Lost in Translation

Abley explores the significance of linguistic extinction

The modern American poet, Robert Frost, once remarked that poetry is what's lost in translation. The essence of a particular language lies beyond simple semantics, in its rhythm and articulation, its metaphors and syntax. From this mysterious, indefinable realm, the poet culls the material to express a culture's unique understanding of the world - or, some would say, its construction of it.
To bear this in mind while reading Mark Abley's Spoken Here is to realize that extinction threatens 90 percent of the world's poetry. Abley says that of the 6000 languages now in existence, only 600 may survive the next century. As they fade into oblivion, they deplete the world of their unique wisdom and understanding. This is a brain drain of global significance, one which impoverishes humanity.
In a recent interview about the book, Abley spoke of his first encounter with an endangered language. It was 10 years ago, when he was working as a feature writer for the Montreal Gazette. He wrote a story about the small community of Odanak, an hour's drive east of Montreal. There he met Cécile Wawanolett, who was one of only a dozen remaining speakers of the Odanaki languages. Cécile taught the language to a handful of students who attended her weekly night class. "She did the best she could with a piece of chalk and a blackboard," he said. But it was clear that the Odanaki language had little chance of surviving another generation.
The experience was saddening and enlightening: Abley soon learned that native languages across North America were in a similar predicament. He toyed with the idea of writing a book on the subject, but as a non-Native, he shied away for fear of cultural appropriation. In subsequent years Abley's perspective widened still, and he came to realize that minority languages all over the globe were facing extinction. By the year 2000, he had left his job at the newspaper and begun work on Spoken Here.
You needn't be a poet, or even share Abley's passion for languages, to appreciate some of the consequences linguistic extinction. The book offers the reader many reasons to appreciate the value of language. In the chapter on Alexander von Humboldt's journey to Orinoco, for example, Abley tells how the great nineteenth century scientist discovered that the only access to the region's human history was through the many languages of its inhabitants. Should these languages disappear - and they had already started doing so in Humboldt's time - this history would vanish from human consciousness forever.
Of course, to say that a language is near "extinction" is to say it is a living thing. In Abley's view, a language must be spoken to be alive. If it is not relied upon for everyday, practical affairs, it will cease to grow and adapt, which is deadly in the fast-paced, modern world. In fact, globalization - the incessant encroachment of modern, capitalist culture on traditional societies - is the single greatest threat to minority languages everywhere. The book notes that on every corner of the globe, "young people are absorbing the same music and watching the same movies, most of them from Hollywood."
The idea of linguistic ecology, the survival or extinction of languages, draws an analogy between animal and plant life on the one hand and languages on the other. This is not an arbitrary analogy: Abley points out that linguistic diversity is greatest in dense, tropical regions, where diversity of plant and animal life is also at its peek. The most striking example of this is New Guinea, where an astonishing 1100 languages exist. That amounts to 1/6 of all languages spoken on earth. Many are indigenous languages whose speakers know a great deal about tropical life forms - knowledge that could be used for medical purposes, for example. As native speakers die off and the dominant culture supplants their language and way of life, vital knowledge may be lost.
In the opening pages of the book, Abley describes himself as a "journalist, poet, and editor... not a professional linguist." Herein lies the book's strength. Abley doesn't deny the basic precepts of Chomskian linguistics, he simply wants to move beyond its limitations. Simply put, Chomsky argues that language follows predetermined patterns that are established below the conscious level of speech, and these patterns are the same from language to language. Therefore the differences between languages are not significant. Applied to the subject of this book, the conclusion might be that the loss of a particular language is insignificant, since its substitutes perform just as well. Nothing is lost in translation; poetry does not exist.
Abley takes us down a different path. "The incredible diversity of human languages," he writes, "is surely just as remarkable as the hidden similarities of their grammars." Note that the two are not exclusive. Without denying the precepts of Chomskian linguistics, Abley asserts that poets, storytellers and everyday speakers can also teach us about language.
"In terms of the human mind," he told Tandem, "language is like the sea around us, we're swimming in it constantly, so to think that you have to follow a particular Chomskian school of linguistics in order to have anything to valuable to say about language - I don't agree with that."
And the book amply demonstrates why. It calls to mind another famous definition of poetry: language made strange. Abley's ability to demonstrate the "strangeness" of these languages - their qualitative differences from English - conveys a sense of what is lost when they disappear.

Publication Date: 2004-06-06
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4035