Daniel Everett, “Endangered Languages, Lost Knowledge and the Future”

I do agree it is nice and laudable to preserve dying languages, but, please: no language has concepts or forces them on its users. Only people do and, occasionally, politicians. Even if, for example, “eskimos” were bon mot-compliant and had 300 words for snow (which they’re not and which they don’t), this would not mean they have more refined concepts or, forsooth, perceptions of crystalline precipitation. Who has never been in a position of being able to vividly cognize yet not being able to adequately verbalize and vice versa? And re. the Pirahã, those virtual Giant Pandas of the linguistic ethnologists’ lobby: yea, they do not recurse, count nor ride motorcycles. But does this mean they are somehow innately unable to? Poppycock!, I cry! Nay, any effort to preserve dying languages would be purely curatorial and, therefore, aesthetical and sentimental. On which, I might add, no shame resteth.

Even though I share the concern for languages lost to history, I can’t help thinking about one aspect, that seems to get left out of this discussion time and again.

How did those languages came to be? They were obviously created by their speakers. So there must be long term processes that precipitate their formation. While everyone is asking: how many languages are being destroyed last decade, I am much more interested in the question, how many have been created?

Humans are hardly the blind beings who take up any language that is imposed on them and forget about everything else, never to do anything new in the future.

When Rome conquered Europe and the Mediterranean, it wiped out a lot of languages and established Latin as the new language. Yet, Latin has vanished, with the exception of some rather anachronistic remnants. But it gave rise to Portugese, Catalan, Galego, Castillian, French, Basque, Italian, Raeto-Roman, Romanian (and whatever languages I forgot) and influenced a plethora of other languages, including the one I’m writing in.

So, where are the linguists monitoring the creation of languages? Warning against normative regulations that may mean that more useful, richer or easier to learn languages may never come into being? Isn’t ensuring improvement and creation of languages something that long term thinking should be more concerned about than the unavoidable extinction of old ones?

Language is a tool we shape and use the same way we shaped and used flint to create axes, spears and knives. It begins with the discovery that our mouths, lungs, tongue and teeth can be used to create sounds that will convey information. A particular language lives in the mouths and minds of a particular group and will only live as long as the people who use it live. When one dies, the other dies. Just as the hammer has become more useful to our society than the rock for driving nails or smashing open shell fish, a language that loses its usefulness due to a better tool being available will be replaced by the new tool and the use of the old tool will die out. As newer and better tools become available to a society the old tools will die from lack of usage and what will kill them will be the plethora of new tools that do a better job in a better way than the old ones. This is a process that will only stop when there is no one left who knows how to make and use the old tool.

American Indian languages are disappearing because it has become less and less useful. You can’t get a job, describe the world you live in or improve your position in society unless you speak English. Thus, the Indian language gets used less and less and must be preserved by artificial means like a specimen in a museum or a zoo. We are losing our languages for the same reason we are losing our tigers and zebras and all the other flora and fauna that are of no immediate use to us. It’s a process that can’t be stopped nor protected because language evolves to interact with an environment. When that environment is gone, so will the language be.

I really like the idea that Daniel Everett decribes about the Piraha, that they demand to know for each claim that is made where the information came from. So each sentence they say has to include an explanation as to how one knows what one is saying (“blah blah, I saw” or “blah, blah, someone told me”) I think we can learn from this to reduce people saying things we can’t track back to the source. http://bit.ly/pOdE5C

Very interesting post.This language and its discovery are very interesting. I really like the idea that Daniel Everett decribes about the Piraha,
that they demand to know for each claim that is made where the
information came from.Really Piraha language is a surprise.

I’ve spent a decade teaching on remote indigenous communities in Australia and although I never learnt to speak any of the local languages, they do not have words for numbers beyond the number 3, they have no words for colours and in some cases no word for “no”. They do not have words for “left” or “right” but orientate themselves according to North, South, East and West. They also live very much in the present.

In our college course about second language acquisition, we had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Daniel Everett about the topic of past and future tenses. When I asked him about this part from his book, he clarified what he meant when claimed that the language has no future or past tense. Everett firstexplai ned that in English we do not truly have a future tense; we add a modal verb in front of a present tense verb or use the present progressive, adding an
-ing to the end of the verb and adding the present form of “to be” in
front of the -ing verb to indicate the future. For example: “I go” becomes “I will go” or “I am going.” The modal verb “will” creates a future sentiment without changing “go” to a different tense. The “am” is the present form of “to be” and then the -ing added to “go” indicates progression, but is still in the present of progression. I recognized this concept because I had previously learned about this in my Pedagogical English grammar course from the previous semester. From this idea, Dr. Everett went on to explain that the Pirahã language works similarly for past tense and future
tense. He said that often they do not talk about the past, but when they do, they will add key words such as “the other day” to the sentence, in a similar way that we would add “will” to signal the future. He said this also applies to the future. My overall understanding that I took away from the explanation was that the Pirahã speak only using the present tense of a verb, but add words that mark the time frame that they want to indicate. Thinking
about this, I can better analyze how I think the Pirahã language works and the influence that the language has on modern linguistics. Additionally, this helps me to re-contemplate the other hypotheses that he expresses in his book, such as the main contradiction against Universal Grammar that the language has no
recursion.