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« Out of the frying pan... | Main | Students' notions of "research" » Tuesday, May 8, 2007Lost and foundLinguists have, in general, done a poor job of articulating why people should care that half of the approximately 6,900 languages spoken on the planet will be extinct in a century.... As for me, afraid of having to dip into the sentimentality and the fetishizing of Last Things, I've kind of been repulsed by the topic and have never written about it. But here goes. On Design Observer, a blog Josh endorsed today, guest contributor Michael Erard, in a very clever piece, directs our attention to a new book by Swarthmore linguist K. David Harrison, When Languages Die. Erard notes, among other juicy tidbits, that "in Squamish, a Pacific Northwest language with 15 speakers, you use a different number depending on if you're counting humans or animals." "Of course these languages are endangered!" someone will inevitably crow. "English or the other major languages are informationally more efficient!" This isn't true. For example, what information is encoded in the English "my nephew"? For sure, it's a male person. But (as Harrison writes) "is he related to me by blood or marriage? Unclear. Is he older or younger than me? Unclear. Is he the son of my sister or my brother? Unclear. Is he the son of an older sibling of mine or a younger sibling? Unclear. Is he a boy or a man? Unclear." Erard doesn't discuss this, but in Mandarin Chinese (which I studied for a number of years in high school and college), there are an incredible assortment of kinship words. The English catch-all word "cousin" is hacked into pieces. If you're great-uncle is younger than your great-grandfather, that's one thing. Older is another. And if he's in fact the brother of your great-grandmother, another word. Blood and marriage get divided up, too. It's a real pain. But it makes a lot of sense. And it also surely suggests something about the importance in Chinese culture of family and lineage. As against American individualism: "Oh, that's my cousin... I'm not actually sure how we're related." I'm quoting myself there. Maybe we should find out if anyone has 40 different words for "obvious" with fine gradations, so we won't run into problems like the whopper Drake Bennett pointed up in Sunday's Ideas section. Posted by Evan Hughes at 07:25 PM
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