Language Off the Chain

Abstract

Page 21 January–February 2009 Gorlée continued from previous page became forgetful of language. In her animal form, Io lost her speaking voice, but she attempted to write the letters of the Greek alphabet. Metamorphosis is, according to the mythological-philosophical story of the writing nymph Io in Echolalias, “the medium of all speech, and every word, in the end, would be made of letters traced in the sand by the hoof of the nymph who no longer was.” But the penetrating question is: can a tongue vanish? Heller-Roazen’s examples center on Etruscan as “completely dead” as well as Greek, Latin, and Old Occitan. In a biblical and archaic sense, the death of a language can happen:Atlantis was lost by an earthquake and inundation of the island, and presumably its language also sunk beneath the sea. From St.Augustine’s days, the “dead” Latin has, however, reflourished in ecclesiastical Latin. “Old” Latin was also transmogrified into the geographical “neo-Latin” vernaculars: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and other Romance languages. “Dead” becomes technically “alive” in the changed version of the languages, that slowly evolved through history, as happened to Spanish and Portuguese languages that found new life in the SpanishAmerican countries and classical Arabic that became the Arabic dialects of Egypt, Iraq, North Africa, and the Syro-Palestinian area—but, we repeat, can a real everyday language vanish? On Earth, we have today between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, of which 5,000 have less than 1,000 speakers. In “Dead Ends,” “Thresholds,” and other chapters of Echolalias, we see that “language death”—anticipated by a “half-life,” “moribund,” and “nearly extinct” tongue—is a distinct possibility , since some languages have “a handful of good speakers left, mostly very old.” UNESCO and other cultural organizations have come to the rescue of extinguishing languages, with varying success. This book states that “over half of the world’s languages are moribund, i.e. not effectively being passed on to the next generation,” issuing a warning that we and our children “are living at the point in human history where, within perhaps two generations, most languages in the world will die out.” A linguistic tragedy. Most languages die out not after the expiration of the “Last Speaker,” as this book argues, but more aggressively, because of the political overruling of more dominant languages. Another of Echolalias’s examples is one of the family of West Causasian languages , Ubykh.Ahundred years ago, the Ubykhians left their territory east of the Black Sea and wandered intoTurkey, where they adopted theTurkish language and Ubykh dissolved. In the explorative “mission” of colonization, West European languages were transplanted globally: such as the Dutch language into Indonesia, South Africa, and Sri Lanka, and French intoAfrican countries. With the later decolonization, the languages have disappeared or stayed alive, but are politically and perhaps religiously colored by the previous imperialist ideology. We may add some examples to Echolalias. The Faroe Islands, north of Scotland, were settled over more than a thousand years ago by NorwegianVikings. Originally speaking Danish, the islands have now officially rehabilitated the modern Faraoese. The independent Baltic countries , Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, have moved out of the decay of russification, exile, and emigration . As recently experienced by this critic, during a lecture-trip to the University of Tartu (Estonia), the Estonian language (of Uralic origin, akin to Finnish) is, after independence from Russia, spurred by a spirit of total rejuvenation. Dozens of other ex-colonial countries have moved out of genuine or “enlightened ” despotism to independence; their language (or tribal languages) followed the practical needs of a postwar or post-occupational era and became filled with new grammar, vocabulary, and an ideologically unbounded discourse. Separatism also moves the other way. English has settled in North America, replacing the languages of the Native American population and the multilingual immigrants. Their native languages (such as Polish, Spanish, Italian, Czech,Yiddish, and German) changed into disappeared or disappearing sublanguages. They remain alive in daily speech at home as native or artistic “folklore,” but US public life requires the use of American English. In the global world politics, where the restless struggle for success dominates other alien languages...