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LAMENT FOR LIGURIAN
In Sapulpa, Okla., an old man is fighting a losing battle. Henry Washburn, at 74, is trying to save Yuchi from the mudslides of contemporary culture.
Guy Gugliotta, a staff writer for The Washington Post, told the story a couple of weeks ago. It is a story that would have fascinated the late, great linguist Mario Pei. Because not everyone reads either the Post or Pei, I borrow freely from their accounts.
Yuchi is the moribund language spoken by a small sub-tribe of the Creek Nation in northeast Oklahoma. Fewer than a dozen persons still speak it as their native tongue. Washburn is doing his best to preserve Yuchi by teaching it to a few children of the community.
The young people are the last survivors of 2,400 descendants of Creeks who were banished from Alabama and Georgia in the Trail of Tears of 1838-39. That story is the most disgraceful chapter of American history ever written, but I leave that to the historians. Driven from their homelands, the Yuchi took their language with them. Now, 160 years later, Yuchi is like an archeologist's pottery shard, the subject of scholarly study.
The process of linguistic erosion has been going on for centuries. No one can say with certainty how language began. Pei tells of a Swedish philologist who seriously maintained that "in the Garden of Eden, God spoke Swedish, Adam Danish, and the serpent French." The theory appears plausible, especially for the serpent.
A more likely theory is that spoken tongues emerged from the sounds of nature -- the roll of thunder, the splash of falling water, the cries of animals and birds. Humankind grunted in labor and groaned in pain. Different peoples hear the sounds of nature differently. Oriental languages developed in one direction, Scandinavian and Indo-European languages in others. From a forest of trees sprang thousands of limbs, branches and twigs.
Pei uses the metaphor of a river and its tributaries. The majestic river of English, he said, is the millennial product of a thousand rivulets. Latin first appeared about 500 B.C, in west-central Italy. To the south and east were Sabines and Sabellians who spoke Oscan. To the north were Umbrians and Etruscans. In both north and south traces remain of prehistoric races who spoke such languages as Ligurian, Venetic and Sicel.
They are gone, all gone. In his Post article, Gugliotta cites linguistic figures. About 6,700 languages still may be identified worldwide, but at least one language disappears every two weeks. The rate of attrition is soaring. Australia once recorded 250 languages. Only 25 remain.
In Alaska, Siberia and the rest of the polar north, 56 of 72 languages are disappearing. In the Amazon jungle, 82 of 100 to 150 languages appear doomed. Before Columbus, there were probably 250 languages spoken in what is now U.S. territory. Almost three-fourths of them are regularly spoken today only by adults. Children are growing up to different cultures and different languages.
Explanations are apparent. One rounds up the usual suspects -- our shrinking planet, the ease of global communication, that old villain television. It is far more difficult to ask: What, if anything, should be done about it?
My own answer has at least the virtue of candor. I wouldn't do much of anything about it. Yuchi is a rare stamp, meant for a collector's album. Make some recordings. Let it go.
As part of the Creek tradition, Yuchi surely has value to the tribe. As a specimen of linguistic paleontology, Yuchi will interest experts in the field. But unlike the preservation of condors, bald eagles and pileated woodpeckers -- living creatures whose survival has wide appeal -- the preservation of Choctaw, Cheyenne and Tewa is a cause for cultural antiquarians.
Writing in the Post, Gugliotta reports the efforts of Jessie Fermino to revive Wampanoag, a moribund language of the Algonquins. Fermino started a class in beginning Wampanoag last year, and this year expects 60 students. "Her goal is to start a children's immersion program in which 'there's no English spoken at all.'"
Toward what end? Remember the thunderstorm last year over Ebonics? I raised no objection whatever to the study of Ebonics as a cultural and linguistic phenomenon. Its treatment of the subjunctive and the present indicative presents a remarkable structure: "If she be a rock star, I be ..."
My objection was to teaching Ebonics as a second functional language. What a disservice to black children! Given limited time and limited resources, teachers have a primary obligation to prepare their charges for the real world. Not much Wampanoag spoken out there.
