Lexicon Valley

So, I was listening to NPR's show "On the Media" and this segment came up unexpectedly...it was great!

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Back by popular demand, here's another installment of Mike Vuolo's "Lexicon Valley." In February 2010, the last living speaker of Boa died, and with her, the logic, culture, and history of the ancient people. Mike and Bob discuss the death of languages and why their passing matters. http://www.onthemedia.org/2011/jul/29/lexicon-valley-episode-2/

The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words

The title of this blog post is actually the title of an essay written by Sigmund Freud. The following text is an excerpt from a reading response that I wrote in a philosophy class that I'm taking right now at UVU called "Freud and Philosophy" (taught by Shannon Mussett). This writing is in response to a reading that we were doing from a section in Freud's book "Totem and Taboo". The section had a few parts that reminded me of Freud's essay "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words". It is a very interesting essay that I recommend checking out, it's a bit difficult to find though. I thought this would be appropriate on this blog.

An excerpt from my (Travis Low) reading response paper:

"...Taboo is something that interests me very much. The concept of taboo is mind boggling in that it alludes to something or someone that is unapproachable, forbidden, holy, unclean, sacred, dangerous, etc. This antithetical description or definition of the word ‘taboo’ made me think of one of Freud’s essays that I recently read called “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,” wherein Freud examines ancient Egyptian words that have two different meanings which are opposed to one another. That is, single words that refer to two different states that are at odds with each other. For example, the Egyptian word for ‘light’ is the same as the Egyptian word for ‘dark’, the same goes for inside/outside, strong/weak, old/young, far/near, and so on. The single word refers to both states, or at least the presence of one state and the absence of its contrary state. Instead of having two words for each manifestation, one word describes the contradictory phenomena. If the concept is abstract, the specific manifestations can be shown in several ways; if written, a simple symbol or picture at the beginning or end of the word can distinguish between the two meanings, if spoken, special emphasis can be placed on the pronunciation of the word in a number of ways, illustrating the nature of the manifestation being referred to. (For example, the word standing for both ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ would be pronounced very powerfully and deeply if referring to ‘strong’, but would be pronounced very softly and delicately if referring to ‘weak’.) This is also true in many other languages. In Latin, for instance, the word ‘sacer’ means both ‘sacred’ and ‘accursed’, and ‘altus’ means both ‘high’ and ‘deep’. (This is all paraphrased from Freud’s essay “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words”) So, I would think that the word taboo, also having an antithetical meaning and essence to it, must have been developed in a similar way, where one word was placed upon the presence of two antithetical states, desires or impulses. Freud also points out early on in the reading that the word ‘taboo’ is an ancient/primal polynesian word.

Taboo is especially interesting being a phenomena that comes upon objects or people for social/cultural reasons and that the phenomena is charged with contradictory forces. Objects of taboo, as said above, are both holy and unclean, both sacred and forbidden, etc. If something is taboo it means that the thing or person of taboo has some kind of prohibition placed upon it, it is warned against, unapproachable. It is both desired and unwanted, it could bring both delight and sorrow.

This brings to mind Frued’s conception of fetish. I wonder how Freud would tie taboo into his understanding of fetishes. It seems like objects that we fetishize are at the same time objects of taboo. To fetishize something is to consider the it to be worthy of worshiping or desiring to no end, but the very fact that we define it as ‘fetish’ implies that it is some kind of unhealthy, or (to use Freud’s language) ‘deviant’ obsession or need. (Maybe even an addiction?!)..."

The end...to spice up this post here is a photo. Yes, that is a Sigmund Freud action figure.

Lost Languages

From the New York Times:

Regions of Dying Languages Named

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: September 18, 2007

Filed at 2:44 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there's still no one to talk to.

Native Australian Charlie Mangulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction.

From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday.

While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.

Five hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed Tuesday in a briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the National Geographic Society.

In addition to northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, many native languages are endangered in South America -- Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia -- as well as the area including British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.

Losing languages means losing knowledge, says K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

''When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday.''

As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated.

That means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature, no text of any kind, he said.

Harrison is associate director of the Living Tongues Institute based in Salem, Ore. He and institute director Gregory D.S. Anderson analyzed the top regions for disappearing languages.

Anderson said languages become endangered when a community decides that its language is an impediment. The children may be first to do this, he explained, realizing that other more widely spoken languages are more useful.

The key to getting a language revitalized, he said, is getting a new generation of speakers. He said the institute worked with local communities and tries to help by developing teaching materials and by recording the endangered language.

Harrison said that the 83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world's population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world's people. Languages are more endangered than plant and animal species, he said.

The hot spots listed at Tuesday's briefing:

-- Northern Australia, 153 languages. The researchers said aboriginal Australia holds some of the world's most endangered languages, in part because aboriginal groups splintered during conflicts with white settlers. Researchers have documented such small language communities as the three known speakers of Magati Ke, the three Yawuru speakers and the lone speaker of Amurdag.

-- Central South America including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia -- 113 languages. The area has extremely high diversity, very little documentation and several immediate threats. Small and socially less-valued indigenous languages are being knocked out by Spanish or more dominant indigenous languages in most of the region, and by Portuguese in Brazil.

-- Northwest Pacific Plateau, including British Columbia in Canada and the states of Washington and Oregon in the U.S., 54 languages. Every language in the American part of this hotspot is endangered or moribund, meaning the youngest speaker is over age 60. An extremely endangered language, with just one speaker, is Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once spoken on the Siletz reservation in Oregon.

-- Eastern Siberian Russia, China, Japan -- 23 languages. Government policies in the region have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages and, as a result, some have only a few elderly speakers.

-- Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico -- 40 languages. Oklahoma has one of the highest densities of indigenous languages in the United States. A moribund language of the area is Yuchi, which may be unrelated to any other language in the world. As of 2005, only five elderly members of the Yuchi tribe were fluent.

The research is funded by the Australian government, U.S. National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society and grants from foundations.