Spoken Here: Travel Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley
Potts gave me this book last year, and I just finished up the last few chapters today (a bit behind "schedule"). As you might guess, it ruminates on languages with few remaining speakers. A few of these languages are thriving (Welsh, for example), but most present little promise for survival. Abley argues - and I'm pretty sure I agree - that the loss of a language is akin to the loss of a species: the "philosophical" diversity lost, so to speak, weakens the entire "ecosystem" of human thought. Ethnologue reports that there are over 1600 languages with fewer than 1000 speakers each, and it lists over 500 of those languages as "nearly extinct."
In any case, here's an excerpt from the book to think about:
Unless I have severely misread Dr. Bhattacharya, though, the glory of the language [Boro] lies elsewhere.
onguboy: to love from the heart
onsay: to pretend to love
onsra: to love for the last time
Verbs like these go beyond all borders: the ideas or sentiments they express transcend the culture that articulates them . . . While I love the surprising verb dasa - it means "not to place a fishing instrument" - I accept, with some reluctance, that my own language might have little use for it. But onsay and onsra are a different story. Having met those words in Dr. Bhattacharya's book, how can I do without them? I covet them, just as I covet the verbs for expressing anger by a sidelong glance or for feeling partly bitter. They are more than just fresh sounds on the tongue; they are fresh thoughts in the mind.
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