Uchebnik_lakhotyuk_mikhaylova

16.1 Part I: Are Old Languages Worth Saving?

Linguists try to preserve dying languages by archiving them. They make dictionaries of the languages. They describe the grammar, record native speakers telling stories, collect books written in the language, and even create writing systems for dying languages that have none. One group, the Long Now foundation, has created a "Rosetta disk," a small, nearly indestructible 3-in nickel object on which is inscribed, in micro letters, 27 pages from the Bible's book of Genesis in 1,000 languages. Their hope is that linguists will find this disk far in the future, when most of these languages will likely be dead.

None of these efforts actually keep a language alive; they merely embalm the corpse. A language thrives only if some group of people wants to speak it. That's why language preservation really comes down to politics.

Gaelic is returning to life, only because some Irish people want to reclaim their Irish identity. Hebrew was nearly a dead language, preserved only in Jewish religious rituals and texts, but now that the state of Israel exists it is a healthy living language again.

Language is peculiarly impervious to legislation. Maybe someday we will all speak the same language. Or maybe we won't. Whatever happens won't be the result of anyone deciding what is correct. Language will decide what it will do - and whatever it decides will be correct.

Comprehension check

1.What is the reason the Bible’s book of Genesis has been created?

2.What can keep a language alive?

3.“Embalm the corpse”. What is this stylistic device called?

16.2 Part II: Are Old Languages Worth Saving? Let's get together and split

If one language carries all the messages related to work, study, shopping, getting around in public, other languages become luxuries. What are you going to do with French, if you live in America? Yeah, I know, see French movies without looking at the subtitles. Big deal.

As soon as a language stops carrying important messages, linguists say, it's in trouble. Children learn the languages they need, but they don't pick up extra languages "just for fun." And languages die when children stop picking them up. All judgments on whether languages live or die may therefore be moot. Language mirrors underlying social realities. If people blend and merge, so do their languages. Wherever invaders have conquered some land

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and settled in with the locals, for example, invaders and the invaded have ended up speaking the same language. One way or another, two languages become one. The Russian language was born this way, when Vikings invaded Slavic-speaking areas.

English was born when Germanic-speaking Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded the Celtic-speaking islands. Christianity seeping in then gave that German a shot of Latin and turned it into Old English. French-speaking Normans conquered England, but were conquered by its language. Old English absorbed some French words, thereby turning into Middle English, but spit out the rest. So it went...and kept going. English is fat on the flesh of languages it has devoured. They say it’s one of the reasons why it has become the main language of the Earth. If things keep going the way they are now, all humanity may well end up speaking English.

What do you think about this perspective? How realistic is it?

Comprehension check

o What does a language reflect? o How can a language be born?

16.3 Part III: Are Old Languages Worth Saving?

People resist losing their own language in favor of someone else's-it doesn't matter if the other language is more functional for getting along in the world.

That's because language does more than carry practical messages, it enables a way of thinking unique to itself. This goes way beyond vocabulary, including phenomena like the Inuit language having 20 words for snow. It's the whole deep structure of a language, how it works.

Sometimes languages blend so thoroughly that whole new tongues spring forth. In the 1500s, for example, Turko-Mongol warriors swept out of central Asia, through Farsi-speaking regions, and into India. They recruited soldiers from all the areas they conquered. In their army camps, one heard a cacophony of Farsi, Hindi, and Turkic tongues. Soon, however, the soldiers in those camps spoke a single new language that was a blend of the others. Urdu, it was called, which meant "army" in Turkish. Urdu is now the official language of Pakistan.

Given the natural tendency of languages to merge, the disappearance of minority languages seems like an inevitable byproduct of globalization. Doesn't matter if it's good or bad. Get over it, dude, it's going to happen. Or is it?

Languages branch apart

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Language has a powerful tendency to branch as well as blend. For example, if you're going to England, remember not to compliment anyone by saying, "Nice pants!" because over there "pants" means "underpants." And there are hundreds of similar examples. Two groups of people with the same language and culture got separated by an ocean and a few centuries later they're speaking British English and American English. No one planned it; no one could have stopped it.

The syntactical connections of the language reflect the neural connections in the brain. Language and thinking are intertwined. When I switch to speaking Farsi, it's not what I'm thinking that changes but how I'm thinking.

Language has the power, therefore, to invoke a sense of identity in its speakers. When native speakers of a language begin talking among themselves, their group identity, separate from other groups, comes alive and gains strength.

Comprehension check

o What is the relationship between language and thinking?

oWhat is the power of language?

16.4Forbidden tongues

Not surprisingly, therefore, languages don't just die; they are also

sometimes killed, or at least the murder is attempted. That is, rulers who speak a different language from their subjects often take measures to suppress their subjects' language. In the 19th century, for example, The British government outlawed Gaelic in Ireland.

By the same token, groups who are trying to reclaim a political and cultural identity take steps to preserve their special language. Today, Native American activists in the United States are busy trying to revive Native languages. Native language-immersion preschools have sprung up on both coasts. Mary Abbot, director of the California Native Network, says, "By learning the language, the native world view and values begin to reestablish themselves. A whole way of being is encoded in the language."

Text 17

Can a language be created? Preserved? Revived?

In 1887, Polish physician Ludwig Zamenhof perfected Esperanto, a brand-new language built from scratch on rational principles: for example, every letter in Esperanto has one sound. Every sound is represented by the

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same letter or letter combination. The grammar has but 16 rules, and all the verbs are regular. What's not to like?

Zamenhof proposed Esperanto as a global second language and nobody's first language. He succeeded wonderfully in his second goal: Esperanto, today, is nobody's first language. Is it anybody's second language? Esperanto enthusiasts claim that millions of people speak it worldwide. They may be right, but I've never met one or met anyone who has. As far as I can see, Esperanto remains a curiosity for language hobbyists, spoken mainly at Esperanto clubs--one more proof that language can grow like an organism, but cannot be built like a machine.

That’s why all the attempts to adopt an artificial language as lingua franca have failed, according to Doctor of Linguistics S. Ter-Minasova. Because they don’t have culture as their basis.

Text 18.
Useful words and expressions:
to become conscious	осознать
to arrive at firm conviction	придти к твердому убеждению
to leave smb disquieted	не давать к.л покоя
to find the ground under the feet	найти почву под ногами
in question	о котором идет речь
to place everything upon the turn of a	поставить все на карту
card

Let's hear from Zamenhof himself how he came to invent Esperanto. He is describing the context in this letter to a friend.

It is not easy for me to relate all this in detail to you, because much I have already forgotten; the idea to whose realization I have dedicated my whole life, appeared to me - ridiculous as it may seem to say so -in my earliest infancy, and from that time it has never left me. I lived with it and I could never imagine myself without it. This will explain to you why I with so much constancy worked over it and why I, in spite of all difficulties and unpleasantness, never gave up the idea, as many others working in the same field have done.

I was born in Bielostuk (now: Bialystok), province of Grodno. This place of my birth and of my childhood years gave the direction to all my future purposes. In Bielostok the population consisted of four diverse elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews. Each of these elements speaks a different language and is not in friendly relations with the other elements.

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In such a city, more than anywhere else, a sensitive soul feels the heavy woe of multilingualism and becomes convinced at each step that the multiplicity of languages is the sole, or at least the chief cause which divides human beings and makes of them unfriendly units. I was educated to be an idealist. I was taught that all men are brothers; and yet on the street and in the market place everything caused me to feel that 'people' did not exist, that there were only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, etc. This always tortured my child's soul, although many possibly will smile at this 'grief for the world' in one so young. As it always seemed to me that the 'grown-ups' could do everything, over and over again, I said to myself that when I become a man I would do away with that evil.

Of course I became convinced by degrees that not everything is as easy as it seems to a child; one after another I put aside various Utopias of my boyhood and only the dream of a single common language for humanity I never could cast aside. In some unexplainable way I was attracted to it, though, of course, without any definite plans. I do not remember when, but in any event very early, I became conscious that the one language should be absolutely neutral, belonging to none of the now-living tongues. When, from the Bielostok high school I entered the Classical Academy in Warsaw, I was for some time attracted to the ancient languages, and dreamt that some day I should travel about the world and with fiery words persuade the nations to revive one of these languages for common use. Afterwards, I do not remember just how, I arrived at the firm conviction that this was impossible and commenced dimly to dream of a new, artificial language. I then began many attempts, invented artificial declensions and conjugations, etc. But a human language with its seemingly endless mass of grammatical forms and hundreds of thousands of words (with which the big dictionaries terrified me) seemed such an artful and colossal machine that I more than once cried, "Away with dreams! This work is beyond human power." All the same, I always came back to my dream.

The German and French languages I learned in childhood when it was still impossible to make comparisons or arrive at conclusions; but when in the fifth class of the Academy I began the study of English, the simplicity of the English grammar was striking, especially with the sudden change from the Latin and Greek grammars. I remarked then that the multitude of grammatical forms is only a chance historical incident and with no logical linguistic necessity. Under the influence of this idea, I began to look into my language and to throw away the needless forms. I remarked that the grammar ever more and more melted away in my hands, and that it soon arrived at a form so simple that, with no damage to the language, it occupied no more than a few pages. Then I began more seriously to devote myself to my dream.

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But the prospect of the big dictionaries still left me always disquieted. Once, when I was in the sixth or seventh class of the Academy I happened to have my attention drawn to the inscription" "Svejcarskaja", which I had seen many times, and later on, the sign "Konditorskaja ". I became interested in this "skaja", and I saw that the suffixes gave me the possibility of making out of one word other words which would not have to be learned separately. This thought quite captured me and I suddenly found the ground under my feet. Upon the stupendous dictionaries fell a ray of light and they rapidly began to shrink before my eyes. "The problem is solved!" I said. I took the idea of suffixes and began working at great length in that direction. I realized what great significance for a consciously created language is possessed by that power which in natural languages works created language is possessed by that power which in natural languages works only partly, blindly and irregularly. I began to compare words, to seek among them for constant and definite relations, and every day I eliminated from the vocabulary a new, long series of words, replacing it with one suffix which signified a certain relationship. I noticed then that a great mass of root-words (for example, "mother", "narrow", "knife", etc.) could be easily replaced by derived words and disappear from the dictionary. The mechanism of the language was before me as though upon the palm of my hand and I now began to work regularly with love and hope. Soon after that I had written the whole grammar and a small vocabulary

Here I will say something about the material for the dictionary. Much earlier, when I sought and threw out everything unnecessary from the grammar, I wished to use the principles of economy also for the words, and, convinced that it is immaterial what form is taken by this or that word (if we only agree that it expresses the idea in question), I simply invented words, endeavoring to make them as short as possible and without needless letters. I said to myself, that instead of the eleven-letter 'interparoli', for example, I can express the same idea by the two-letter 'pa'. Therefore, I simply wrote the mathematical series of the shortest, but easily-pronounced combination of letters, and to each gave the meaning of a definite word (for example, a, ab, ac, ad, - ba, ca, da, - e, eb, ec, - aba, aca, etc.). But this thought I immediately discarded, for the tests with myself showed me that such invented words are learned with difficulty and with even more difficulty remembered. Already then I became convinced that the material for the vocabulary must be Romance-Germanic, changed only as much as would be required by the regularity and other important conditions of the language.

From this standpoint I soon noticed that the existing languages possess an immense storehouse of ready words, already international, which are

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known to all peoples and form a treasure for the future international language and I, of course, utilized this treasure.

In the year 1878 the language was already more or less ready, although between the then "Lingwe uniwersala" and the present Esperanto there was still a great difference. I spoke of it to my colleagues (I was then in the eighth class in the Academy). Most of them were attracted by the idea, and by the strikingly unusual simplicity of the language, and began to study it. On the 5th of December, 1878, we all gathered to celebrate the consecration of the language. During this event there were speeches in the new tongue, and we enthusiastically sang the hymn whose opening words are as follows:

"Malamikete de las nacjes alamikete de las nacjes Kadó, kadó, jam temp; está! La tot' homoze in familje Konunigare so debá."

(A free translation in English would be: "Let the hate of the nations fall, fall! The time is already here. Humanity must unite in one family.)

Upon the table, along with the grammar and the vocabulary, were several translations into the new language.

Thus concluded the first period of the language. Since I was then still too young to come out publicly with my work, I decided to wait another five or six years and during this time carefully to test the language and work with it fully in practice. Six months after the celebration of the 5th of December we finished the Academy course and separated. The future apostles of the language tried to talk about the 'new speech' to others, but, meeting the ridicule of older people, they at once hastened to disown it, and I was left entirely alone. Anticipating only mockery and persecution, I decided to hide my work from everyone. During five and a half years of my stay in the University, I never spoke to anyone about the matter. This period was for me very difficult. The secrecy tormented me. Being obliged to hide my thoughts and plans, I hardly went anywhere or took part in anything, and the most beautiful time of life - the years of a student - for me passed most sadly. I sometimes tried to seek diversion in company, but, feeling myself always a stranger, I sighed and went away. Sometimes I eased my heart by composing verses in the language. One of these poems, "Mia Penso", I added to the first booklet issued by me; but to the readers who know nothing of the circumstances in which these verses were written, they seemed, of course, strange and incomprehensible. During six years I labored, perfecting and proving the language - and in this I had enough work, although in the year 1878 it seemed to me that the language was already in finished shape. I translated much and wrote original pieces in it, but extensive tests showed me

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that that which seemed to me to be ready in theory was still not ready in practice. Much I was obliged to prune away or to find substitutes for, to correct and radically to transform. Words and forms, principles and requirements pushed and hindered one another, while in theory each thing separately and in short tests seemed to me quite good. Such things as, for example, the universal preposition "je", the elastic verb "meti", the neutral but definite termination "au", etc., of course, never would have fallen into my head as a matter of theory. Certain forms which originally seemed enriching now appeared in practice to be unnecessary ballast. Thus, for example, I had to discard certain useless suffixes. In the year 1878 it seemed to me enough that the language should have a grammar and a vocabulary; the heaviness and clumsiness of the language I ascribed only to the fact that I had not yet fully mastered it. Practice, however, more and more convinced me that the language still needed an elusive something, a binding element, giving to the language life and a definite, concrete spirit. (Ignorance of the spirit of the language is the reason why some Esperantists, having read very little in Esperanto write without error but in a clumsy, ungraceful style, -while more experienced Esperantists write in good style, exactly the same, whatever the nation to which they belong. In the course of time the spirit of the language will change, without doubt, although by insensible degrees. But if the first Esperantists, people of diverse nations, had not seen in the language a quite definite fundamental spirit, each would have begun to follow his native style and the language would have remained forever, or at least through a long period, a clumsy and lifeless collection of words.) I began then to avoid literal translations of this or the other tongue and tried to think directly in the neutral language. Then I noticed that the language in my hands already ceased to be a baseless shadow of this or the other language. that it possessed its own spirit, its own life, its own definite and clearly expressed physiognomy, independent of outside influences. The words flowed of themselves, flexibly, gracefully and quite freely, like a living mother tongue. For a long time there remained unsolved a problem which has a great significance for a neutral tongue. I knew that everyone would say to me: "Your language will be useful to me only when the whole world accepts it; therefore I cannot accept it until the whole world accepts it." I thought for a long time over this problem. Finally, the so-called secret alphabets gave me the clue. These do not require a previous acceptance by the world, but give to an addressee, even without prearrangement, the ability to understand everything you write, if you only send him a "key". This led me to the idea of arranging the language also in the manner of a "key", which should contain, not only the whole vocabulary, but also the complete grammar in the form of separate and wholly independent and alphabetically arranged elements. This

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would give to any correspondent, even an unprepared one, of any nation, the immediate ability to understand your letter.

I finished university and began my medical career. Already I began to think about the publication of my project. I got ready the manuscript of my first pamphlet. (Dr. Esperanto. "An International Language. Introduction and Complete Vocabulary"), and began to look for a publisher. Here I met for first time the sad experience of life, the financial problem, with which I afterwards was obliged to battle strenuously. For two years I vainly sought a publisher. When I finally found one he kept me waiting six months in order to prepare the manuscript - and then refused. At last, after a great deal of trouble I was myself able to publish the pamphlet, in July of the year 1887. I was very excited before that time arrived. I felt that I stood at the Rubicon, and that from the day my book appeared there would be no possibility of retreat. I knew what fate awaited a physician who depends upon the public, when the public sees in him a follower of fantasies - a person who busies himself with mere hobbies. I felt that I was placing the whole happiness and welfare of myself and family upon the turn of a card. But I could not give up the idea which had entered my very blood - and I crossed the Rubicon.

·What helped Zamenhof to create Grammar, Vocabulary of Esperanto?

·How did Zamenhof arrive at the idea of creating a language for common use?

·How did English contribute to this idea?

·What helped Zamenhof to find ground under his feet?

·Spirit of language. What is it?

·What are the conditions on which a neutral language can have the future?

Text 19.

ASIA: Globalisation Erodes Local Languages, Fuels 'Glocal' English

SINGAPORE, Jul 30 (IPS) - A continent that contains a third of the world's spoken codes -- and yet one whose astonishing diversity of speech and written systems -- is being eroded by relentless globalisation. That, in a nutshell, is the ethnolinguist's lament for Asia.

”In South-east Asia, the response to globalisation is to acquire language skills, not in many languages, but in one, the English language, which is seen as the key to success in the globalised age,” said Dr Rujaya Abhakorn, lecturer in South-east Asian history at Chiang Mai University, Thailand.

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It is indeed English, which served the colonial British Empire and now drives the knowledge economy and the Internet, that is all too often seen as a tyrannosaurus rex that voraciously gobbles up cultures and traditions. ”Efficiency and development, growth and human capital, are not tolerant of difference,” commented Prof Joseph Lo Bianco, director of The National Language and Literacy Institute of Australia. ”Globalised modernisation requires that knowledge is imparted in ways that are comparable across differences of setting, culture and language.”

Abhakorn and Lo Bianco were participants at a conference on language trends in Asia, held this month by the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute. The discussion focused on the sorts of globalisation in Asia today, and whether or not the primary language of an economy is endangering other languages.

Generally, some participants pointed out, the endangerment of language is most serious where local globalisation is the most advanced and includes virtually all economic sectors.

Against such a background, the future of languages such as Hovongan, in north-central Kalimantan, Indonesia, and Sou, in the southern Laos province of Attapeu, is in peril - both are estimated to have around 1,000 speakers, and thus classified as being endangered under the definition of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

”Our language has been ripped from the world,” Goenawan Mohamad, founding editor of the Jakarta-based 'Tempo' newsmagazine, wrote in a paper presentpresented at the meeting, ”stripped of shape, smell, colour and form, cleansed of the grit and grafitti, the rumpus and commotion that make up real life''.

Even where languages are not endangered, there are confrontations between them and English.

Dr Udaya Narayan Singh, director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore, India, provided a background to the diversity and linguistic politics of the country.

”Even when 80 percent of all Indians speak one or another major Indian language, and Hindi is understood by close to 60 percent,” said Singh, ”there are still many other languages with a long literary history, grammatical tradition and rich heritage, and they are still in use in all modern means of communication.”

”Bilingualism in India,” he told IPS,”is not just due to economic causes but also due to conflict.”

The official language of communication of India is Hindi. But, Singh explained, ''There is always a hidden tussle as well as open confrontation

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