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How to Save a Dying Language

posted by martyb on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the is-there-an-app-for-that? dept.

Fnord666 writes:

Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was the common tongue of the entire Middle East when the Middle East was the crossroads of the world. People used it for commerce and government across territory stretching from Egypt and the Holy Land to India and China. Parts of the Bible and the Jewish Talmud were written in it; the original "writing on the wall," presaging the fall of the Babylonians, was composed in it. As Jesus died on the cross, he cried in Aramaic, "Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?" ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?")

But Aramaic is down now to its last generation or two of speakers, most of them scattered over the past century from homelands where their language once flourished. In their new lands, few children and even fewer grandchildren learn it. (My father, a Jew born in Kurdish Iraq, is a native speaker and scholar of Aramaic; I grew up in Los Angeles and know just a few words.) This generational rupture marks a language's last days. For field linguists like Khan, recording native speakers—"informants," in the lingo—is both an act of cultural preservation and an investigation into how ancient languages shift and splinter over time.

In a highly connected global age, languages are in die-off. Fifty to 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to go silent by century's end. We live under an oligarchy of English and Mandarin and Spanish, in which 94 percent of the world's population speaks 6 percent of its languages. Yet among threatened languages, Aramaic stands out. Arguably no other still-spoken language has fallen farther.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-to-save-a-dying-language-4143017/?all

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  • (Score: 5, Disagree) by jdavidb on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:45PM (14 children)

    by jdavidb (5690) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:45PM (#873560) Homepage Journal

    Netcraft confirms it. Let's stick to the facts and look at the numbers.

    Seriously I am glad there are some preservation efforts underway. Aramaic is very historically significant. Besides some of the facts noted in the summary, Aramaic completely replaced the original Hebrew phoenician-style alphabet, supplying the Hebrew square script that is used today, and a minority of scholars believe the New Testament was originally written in Aramaic rather than Greek. (This theory is doubtful, but there are definitely some sentences in the NT that make more sense when translated back into Aramaic or compared with existing Aramaic versions.)

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:12PM (11 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 31 2019, @03:12PM (#873575) Journal

    How about a continuous culture far older than any other on this Earth [australiangeographic.com.au] which one may never learn directly about because their language dies? [wikipedia.org]

    Other uncontacted people [wikipedia.org], many invaded in sorta contemporary conquista [survivalinternational.org]?

    Tears in the rain, we don't even know what we are losing.

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    • (Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:15PM (10 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:15PM (#873657)

      The dirty little secret that no one will publicly acknowledge is that the current population of Australian aborigines have only been here 10,000 years. They displaced an earlier culture which is where all the >10,000 year old artefacts come from. So they are invaders too, just a bit older.

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:41PM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:41PM (#873673)

        Nice try. Except the Earth is only 6000 years old. So you'll need to come back with a better justification for genocide.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:39PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:39PM (#874000)

          Dave Price, non-Aboriginal husband of Bess Price, was shocked by elders’ open comments in 2009 that their women could and should be executed for sacrileges. The comments came after a policewoman drove onto men’s ceremonial grounds while young men were being initiated at Lajamanu in the remote NT. Lyndsay Bookie, chairman of the Central Land Council, told ABC TV news:

          “It’s against our law for people like that breaking the law, they shouldn’t be there. Aboriginal ladies, they’re not allowed to go anywhere near that. If they had been caught, a woman, aboriginal lady got caught she [would] be killed. Simple as that.”

          Dave Price said Bookie had, for once, openly expressed what all involved with the traditions know but keep silent about. “Both men and women are threatened with execution and grievous bodily harm for offences against the Law. Rape was added to possible punishments in the case of women…This is a fact of life. Lyndsay didn’t invent this Law, it is unchanging, it comes from the Jukurrpa, the Dreaming.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:40PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:40PM (#874033)

            Just give them more petrol to sniff, that will get their minds off the intrusion.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:42PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:42PM (#874003)

          Indigenous communities, Nowra says, have to recognize they are part of Australian society and grasp the idea of personal and individual responsibility for their actions. Romanticising remote life is dangerous. There have been instances of white women or urban Aborigines moving into relationships in remote communities. After getting their first or subsequent “proper good hiding” they are lucky to escape.

          Violence levels are evidenced for thousands of years into pre-history.

          Paleopathologist Stephen Webb in 1995 published his analysis of 4500 individuals’ bones from mainland Australia. Webb found highly disproportionate rates of injuries and fractures to women’s skulls, with the injuries suggesting deliberate attack and often attacks from behind, perhaps in domestic squabbles. In the tropics, for example, female head-injury frequency was about 20-33%, versus 6.5-26% for males.

          The most extreme results were on the south coast, from Swanport and Adelaide, with female cranial trauma rates as high as 40-44% — two to four times the rate of male cranial trauma. In desert and south coast areas, 5-6% of female skulls had three separate head injuries, and 11-12% had two injuries.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:55PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:55PM (#874013)

          From 1788, British and French arrivals were shocked at local misogyny. First Fleeter Watkin Tench noticed a young woman’s head “covered by contusions, and mangled by scars”. She also had a spear wound above the left knee caused by a man who dragged her from her home to rape her. Tench wrote, “They are in all respects treated with savage barbarity; condemned not only to carry the children, but all other burthens, they meet in return for submission only with blows, kicks and every other mark of brutality.”

          He also wrote, “When an Indian [sic] is provoked by a woman, he either spears her, or knocks her down on the spot; on this occasion he always strikes on the head, using indiscriminately a hatchet, a club, or any other weapon, which may chance to be in his hand.”

          Marine Lt. William Collins wrote, “We have seen some of these unfortunate beings with more scars upon their shorn heads, cut in every direction, than could be well distinguished or counted.”

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:59PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:59PM (#874016)

          In 1825 French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville wrote “that young girls are brutally kidnapped from their families, violently dragged to isolated spots and are ravished after being subjected to a good deal of cruelty.” George Robinson in Tasmania said in the 1830s that men courted their women by stabbing them with sharp sticks and cutting them with knives prior to rape. The men bartered their women to brutal sealers for dogs and food; in one case such a woman voluntarily went back to the sealers rather than face further tribal violence.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:28PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:28PM (#873995)

        Yeah, we don't talk about things like that. Just like we don't mention that those tribes would slaughter each other for resources making the arrival of Europeans no different than some other tribe taking over.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:09PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:09PM (#874023)

          Yolngu punishments are deemed valid for wives if they leave scars but do not kill. In one 2008 case, a husband stabbed his wife multiple times with a steak knife, which was within traditional bounds. The husband got a short sentence and this minor punishment was quashed by Southwood J.

          Jarrett wrote: “Even if Australian governments on grounds of harm minimization allow traditional physical punishment, there are some settings – wrong or disputed accusations, a person’s refusal to submit to traditional punishment, and traditional punishment for non-crimes – where such appeasement is either unworkable or particularly immoral.”

          Mass violence today can involve large numbers of Yolngu, with a 300-person riot in 2008 and another of 400 people on Elcho Island. At Galiwinku Council Offices in late 2010, 500 people were involved.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:02PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:02PM (#874018)

        Anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow described a black-on-black massacre in 1875 in the Finke River area of Central Australia, triggered by a perceived sacrilege:

        "The warriors turned their murderous attention to the women and older children and either clubbed or speared them to death. Finally, according to the grim custom of warriors and avengers they broke the limbs of the infants, leaving them to die ‘natural deaths’. The final number of the dead could well have reached the high figure of 80 to 100 men, women and children."

        Revenge killings by the victims’ clan involved more than 60 people, with the two exchanges accounting for about 20% of members of the two clans. (When Pauline Hanson, then member for Oxley, quoted this account in 1996, an Aboriginal woman elder replied, "Mrs Hanson should receive a traditional Urgarapul punishment: having her hands and feet crippled.")

        Escaped convict William Buckley, who lived for three decades with tribes around Port Phillip, recounted constant raids, ambushes, and small battles, typically involving one to three fatalities. He noted the Watouronga of Geelong in night raids ‘destroyed without mercy men, women and children.’

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:27PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:27PM (#874030)

          Racist!

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:12PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:12PM (#873654) Journal

    > supplying the Hebrew square script that is used today

    But when were the vowel markings added?

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:25AM (#873870)

      Hebrew vowel markings used today were developed between 500 and 900 ce, according to Wikipedia (see Niqqud).