e.g., French and Castilian.
This is a fascinating, and very sad, story...
7
In Canada we had a system where we took indigenous children from their families, put them in residential schools and beat their language out of them. The shame completely over shadowed our recent celebrations of turning 150 years old as a nation turning it into a somber affair. Now as we struggle with reconciliation it’s clear that we lost so much more than knowledge and culture. We pressed silly Christian values on a race of people that had a perfectly sustainable way of life thus sealing our own fate as well as theirs. But there is no going back.
11
David Attenborough made an excellent (and heartbreaking) documentary about the destruction of the culture of the First Peoples of the American Pacific North West. It is called Crooked Beak of Heaven and was part of his series Tribal Eye. Highly recommended and searchable on a well-known purveyor of media clips.
1
Why is this a tragedy? It is sad, admittedly, but the human condition is all about the rise and fall of cultures. Let's not make a religion of multiculturalism. Mourn the loss and move on.
15
The last of the kind is always sad and lonely affair. It has nothing to do with multiculturalism, even though language as a sign of culture intensifies it.
To those who cannot see beyond their ethno-centricism, try this thought experiment. If you are the last human being walking this earth - even you are not threatened by the new masters - it is a lonely planet. And this is just the beginning. That is why solitary confinement - as the researchers have discovered now - is so destructive
8
A typical do-gooder Western piece. Never mind the human beings who spoke only Taushiro but their 'Language' needed protection. Frankly, why was nothing done to preserve and protect the Taushiros and leave them to lead their own lives in their own way, with their own culture and allow procreation as they wanted. Of course, not! There was that important commodity - rubber! The Spanish came robbed them, killed them, sent them into camps, making them slaves and imposing their language while spreading disease never known to the Taushiros. And the worst part is the blackmail - medicine for conversion to Christianity. What a way to spread disease and hold medicine for a ransom.
But why should I be surprised? The indigenous people in every part of the globe have perished or are almost there, meeting the same fate as the Taushiros, herded into camps like animals, forcing them to drink to escape from their new identities thrust upon them.
The lonely picture of Amadeo, drunk and wearing pants and a T-shirt (!!) fishing in a canoe is so sad. What a tragedy not for the loss of Taushiro language but for the extinction the Taushiros themselves !!
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That's right, the extinction had its roots a long time ago, but is nearly complete for this tribe. Capitalism and religion are destructive forces, aren't they?
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Christianity can be a force for good when the people that practice it follow the sterling example left by its founder and his disciples.
Capitalism can never be good because greed is always bad and brings out the worst in the people who support it.
That is why our world is so messed up because our political rulers put their faith in greed rather than time-tested principles associated with Christianity.
1
Thank you for making articles like this instead of focusing on Trump. This is why I have a subscription!
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Can't wait until Trump is the only one left of his lineage, living in a shack and drinking himself to death. The only one left capable of speaking his weird language, and nobody will try to record it by then.
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Bravo Mr Stackhouse !!!!
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You don't really mean that do you, Dan?
Is Donald Trump really that detestable?
I know he says some bad stuff but don't we all from time to time?
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Can someone direct me to the NYT article mourning the loss of Chaucer's dialect that brought us:
"WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye...."
"Yo Mayhaps we's should revisit da 1996 Oakland decision of da language o' da inner city ya'll is mad stupid." (from an Ebonics translation program).
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Chaucer's language evolved. It wasn't wiped out by a bunch of foreigners looking to rape and pillage to make a buck.
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More than the diseases and natural accidents, indigenous people have been killed off by greedy imperialist countries and companies.
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Ishi lives!
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Why is Trump killing all these people?
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I have a problem understanding the "tragedy" behind the death of a language. Cultures come and go and we should not display it as a tragedy, should we?
I raise other issues. What made English an omnipresent language? Was it the economic uprise of the English society? I know the US have a program called Alumni around the world that aims to promote English language.
Second, would the world be a better place if we could speak the same language? Is there an institution around the world promoting the idea?
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When this civilization ends, taking with it your culture, your language, will it be less tragic for you or your descendants because it has happened countless times before?
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The future belongs to those who are open to change. I would not regret living in a new culture. Humans should set a bar of knowledge and work to lift people up. We talk about economic progress but economists dont tell we need educational progress in order to achieve the first. In Brazil the majority of people below 20 cant speak or write Portuguese based on its official rules. I would not be surprised if it died within one century.
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Yes, Fernando, there are those that have tried to devise and promote a "universal language." Take a look at Esperanto as an example. With respect to the place of English as the preeminent language on today's planet: it wasn't always thus. Take a look at the languages of diplomacy.
Really interesting stuff.
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My heart breaks for what our culture carelessly destroys, and for the callous joking comments that have been posted here.
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Methinks, Allison, that your heart breaks easily. What about the language of the Hittites?
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In this case, it was not our culture carelessly destroying.
1
Methinks, Ralph, that as far as language is concerned, one word seems to have escaped you : heart.
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About 45 years ago, I read an ethnography about a tribe near the Peru-Ecuador border. They, too disappeared, but the story stuck with me and the seed for my first novel was planted. I think of those people, long gone, often, and wonder what could've been done to save them, their culture, their poetry, their songs, even their religion.
In our quest for instant access mass communication globalization, I fear for the quirks and idiosyncrasies that make us human. Being part of a tribe, a clan, a family, a town with an individual identity it not a bad thing. People are usually proud of their origins. So proud that I happen to be sitting here in St. Paul, Minnesota wearing a sweatshirt that proclaims:
North Bellmore
Long Island
New York
I mourn for Amadeo, his brother, his people, their language, their traditions, and most of all, their language. All of it will be lost to us forever, and therein lies the tragedy.
https://wifelyperson.blogspot.com/
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Terrific article, thanks. And it's a sad tale, but most noteworthy in that it's one of the few times the death of a culture has been witnessed and recorded. Nobody knows how many languages vanished without a trace, along with their cultures, but a million is probably a conservative estimate. Small tribes of humanity, each with their own specific culture, have been eliminated on a fairly constant basis since the start of humanity.
There were plenty of big ones too, like the Carthaginians, but most of the cultures we've lost are ones we never found out about. Droughts, floods, earthquakes, and of course other humans, consistently annihilated small tribes for the past few hundred thousand years.
So on the personal scale, this is tragic, and I feel badly for Amadeo for the suffering he's gone through. But on the global scale, this is just what happens to humanity's less successful groups, and not nearly as important as, say, the extinction of the Vaquita which just happened in Baja. When a species goes extinct, there's no recovering it, but there is no shortage of humans. And the language of a small tribe is not really something we can learn from, just different sounds to convey the usual primitive grasping for truth. Lastly, there's nothing from this culture that we really want to hang on to, what with the notions of marrying young girls, abusing women, attacking strangers, and so forth.
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" Lastly, there's nothing from this culture that we really want to hang on to, what with the notions of marrying young girls, abusing women, attacking strangers, and so forth."
Well, seems we have hung on. All those things still exist in our culture today.
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Dan, "attacking strangers" was a reaction to the exploitation of the Taushiro by outsiders.
I'm not so sure we should be condescending toward their culture considering abuse of women and girls is still happening in our allegedly advanced civilization.
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Our perception of the world is strongly biased by cultural constructs such as language. There is no way to know that another language is simply different sounds for the same things. All the "notions" you mention are present in all cultures, including "modern" ones.
2
This story is about more than a lost language. Cultures are lost because outsiders don't appreciate the beauty and complexity of a different culture. Instead they come in and force them to abandon their culture and adopt the outsiders vision for how they should be living their lives.
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Or because they are forced into slave labor...
3
When a language is reduced to so few speakers, it's already lost. We need to work to preserve the perspectives of rare languages and dialects before they are in danger of immediate extinction, so knowledge of the language and culture and stories and myths are drawn from dozens or hundreds of people. To task one person with the preservation of a language and culture is to set him up for failure.
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DIsappointed to see the brief focus on alcohol use; it wasn't well developed and came across to me as people magazine reporting. The time would have been better spent on the language. What is its origin and what will its loss mean in terms of expressions or meanings that just can't be captured in any other language and are unique to this culture.
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Dear Dpod,
Good point about the alcohol use, I think if it was something this tribe was particularly susceptible to, that should have been delved into; if not, it should have been mentioned just in passing.
But I'm curious as to what this culture would have about it that would be unique. Humanity has many things that are common to all cultures, and this one would probably just be the standard hunter-gatherer notions we all started out with. Also, like all non-scientific peoples, all of their creation myths and so forth would be wrong. The earth was not produced by the sneeze of a giant iguana and so on.
So, my apologies, but I just don't see that humanity has lost very much in this case.
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Thanks for the article.
Language issues aside I wish I would spend more time keeping company to older, lonely people. Most everybody has an interesting story worth listening to.
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Thank you for this article. Languages, like species, are part of God's creation, or the creation of the planet's imagination and natural processes. We are losing languages and species, before we even know their value.
...
David is the author of "The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteen-Century Vietnam," and blogs at TheTaysonrebellion.com and InconvenientNewsWorldwide.wordpress.com.
2
Dear Mr. Lindsay,
Sorry, but languages are entirely humanity's creation, not formed by God or the planet. In this case, we've probably lost nothing by this language disappearing, because we don't need to have another set of sounds to count like, one, two, three, many. Whatever this culture had figured out about reality was likely wrong, and it seems like it was fairly misogynistic and violent.
Species though, those are a big loss. We cannot replace all the species we have driven to extinction, or the ones we still will, and I will mourn the death of the last elephant forever. But a small tribe of humans is completely replaceable.
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No such thing as "God's creation" since there is no such thing as God.
2
The saddest part of this video might, in fact, be that his friends and community tried to help preserve it, “but Amadeo was always drunk.”
Even if we knew the survival of our culture rested on our shoulders alone, would we rise to the occasion?
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Killed by a jaguar. Bitten by a venomous snake. Drown in a river. Bled to death in the jungle. Died of malaria.
As If life wasn't hard enough already, along comes the "missionaries.
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Yes, the blessed missionaries !
2
Such a sad story. Amadeo may be the last man to speak Taushiro, and that makes his story unique, but the other stories -- of fathers and lost children, of good and bad choices made, of families lost to injury and disease, of isolation and the pain it causes, and the way alcohol, turned to in an attempt to alleviate it, only exacerbates the pain and isolation -- those stories are universal. And so very very sad.
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I'm wondering about the flip side. Are any new languages being created anywhere on earth? Which was the last to emerge? When and why?
It's sad that languages and cultures are being lost forever. Perhaps more tragic is that civilization seems to have wiped out the conditions that once spawned new cultures and allowed for some to take hold and flourish.
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I do not know of the most recently spawned language. However, a case was studied about 20 years ago, or more, when Nicaraguan deaf children were brought together from far away places to a central school. They rapidly fabricated a unique way of signing among themselves. Thus, when necessary, motivated individuals from different homes can cobble unique language to communicate to each other.
4
Ever heard of AAVE? Spanglish?
Dear Billy,
There was an attempt to start a universal, planned language of Esperanto. It mostly failed, although there are some who still speak it. But most current languages, particularly English, are adding new words and concepts pretty quickly, and very few would be fully understandable to someone from five centuries ago.
And it's not that sad that languages and cultures get lost forever. Most of those that have were pretty barbaric, vicious cultures, and the rest were ones that just didn't work out. Better not to dwell on the failures, but appreciate and sustain the successes.
1
Although languages change and their speakers adapt, language loss is still a grave issue globally, even here in North America, because language is culture, and culture loss is the destruction of a peoples' unique way of being, thinking, and seeing the world.
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Language changes.
Culture changes.
It is inevitable.
3
You own death is also inevitable. Yet you seek to prevent it every day.
1
You are arguing 100 percent against diversity and multiculturalism. If indigenous tribes should protect their cultural identity, then Americans should protect theirs from the invasion of foreign speaking people who will dilute our sacred cultural purity. Don't you see where your argument goes? You cannot have it both ways.
3
Interesting piece, but I'm curious.
Where was Mr. Casey when people on the Italian Peninsula gave up the Latin of Virgil, arguably a FAR more impactful language than Taushiro?
9
What on earth is the point of this snarky comment? Did Mr. Casey have a special obligation to time-travel back in history to the time and place of Latin as a living language to earn the right to explore the demise of an "arguably" less "impactful" language today?
23
I can never tell whether you're being facetious or not.
1
This is not a piece about what language you deem to be FAR more impactful than any other, this is a story about a person who wishes he was not the only person responsible for his language's survival.
What an arrogant thing to say.
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Wonderful article. I remember well the adventures of a relative to the Wauja community in the 1980s, and she learned their language while living there for many years. I believe there were fewer than 200 people who spoke the language then; I am sure that because of her work, many more have received her great gift of love to the Wauja.
http://palinstravels.co.uk/book-4671
6
I've been dedicating some of my free time to keeping the Swedish language alive. I've heard that in Sweden everyone speaks English now, so I take this task very seriously! Vi sees, och tack!
14
A beautiful, if tragic, story. Whenever something on this earth is lost forever that loss should be recognized, it should be mourned. The diversity human experience is diminished.
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Not really tragic at all. Language loss is a sign of people adapting and raising their standards of living and is a great thing.
We love to romanticize rare languages as English speakers, who never have to deal with the difficulties of a non-dominant language. It’s easy for us to wish every language lived forever, because it gives us pleasure as an observed curiosity. But it’s invariably better for the life of the tribal member to adapt a major language, even if we English speakers lose the pleasure of one more cultural ornament to gaze at.
10
Ashes to ashes, Asher !
2
It is still valuable to study languishing languages, if the resources are available, to teach us of the inventiveness of humans, particularly their grammatical rules, their system of naming items unique to their culture, and their cherished values.
9
"A life of isolation," yet I see styrofoam fast food containers and plastic water bottles on the table. Can the worst aspects of "modern" western civilization so thoroughly invade such remote outposts? Is there nowhere immune from the encroaching tide of humanity? Of course not. Humans will continue to multiply until their environments become sufficiently toxic and/or their resources are completely depleted.
Languages are a dime a dozen, and millions have been "lost" over the millenniums, so who will lament the passing of one more? Not I. There is nothing special about this place, this man, or the words he uses. He's just another human among trillions of humans that will come and go in our tiny slce of geological time. Put that in your pipe and smoke it - if you have the courage to face reality.
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This comment is all about you, not the tribesman. You use and yield benefit every day from the things you deride here, and you oppose them because the aesthetic is not as pleasing to YOI, not because of any concern for the man here. I’m fact it makes his life better - just it does for you.
Rare cultures are not ornaments for our romanticized western observer enjoyment.
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You're obviously depressed, not well hidden, and I hope you'll soon feel better.
Incurious, shortsighted people are a dime a dozen....
2
"[I]n any academic circle, that would have been considered an unethical event.... [Y]ou have lost a key data point."
Actually, there are some academic circles in which the criterion for what is ethical or unethical takes human welfare into account, not just the preservation of an abstract structure or data about linguistic universals.
I think this article has the appeal that it does because it is hard to let go. But I don't see why the world is worse off if a language falls into disuse because no one is sufficiently interested in continuing to speak it.
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You appear to miss the point that the people who spoke that language have disappeared along with it. That is a sad thing.
24
He made a very cogent point. You think their disappearance is sad. That's subjective, and you failed to explain why. Because I don't think it said when the primitive disappears... neither for them or us. Rather, I think it's sad when people want to preserve a way of life simply for its quaintness regardless of how deprived of modern benefits such a people are. In this case, most of his family died unnecessarily and very prematurely.
8
But "the people who spoke that language" haven't disappeared. They've adopted a new language. Amadeo's son Daniel lives in Lima and has steady work. His other children live across the Americas. His relatives who stayed in the forest perished from diseases such as measles, infections, and malaria, or were preyed upon by jaguars and boas. The more I think about it, the more I think that Mark and Fernando (above) have a point. If the price of preserving Taushiro as a living language is to consign its speakers to a nature preserve, where life is nasty, brutish, and short, that price is too high.
8
I think Ms. Alicea deserves an article of her own. Most likely the Taushiro people would never have been known to the world at all if not for the Christian missionaries like her. “I love the language,” Ms. Alicea said. “But I love the people more than the language. With the blessing of God, those children had a future.”
It is difficult for me see the disappearance of the Taushiro language as something to mourn. Amadeo is obviously a tragic figure for more reasons than just the disappearance of his language. Humans are slowly but surely coming together as a species all over the earth and, in the process, we are discarding barriers. Language is one of the greatest barriers preventing greater human progress and unity, in my opinion.
6
Such a touching, moving story. Heartbreaking to know that when he’s gone so will his culture.
7
How strange. But, come to think of it, I haven't heard anyone speaking Carthaginian recently. Or Assyrian. And, for that matter, you never hear subway conversations in Middle English!! Yes, it's sad (in some ways) that old tribal languages and cultures disappear, but it's been going on for a VERY long time.
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Imagine you were the last speaker of English — the last person to understand Shakespeare, or Handel’s Messiah, or To Kill A Mockingbird. Now think about what songs, poems and expressions of the human spirit are lost when a language dies.
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This is a little different, Steve. It is called genocide.
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But you do in fact hear those languages spoken everywhere, especially on the NYC subway, it's just that they have evolved, and we and the languages live on. Hence, those languages are not dead; they are just different. Here's a taste of the living Middle English you use or hear daily: as, although, also, ax (metathesis for "ask"), can, each, go, less, much, none, said, such, enough. Orthography changes but the sounds do not. Listen up and you can recognize it everywhere.
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Wycliffe translators better hurry up and translate the Bible into Taushiro before this language is lost...if they have not done yet.
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Dear Kenell Touryan,
On the one hand, it already is too late. On the other, there's no point at all, because nobody could read a Bible written in Taushiro.
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I just want god's promises in the bible to come true for us down here on an earth that is becoming increasingly troubled for everyone.
I have similar feelings every time I have to refill the hummingbird feeder and rinse the ants off before I do, watching the last ant vanishing down the drain. I especially am impressed by their stoic silence though it all. It makes for such an unbelievable spiritual connection, each of us in our roles as the swirling spiral of water silently disappears.
22
I can't tell if you're joking or not but that did make me LOL.
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Dear Iver Thompson,
Sorry to step on your metaphor, but you can't hear the ants because the ones that make sounds do so very, very quietly, and most of them communicate by pheromones. So as they swirl and drown, the ants are screaming out smells to the best of their ability, but we have no ability to sense their messages.
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I like your comment Iver.
It's very thoughtful.
2
“I am Taushiro,” he said. “I have something that no one else in the world has. One day when I am gone from the world, I hope the world remembers.”
I both applaud this article and feel very frustrated. I'm worried that readers will assume that languages like that described in this article, will be lost forever. This is an old story, and was already being told a hundred years ago; it is easy to feel sad for the last people.
However, focusing on the "lost cases" actually ends up enabling the unnecessary loss of languages. Why focus on a language that is already gone when there are many others which don't have to be! There are currently hundreds of languages that will be lost in the near future and thousands more that will be lost over the next years. It would take minimal effort to support the documentation and support of these languages. Each language contains unique qualities and is an essential part of a unique culture.
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Paul: are there programs, groups and/or institutions dedicated to documentation and support of endangered languages? [email protected]
4
Yes, see the Endangered Language Alliance: http://elalliance.org/
8
http://www.eldp.net/
https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf15116
https://recoveringvoices.si.edu/aboutus/partners.html
These are a few.
I know that readers know many more. It is a noble way to live your life.
6