Language preservation, Linguistics publications 1 comment

A reading list for language death

2012-01-31

Since the turn of the millennium there have been a number of books dealing with language death and the problem of protecting the world’s diversity of languages from the forces of globalization. Some of these are meant for undergraduates, while others want to communicate the problem to the man on the street. Here I’ve compiled a list of the ones that I’ve read. I’ve reviewed them all at Amazon if you want to see my detailed impressions of each book.

  • David Crystal, Language Death (Cambridge University Press, 2002) ISBN 0521012716. This is meant for an educated audience with some prior training in linguistics.
  • Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (Oxford University Press, 2000) ISBN 0195152468. This is meant for undergraduates with only a basic linguistics background.
  • Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages (Mariner Books, 2005) ISBN 0618565833. This is written for a mass audience. Unfortunately, the author seems to have no formal training in linguistics and the book contains numerous errors and misunderstandings of the field.
  • K. David Harrison, When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2008) ISBN 0195372069. Here the author describes the problem and his work for an educated readership with some passion for the subject, but no more than basic undergraduate linguistics. In writing this book, the author draws on his personal experience with Siberian Turkic languages.
  • K. David Harrison, The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages (National Geographic, 2010) ISBN 1426204612. This one is targeted towards the general public. It revisits many of the same topics as Harrison’s earlier book, but depicts the author and his peers as almost Indiana Jones-type figures in an attempt to get the layman’s attention.
  • Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) ISBN 0631233067. The author hoped to reach a mass audience with this book, but the jargon and transcription choices will probably scare off most people and it looks like another book most suitable for assigned reading for undergraduates. Examples are drawn mostly from the Australian indigenous languages.

There’s a couple of other books that I’m aware of but haven’t yet read:

So that’s eight books in the last 12 years, and I’m sure there’s more I’ve not discovered yet. Whether they are popular or academic, each of them has competition, and the same general background is repeated across them all. Therefore the readership must be larger than I imagine if publishers are willing to put out another such book.

Besides these grim discussions of the threat to language diversity, there are also a surprising amount of general introductions to the subject of language revitalization, which I may list in a future post.

Finno-Ugric, Komi, Uralic 1 comment

IFUSCO used for propaganda

2011-10-23

The Finno-Ugrian student conference IFUSCO was held in Russia’s Perm Krai in 2010. Madis Tuuder, a student at the Estonian Art Academy, reported her impressions and subsequently a Finnish translation by Sonja Laitinen appeared in the University of Helsinki’s Alkukoti magazine (2010 no. 12, online version here). Here follows my English translation of a report that explains well why I no longer go to academic conferences in Russia.

IFUSCO (the International Finno-Ugrian Student Conference) is turning into a state propaganda event. This claim is based on multiple indicators from the conferences of recent years. This year’s academic event for Finno-Ugrian linguists and others interested in Finno-Ugrian affairs – which IFUSCO ought to be – was held from May 14 to 16 in the Perm Krai of Russia, in the cities of Perm and Kudymkar.

The Komi-Permyak Autonomous Okrug district was combined several years ago with Perm Oblast to form Perm Krai. Now there’s a Finno-Ugrian façade over the whole region, but what lies behind it is something different. The Komi-Permyak Autonomous Okrug was the only area in Russia where a Finno-Ugrian people made up over half of the population. Now the Komi Permjaks’ share in the population of the region is only 3.7%.

In their opening speeches, local officials took every opportunity to boast that Perm Krai belongs to the family of Finno-Ugrian regions; it would certainly be strange to hear claims to the contrary in this sort of conference.

The choice of Perm, a city with a million inhabitants, as the second conference venue might be due to aspirations to put the city on the Finno-Ugrian world map. We were told, however, that Kudymkar, which is little more than a large village, couldn’t organize such an event on its own. That claim is hard to understand, since the entire conference – except for the public opening ceremonies – took place precisely in Kudymkar.

It has become a sad trend that in recent years the opening ceremonies have sung the praises of local officials. The same happened this year, as can be seen from who was on the organizing committee: of the organizers, three were local ministers. The Finno-Ugrian youth organization MAFUN came last in the list of organizers. The opening speeches dealt with Perm Krai’s economical and social progress, with an emphasis on transport.

One theme emerged at the end of the opening ceremony. Alevtina Lobanova, a lecturer at Perm Pedagogical University, spoke passionately and sensibly on the shrinking role of Finno-Ugrian languages in the social life of their titular regions. Her views and arguments were virtually the opposite of what the officials had said before her. The audience applauded Lobanova’s courage and outspokenness several times.

One local historian’s presentation on ‘societal-social modernization’ attracted some interest, as it ought to have dealt with the development of Komi Permyak identity. The historian however criticized the national policies of the Baltic countries (the only example he gave outside Russia) and recommended that they take Russia’s Finno-Ugrians as a model, for whom the policy cultivated in the Baltic countries would not be suitable and wouldn’t even be considered due to its oppressive and discriminative nature. He compared the state of the Baltic countries to the situation prevailing in Chechnya and called on those two areas to solve their national problems in radical ways.

In their presentations officials praised, besides economic progress, the synergy and neighbourliness of the nationalities in the area. According to them, everything is being done to maintain a diversity of languages and identities. Of course, nobody talked about what hasn’t been done, like a sufficient guarantee of teaching in pupils’ native languages. At the same time that IFUSCO was held, there was a seminar for teachers of minority languages. Of Perm Krai’s many nationalities, the most successful in native-language education are the Tatars. The situation of the area’s titular nationality (we use that term with certain reservations), the Komi Permyaks, becomes worse year after year.

Around 180 students registered for this year’s IFUSCO. Estonia sent 12 people, but there were fewer rows of Finnish and Hungarian students this time. It’s unfortunate that more and more talks and abstracts are in Russian. In former years it was required that participants either speak or write abstracts in a Finno-Ugrian language (such as their native language), but now this requirement has become only a suggestion. Some students were even forbidden from using a Finno-Ugrian language in their talk or abstract.

The pathos of this conference was seasoned by plays about invented pseudo-mythological heroes, which have become an integral part of Finno-Ugrian conferences. The plays deal with historical events (which may not have ever happened) and profess the eternal brotherhood and friendship of local (and sometimes made-up) tribes.

The political tone of the conference was also visible in the fact that during Estonian-led sessions, a picture of the Bronze Soldier was projected on the big screen. However, they did allow people to make their own Powerpoint presentations.

Luckily, politics and propaganda didn’t diminish the students’ enthusiasm and happiness at meeting each other. The next IFUSCO will be held in Hungary. The choice of this venue is intended to bring the conference back on track and offer some relief from these kind of IFUSCOs which are dominated by bureaucrats and state figures.

I was frustrated by the IFUSCO conference in Saransk in 2007, but there state control was visible less in propaganda and more in strict control of participants’ movement. All the participants were split up into different groups depending on their nationality – as a holder of a US passport, I was not even allowed to join my fellow students from University of Helsinki – and had to remain with the group at all times, a minder ensuring that no one wandered off alone. The arrival times of each group at events were staggered, and everyone was marched straight into the lecture halls, so that they could not mingle outside. Unfortunately, it seems that some Western students have contact with Russia’s Finno-Ugrians only at these conferences, and I’d recommend that everyone spend their time and money in travelling independently to Russia instead.

Hindi, Indic, Sanskrit 2 comments

Classical philology is dead in India

2011-10-15

Sheldon Pollock, one of the most prominent scholars of Sanskrit literature today, has contributed a jeremiad entitled ‘Crisis in the Classics’ to the journal Social Research Vol. 78 No. 1 (Spring 2011) on the decline of classical philology in India. The article is available as a PDF and its 28 pages have so much good material that I can hardly decide what to quote here, but here’s the heart of Pollock’s observations:

Indeed, there have been no successors to any of the pre-independence generation of Sanskrit scholars, the sort who mastered their discipline and thought conceptually about it and wrote for an international audience: S. N. Dasgupta, S. K. De, Mysore Hiriyanna, P. V. Kane, S. Radhakrishnan, Venkata Raghavan, C. Kunhan Raja, V. S. Sukthankar, are the first in a long and distinguished list from across India (I leave aside the loss of the great tradition of pandit learning, which is now virtually extinct). There have been no major Sanskrit projects in India since the completion of the critical edition of the Ramayana at Baroda more than 30 years ago. All the great classical series (such as Anandasrama, Trivandrum, Gaekwad, Madras) have been more or less discontinued, and as a result the manuscripts in those collections are no longer being published. Indeed, there have been few new Indian editions of complex Sanskrit texts at all from among the scores of important manuscripts that lie unpublished in archives. In the area of hermeneutics (Mimamsa), for example, I know of no one in India today capable of editing works like those edited just a generation ago by P. N. Pattabhirama Sastry or S. Subrahmanya Sastry. (The same holds for many other areas of classical studies; with the death of A. N. Upadhye in 1975 and H. C. Bhayani in 2000, the editing of Prakrit and Apabhramsha works seems to have died too.) I have not encountered a single PhD dissertation on Sanskrit in India—and I have seen many—worthy of publication by a Western university press.

The situation is no different in the other classical languages, as I learned in the late 1990s when I organized a project on the histories of South Asian literary cultures (Pollock 2003). Our core group of colleagues was looking for others to join us who possessed a deep historical understanding of a regional language, conceptual skills, and the capacity to communicate their knowledge effectively. We were able to locate only four qualified scholars in India, and identified no one for a host of languages, including Assamese, Marathi, Newari, Oriya, and Panjabi.

I suspected as much when I visited university bookshops in India: almost no publications from the last 30 years, and heaps of decaying old editions that evidently no one wanted to buy. Online language discussions are so often overrun by Hindu fundamentalist claims that Sanskrit is a divine language and India’s literature the oldest and wisest in the world, but for all the prominence of such views on the internet, this heritage is neglected in India.

Greek No comments yet

Gospel of John in Homeric Greek

2011-10-14

During the evening service on Easter (the so-called Agape Vespers), the Orthodox Church has a tradition of reading the gospel passage for that day (John 20:19–25) in many different languages. In Greece, one of the versions sung is a rendering by St Nicodemus the Hagiorite (1749–1809) which casts the passage in the Homeric Greek and dactylic hexameter of the Iliad and Odyssey.

Ὄφρακε νωιτέροισιν ἐν οὔασι πάγχυ βάλωμεν
θέσφατον, ἱμερόεσσαν, ἁγνὴν Εὐάγγελον ὄππα
μειλίξωμεν Ἄνακτα Θεὸν μέγαν, οὐρανίωνα.
Ἰθυγενεῖς. Σοφίη. Εὐαγγελίοιο κλύωμεν.

Εἰρήνη χαρίεσσ’ ἐπ’ ἀπείρονα δῆμον ἐσεῖται.

Ἐκ δ’ ἄρ’ Ἰωάννοιο τόδ’ ἔστι βροντογόνοιο.

Ἄλλ’ ἄγετ’ ἀτρεμέσι χρησμοὺς λεύσωμεν ὀπωπαῖς.

Εὖτε δὴ ἠέλιος φαέθων ἐπὶ ἕσπερον ἦλθε
καὶ σκιόωντο ἀγυιαὶ ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ,
ἥματι ἐν πρώτῳ, ὅτε τύμβου ἆλτο Σαωτήρ,
κλῃισταὶ δὲ ἔσαν θυρίδες πυκινῶς ἀραρεῖαι,
βλῆντο δὲ πάντες ὀχῆες ἐυσταθέος μεγάροιο,
ἔνθα Μαθηταὶ ὁμοῦ τε ἀολλέες ἠγερέθοντο
μυρόμενοι θανάτῳ ἐπ’ ἀεικέι Χριστοῦ Ἄνακτος
καὶ χόλον ἀφραίνοντα Ἰουδαίων τρομέοντες,
ἤλυθε δὴ τότε Χριστὸς Ἄναξ θεοειδέι μορφῇ,
ἔστη δ’ ἐν μεσάτῳ ἀναφανδὸν καὶ φάτο μῦθον·
Εἰρήνη ὑμῖν φίλη, ἡσυχίη τ’ ἐρατεινή.
Ὡς εἰπὼν ἐπέδειξεν ἑὴν πλευρὴν ἠδὲ χεῖρας.
Γήθησαν δὲ Μαθηταὶ ἐπεὶ ἴδον Εὐρυμέδοντα.

Τοὺς δ’ αὖτις προσέειπεν Ἰησοῦς οὐρανοφοίτης·
Εἰρήνη ὑμῖν φίλη, ἡσυχίη τ’ ἐρατεινή.
Ὡς ἐμὲ πέμψε Πατὴρ ὅς ὑπέρτατα δώματα ναίει,
ῳδ’ ἐγὼ ὑμέας ἐς χθόνα πέμπω εὐρυόδειαν.
Ὡς ἄρα φωνήσας Μύσταις ἔμπνευσ’ ἀγορεύων·
Πνεῦμα δέχνυσθ’ Ἅγιον, φαεσίμβροτον, ὑψιθόωκον·
Ὧν μὲν ἀτασθαλίας θνητῶν ἀφέητ’ ἐπὶ γαῖαν,
τοῖσι νύπου ἀφίενται ἐς οὐρανὸν ἀστερόεντα·
ὧν δ’ ἄρ’ ἐπεσβολίας ὑππερφιάλων κρατέητε,
τοῖσιν ἁλυκτοπέδῃς κεῖναι σθεναρῇς κρατέονται.

Θωμᾶς δ’ ῳ ἐπίκλησις ἅπασι Δίδυμος ἀκούειν
οὐχ ἅμα τοῖς ἄλλοις Μύσταις πρὶν ὁμώροφος ἔσκε
Ἰησοῦς ὅτ’ ἔβη εἴσω μελάθροιο ἑταίρων.
Ἴαχον οὖν ἄλλοι τούτῳ ἐρίηρες ἑταῖροι·
Εἴδομεν ὀφθαλμοῖσιν Ἰησοῦν παγκρατέοντα.
Τοὺς δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος Θωμᾶς προσέφησεν ἀτειρής·
Ἴχνια ἤν μὴ ἴδω μετὰ χείρεσιν ἡλατορήτῃς,
δάκτυλον ἐμβάλλω τε ἐκείνου ἔνδοθι χειρός,
χεῖρα τ’ ἐμὴν εἴσω πλευρῆς οἷ ρεῖα βαλοίμην,
οὔποτε ὑμετέροισι λόγοις κεφαλῇ κατανεύσω.

Like the Latin translation of the Kalevala by Tuomo Pekkanen, this could only have been made by someone with a great love of epic and a lot of time on their hands.

Chuvash, Literature No comments yet

New Chuvash resources in Cheboksary

2011-10-12

I used to be unhappy with the limited range of Chuvash publications available in the bookshops on Leninsky prospekt, but on my most recent trip I discovered a shop with a fantastic selection. Located on Egerskij bul’var near the intersection with prospekt 9-j Pjatiletki (just across the street from the Šupaškar shopping mall and McDonalds), this bookshop offers seemingly every recent publication from the Chuvash state publishing house. Chuvash books for sale in a fine Cheboksary bookshop

I saw that I. A. Andreev’s Chuvash textbook Чувашский язык has been re-released in a third edition – though I’ve never seen a second – and is now subtitled ‘практический курс’ instead of ‘началный курс’. That’s a bit of a misnomer, as Andreev still has students starting off with translating complicated poetry instead of actually learning how to use Chuvash in daily life, but there’s still enough useful material in the book to recommend it.

Gennady Aigi’s complete poems have recently been issued in a two-volume set. I was able to purchase the second volume, which collects his poems in Russian: Собрание сочинение (Чебоксары: Чувашкое Книжное Издательство, 2009) ISBN 9785767016648. However, the first volume, which collects his poems in Chuvash, is sold out. I heard a rumour from a trusted source that almost the entire print run of that volume went to Chuvash politicians and is gathering dust on their shelves.

Chuvash, Literature, Mari, Tatar, Udmurt 1 comment

Tuqay in Volga-Kama languages

2011-10-03

One Tatar book being prominently displayed in Kazan bookshops is a slim volume of poems by the Tatar national poet Ğabdulla Tuqay: Габдулла Тукай, Стихотворение (Казань: Татарское книжное издательство, 2011), ISBN 9785298020398.

Remarkably, the 20 poems in this volume appear not only in Tatar and Russian translation, but also in Bashkir, Mari, Chuvash and Udmurt. This is a nice show of solidarity with other minority peoples of Russia. I’ve often bought a Russian translation of Ivanov’s Chuvash work Narspi as a gift for Mari friends as my contribution to дружба народов, but this little book allows one to present Tatar poetry to others in their own language. I’m not sure if the poems were translated into the Finno-Ugrian languages through Russian or not, though I imagine plenty of minority-language activists in this region know something of Tatar.

I’d like to give an example of one of these poems in several languages, but I don’t want to type too much, so I’ve chosen his two-line ‘Kazan’ from 1913:

Tatar

Ут, төтен, фабрик-завод берлә һаман кайный Казан;
Имгәтеп ташлап савын, сау эшчеләр сайлый Казан.

Russian

Огнем заводов дни и ночи людей ты жжешь, Казань.
Здоровых погубив рабочих, ты новых ждешь, Казань.

Bashkir

Ут, төтөн, фабрик-завод менән һаман ҡайнай Ҡазан;
Имгәтеп ташлап һауын, һау эшселәр һайлай Ҡазан.

Chuvash

Заводсен вучӗпе ир те каҫ ҫынсене ҫунтаран эс, Хусан.
Чире ярсан сыввисене, ҫӗннисене кӗтетӗн эс, Хусан.

Udmurt

Тыл но ӵын заводъёсад адямиез сутэ, Казань…
Кужмоез бырем бере, егит борды кутскод, Казань?

Meadow Mari

Еҥлам йӱд-кече йӱлалтет завод тул ден, Озаҥ.
Таза пашазе-влакым пытарен, бучет эше, Озаҥ.

Chuvash, Mari, Tatar 2 comments

Minority-language books in Kazan

2011-10-02

If you visit Kazan and want to buy books in Tatar, the place to go is the intersection of Bauman (ул. Баумана) and Astronimičeskaja (ул. Астрономическая) streets. It’s unassuming from the outside, but if you open the door and walk down a flight of stairs, you’ll encounter a large selection of Tatar poetry, prose, school textbooks and dictionaries. There are unfortunately no textbooks (on both my 2008 and 2011 visits, the shopkeeper seemed annoyed that I even asked), but as pretty much every Tatar textbook can be found online at pirated linguistics books sites, that’s not a major problem.

The shop also sells some minority-language publications from surrounding regions. For Mari, I was able to buy two of the three volumes of Sergei Chavain’s complete works. Chuvash is represented mainly by dictionaries and cookbooks. Considerably more shelf space is dedicated to Bashkir, but as one northern Kipchak language is frustrating enough for me right now, I didn’t have a detailed look at those offerings.

American Indian languages 1 comment

Swedish encounters with Delaware

2011-09-14

I had never known that Swedes had contact with colonial languages until I read The History of Linguistics in the Nordic Countries by Even Hovdhaugen et al. (Helsinki: Societas Scientarum Fennica, 2007) The authors give the following brief account of Swedish missionary efforts among speakers of Delaware (Lenni Lenape).

The first Swedish colonists in America, many of them Finnish immigrants from Värmland, came to Delaware as early as 1538. John [Johannes Jonæ Holmensis] Campanius (1601–1683) stayed and served as a pastor in Delaware from 1643 to 1648. After returning to Sweden, Campanius finished the manuscript of a Delaware catechism in 1656, but by this time a Swedish colony no longer existed in Delaware. Long after his death, Campanius’s grandson, Thomas Campanius Holm, as well as others who planned missionary work among the Delawares, had the Delaware catechism published in 1696, and 600 copies were printed and brought to the Delaware Indians. The article on Campanius in the Swedish Biographical Lexicon (Svenskt Biografiskt lexicon VII:1927 p.262), contains the following informative passage:

The Swedes there, who now knew the language of the Indians as well as their own, read from the catechism to the Indians, and “a number of them observed carefully what was written”. They even asked a Swede, Karl Springer, to teach their children.

This is especially interesting in the light of Holmer’s analysis of Campanius’s Catechism (1946b), in which he convincingly shows that Campanius only had a very rudimentary knowledge of Delaware and furthermore that he had no understanding of the very complicated morphology of this Algonquian language. For instance, he never used plural forms, and he adopted very unidiomatic independent pronouns instead of pronominal suffixes, which he had not observed. Accordingly, he used nux ‘my-father’ (cf. n- ‘my’, ux ‘father’) as the word for ‘father’ and when he wanted to express the sentence ‘honor thy father’, he wrote the equivalent of ‘honor thy my-father’ which may have been unintelligible for the natives. Similarly he used mpa ‘I come’ (cf. m- ‘I’, pa ‘come’) also for ‘thou come(st)’, which is kpa (cf. k- ‘thou’) in Delaware. The syntax was worse. Sometimes Campanius even resorted to desperate devices like introducing the Swedish genitive -s into Delaware.

Holmer is right when he stated that this translation was unintelligible to a native speaker of Delaware. But actually it was not Delaware at all, but a kind of Delaware-based pidgin that had already developed through contact with Europeans (mainly Dutch colonists) before the Swedes arrived. In this respect, Campanius’s catechism may be a very valuable document for linguistics, since it would be the only record of this language.

Campanius’s grandson published an account of the Swedish colony in Delaware (T. Campanius Holm 1702), which was influential and widely read in Sweden. The book contained extensive material, word lists and short phrases as well as a dialogue, mainly based on his grandfather’s work. He also tried to prove the hypothesis going back to Governor William Penn that the Delaware Indians are one of the ten lost tribes of Israel and accordingly that their language is related to Hebrew. To prove this Holm provided about twenty etymologies of very questionable quality (T. Campanius Holm 1702:115-120).

Turkic, Turkish No comments yet

Clauson’s terminological rebellion

2011-07-13

It has been a minor irritation that the late Sir Gerard Clauson used the term “Turkish” to refer to the entire Turkic family, thus his An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-13th Century Turkish somewhat unexpectedly covers all early Turkic languages and not just words from Anatolia. But in reading his paper ‘The Turkish Y and Related Sounds’ (in the Festschrift Studia Altaica: Festschrift für Nikolaus Poppe zum 60. Geburstag) I finally saw his reasoning for this choice:

I use “Turkish”, not in the limited meaning of ‘the language of Turkey’, but as a generic term for all the languages geneticly related to the language of the Türkü Dynasty (6th to 8th Cent. A.D.), from whose name the word is of course derived, including those anterior to that date. In other words I use “Turkish” where some other scholars use “Turkic”, a word which seems to me open to the objection that if the Greek adjective tourkikos is to be used in English it must be transcribed consistently either as “Turcic” or “Turkik”, both of which look grotesque.

I’m sorry, but that’s just daft.

Uncategorized 1 comment

When language study becomes a harangue

2011-05-02

I’ve been travelling in Tajikistan for a few days now and I’m not liking it much as a linguist. It’s not because the people aren’t friendly; for not a single night have I lacked invitations for a place to dine and sleep comfortably. But conversations here tend to all be the same. The first repetitive response happens all over the former Soviet Union: Your name is Christopher, eh? Like Christopher Columbus/Christopher Lambert! I guess I’m used to that one, and I just laugh and pretend I haven’t heard it myriad times before.

But essentially all conversations devolve into this very quickly:

Tajik: Are you married?

Me: No, I am not married yet.

Tajik: How old are you?

Me: I am 29 years old.

Tajik: You need to get married! [The more good-humoured locals will at this point indicate the closest unmarried woman and propose I marry her]

Me: I don’t wish to get married yet.

Tajik: Why?

Me: Because I wish to travel and study and remain a free man.

After this they tend to grumble a fair bit — it does seem that some are appalled by what I said — and the conversation returns to marriage constantly. It would be nice to talk about something else and to perceive some element of culture. What happened to even fairly poor, rural locals knowing something about shashmaqâm or Persian classical poetry as travelers in Transoxania reported less than 20 years ago? It’s especially frustrating since I came here to learn Tajik, but there’s not enough of a variety of conversational topics to really expand my active vocabulary.

I’m now tempted to give up on Tajiki and concentrate on Persian of Iran. My American passport may prevent me from travelling independently in Iran, but there’s plenty of Iranians abroad to practice with and I’ve never been bored among them.