Comments | oriflamma: Last Alaska language speaker dies (ps, this is why i have the bbc set as my homepage)

oriflamma

Last Alaska language speaker dies (ps, this is why i have the bbc set as my homepage)

Jan 24, 2008 12:48

A woman believed to be the last native speaker of the Eyak language in the north-western US state of Alaska has died at the age of 89.

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Comments 8

girlvixxxen January 24 2008, 19:08:21 UTC

Wow, that is amazingly depressing.

oriflamma January 24 2008, 20:20:00 UTC

It's so sad. And I know it won't make the evening news. Such a shame.

girlvixxxen January 24 2008, 20:26:43 UTC

Of course not. We have Heath Ledger's death to obsess over! *eyeroll*

oriflamma January 24 2008, 20:58:34 UTC

You know it. I would seriously cancel cable tv if it were not for 3 or 4 quality channels. Otherwise it's all celebrity death watch and I just find that so damn disturbing.

Thread 6

jeffreywilliam January 25 2008, 04:34:58 UTC

heard about this on NPR today as i was driving around today. they said that a language dies out on Earth every 14 days...i want to say that there are something like 7000 languages going on right now. crazy, huh? i often think about the idea that i'm thinking in English...in what way does your Native tongue shape your thinking with its own internal logic, and idioimatic phrases (e.g. saying, "i'm losing my shit!" what? you lost your shit?) that just don't translate. how did they come up with grammar when they were trying to preserve it?

or things like class, exemplied in the foreign words that are English words, like cow--German; beef--French. deer--Gr; venison--Fr. one is the raising of the animal/peasant, the other the eating of the animal/higher class.

Hawai'ian seems like an interesting one, too.

oriflamma January 27 2008, 00:09:25 UTC

I saw a movie in Yiddish and English last week, in the middle of the night it came on Turner Classic Movies and I was blown away at how that language has in one sense died away, and in another way become such a part of our daily useage.
My exposure to French and Portuguese has led to some odd observations, I have words that when I say them in English, in my head, I hear French or Portuguese. No matter what. It's amazing.

But I'm fascinated by vanishing people/cultures/languages. Russia seems to have a disturbingly high number of these, like the Hinukh, which numbers between 200-500 speakers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinukh