Vanishing Words, Vanishing World: ‘When we lose a culture, the whole world loses

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/news/article_347364be-4744-11df-bcd2-001cc4c03286.html?mode=story

Vanishing Words, Vanishing World: ‘When we lose a culture, the whole world loses'

Kayla Gahagan Journal staff | Posted: Friday, April 16, 2010

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The elders are right, experts say. But whether it's the victim of past oppression or a widening gap among generations doesn't matter. It's disappearing all the same.

Word by word. Fluent speaker by fluent speaker.

"When an elder dies, it's like a library burning down, so much is lost," said Chris Harvey, head of research and development for the Indigenous

Language Institute, headquartered in Santa Fe, N.M. "The language will be lost unless drastic action is taken."
Darrell Kipp, founder of the Piegan Institute on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, agreed with Harvey.

Every language is a library because the people have developed it through their relationship with the land, time and ecology. The Lakota language especially, he said, "is directly reflective of a long-term residency" on the land.

"Every word has a true, deep connection, telling the story, explaining a phenomenon," he said. "That in itself is important."

Tina Merdanian, director of institutional relations at Red Cloud Indian School near Pine Ridge, agreed that the loss of the language could be literal in the sense that some Lakota words simply can't be translated.

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The loss of a small culture or a language that's not widely used is a loss only to those directly involved, not to the rest of the world.

it's not a loss to you, because you don't care about it.

very simple really..

Each day species of plants and animals disappear forever, and you don't notice.
Your awareness of them doesn't reflect in any way their true importance or significance.

Not your best.

Poorly, but made. It should be pointed out that before Lakota took its present form it expressed, apparently, a different worldview, so by having pre-Lakota morph to contemporary Lakota a world was lost. Then again, Lakota split to different dialects--does each present a different world? If so, does each English dialect present a different world? Eh.

A lot of people are very, very deeply conservative. They must conserve what was there; what existed 50 years ago must be prevented from changing, at least if the change is something they don't want. Even if what existed wasn't what had been there 100 years before. Then they want to force people to not change, or at least make it punishing for them to change. And they call themselves liberals or even progressive. They're pro-choice when they like the choice; they're anti-choice when they don't.

Forcing the Lakota to learn English was a foolish thing, but one that was standard at the time--it's why we have a public education system, after all. It did to the Lakotas what was done to the Poles and Italians and the Serbs. It was foolish but pragmatic. However, most of the time the reasons for conserving your own language has to do with group identification and perceived benefit. See Susan Gal's research for how that works in languages where ideology and American-based identity-politics don't come into play.

Another point is that language and culture are correlated. Language preservation folk tend to form a cult with the mantra that a language is a culture and language is world-view--very strong supporters of a very weakly supported Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. However, you can then look around and see where languages have spread but local cultures continued--thus falsifying the claim and reducing it to a correlation.

As though we needed more corroboration, you can keep your language and adopt a new culture. As the article in the OP points out--some speak the language but barely observe the culture, except for some iconic, token features. Usually one of the four Fs--food, fashion, folklore, and festivals. Cultural trivia, for the most part, but very easy to study and often the object of adoration because they're symbols of ethnic affiliation. In other words, badges.

And, finally, we can add a third point: We can resurrect a language, but if the culture that was associated with that language is gone that culture doesn't automatically spring back into existence. Language expresses culture, to be sure. But paints express images and print expresses words.

Adding causality is that usually when a language spreads it's because people see a reason in adopting it; usually they see a reason to adopt the culture borne by their newly adopted language's bearers. This can be to avoid being killed, to have access to greater prosperity, to have access to additional lands, or because you like the group and want to join. Note that language and culture don't exist except as behaviors expressed by people or descriptions of those behaviors.

As for Lakota expressing a deep connection to the land, one "reflective" of being there for a long time, note that they emigrated from the Great Lakes to the Dakotas in the early 1700s. English has been spoken in Massachusetts for longer, and must, therefore, express an even deeper connection to the land. I suspect a lot of language preservation folk would struggle before saying yes--and then do so only because they'd be forced to in order to avoid denying something they firmly believe, and then they'd exclude standard English and argue that folk speech from the area is what they have in mind. Even if "folk speech" involves 99% standard vocabulary and grammar with the distinctive traits being a few dozen words with ready synonyms elsewhere or localized referential meanings that could easily be duplicated. If we allow for Lakota to be connected to *any* land, then that's true of all natural languages.

As for Lakota having special words that cannot be translated, "mother" or "mom" is one that rarely translates with its full emotion for non-native speakers. I've spoken Russian for decades, but Russian "mat'" and "mama" don't have the same emotional content as English "mom" does for me. Then again, that's my emotional connection to a string of sounds and for Russian native speakers it's precisely the reverse. Some people loved the Latin Mass not because it said anything different from its English translation--meaning in context is usually easy to handle--but because you can't translate affection and habituation.

Once we dispose of this spurious kind of semantics--emotional attachment by some speakers being read as a property of and part of the deep semantics of the language itself--then we're still left with words that can't be properly translated. In some cases there's no ready equivalent, but we can coin a word or borrow the word to provide the needed term (borrowing is more common in some languages--take English, with pinata and borshch, latke and Eid). In other cases we can't come up with a fixed and ready translation for some grammatical category or word: English "a" is notoriously difficult, Russian or Chinese aspect is annoying to wedge into English, but English aspect is just as annoying to squeeze into Czech. Often the problem is translation without good context--so some Navajo dialog can be a bitch to translate without altering the level of specificity or ambiguity, and can even be hard understand outside of context. Then again, the same is true of Russian and English.