Skip to main content

Recreating Babel

While my own anthropology training actually did not include much linguistics, I have always been fascinated with the subject. And, in the last two days I have seen two articles that sparked my thinking. The first article was on the Oneida Nation of New York, whose language was dying with the elders. The tribe worked with Berlitz to develop an intense curriculum, then paid several members to learn the language. Those first students then became the instructors for others, and they are working to teach the language in the schools (and, just as important, have the kids care about learning it).

The second article was about Ethnologue, which is an amazing resource on the world's languages. According to the latest edition, there are 6,912 living languages in the world--an increase over the 6,809 in the 2000 edition. An interesting contrast to the reported death of languages. Of course, Ethnologue is not so concerned with how many native speakers there are, and the lines between what is a dialect and what is a language is always a fuzzy one...And Ethnologue, having missionary origins, counts a language if it is distinct enough to need its own Bible translation. The article does point out the contradiction between a resource recording and presumably preserving languages, which is based in missionary work that does in its own way destroy cultures.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Storytelling

A couple of years ago I organized a conference session on storytelling as a means to communicate anthropological findings in non-academic environments. Storytelling is central to anthropology as a discipline—not only do we all study some aspect of human story, the stories of the cultures we study are key to our understanding of them. Stories become mechanisms for collaboration and change, as well as carriers of history. But we don’t always stop to think about the stories we tell, even though anthropologists regularly use storytelling as a communication device. In order to be relevant in settings dominated by non-anthropologists, we must not only pass on the data we have gathered, but convey its importance and convince decision makers in business, design, development, public policy, environment, and a myriad of other fields. Constructing these stories involves editing and carefully choosing what to relay to our audience. Delivering the stories involves performance on many scal...
6 comments
Read more

Kids Day and India

Last Friday was bring your kid to work day at Pitney Bowes. It's all very fun, begins with breakfast and a magic show, followed by tours for the older kids, then a big outdoor picnic. I was a tour stop, "Let's Travel to India." They put the kids in groups by age, since some of the stops are better for older or younger ones...I ended up with groups ranging from about 8-13 years old. It was fun but exhausting. I figured the point was more fun than educational, so pretty much I set up a slide show to talk about the fact that we invent stuff by understanding how people live and work, and asking what they knew about India. Answers: lots of people, cows...Showed them pics of cellphones, malls and offices and lots of things that look pretty similar in India as in the US, then pictures of things that look different. Fun to see their reactions. They all noticed the Subway in the mall, and they all recognized the well in the village and understood what it was for and that...
6 comments
Read more

Fishies

Today I am reflecting more on ichthyology than anthropology. Our big event last weekend was setting up an aquarium--10 gallon, freshwater tank. Did a bit of research beforehand, mostly consisting of asking people with some existing knowledge what we should do, but arguably, not very much prior investigations, other than when I was a kid we had several aquaria in the house (not to mention dogs, turtles, birds, snakes--we were pretty well supplied with pets). So, a week ago Saturday we got the tank, set it up, got the water in. Next day went to get fish, relying on the guy at the Petco who assured us our choices were OK for a starter tank. Get home, introduce them to the tank, Kurt decides to read up some more on our new friends. Learn one is in fact not such a friendly species and might torment the others--so back to the pet store for a fish exchange. At that point, we did more web research, which I have to say is more confusing than anything else--a case of too much information and som...
4 comments
Read more