The Last Man on Earth To Speak His Language (axios.com)

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Last Man on Earth To Speak His Language (axios.com)

Posted by msmash on Wednesday December 27, 2017 @06:01AM from the need-urgent-attention dept.

From a report: An elderly man in Peru named Amadeo Garcia Garcia is the last person on earth to speak his native language, Taushiro, the NY Times' Nicholas Casey reports in a remarkable long-read. A combination of disease and exploitation have led the Taushiro, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon, to the verge of extinction. In the last century, at least 37 languages have disappeared in Peru alone, lost in the steady clash and churn of national expansion, migration, urbanization and the pursuit of natural resources.

15 of 177 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Not really bad. by Gravis+Zero · 2017-12-27 06:13 · Score: 3, Insightful

Of the things that are going extinct, speakers of a particular language are not of great concern. Some people may see it as a tragedy but we aren't really losing much of anything. It's more romanticism over something interesting more than anything else.

--
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
1. Re:Not really bad. by Aighearach · 2017-12-27 06:22 · Score: 2
  
  They always leave out, or carefully word, the fact that the main cause is that the living relatives of the past speakers don't find value in speaking it.
  Compare it to Irish, which nobody was allowed to speak for generations, but when they got their freedom they wanted to learn it again!
2. Re:Not really bad. by Quirkz · 2017-12-27 06:23 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I'll admit I don't feel much twinge about losing a language. Now, cultures dying out, maybe, and associated stories and traditions, definitely, I can see how there's some value being lost. But at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
  
  --
  The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
3. Re:Not really bad. by pz · 2017-12-27 08:02 · Score: 4
  
  Language is the same as culture. Or, perhaps better put, language is inextricably mixed with culture.
  Yes, it is possible to experience a culture without speaking the language, but that experience is muted and without depth. Language and culture grow into and out of each other. One might argue nuances, such as various dialects of American English supporting the variety of cultures in the different corners of the US, but without a unifying language across a population, a deep, resilient culture does not develop.
  My favorite example of this is the deaf versus blind populations. Blind people do not have a unifying culture that is starkly separate from the normal embedding culture, but deaf people do. Why? Because blind people communicate in their normal, native language whereas deaf people have a distinct language (i.e., sign language) that, with regional variations, defines subcultures that are separate and apart from the mainstream.
  
  --
  
  Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
4. Re:Not really bad. by Kjella · 2017-12-27 08:50 · Score: 2
  
  But at some level I feel like more languages just leads to more confusion, and the fewer of them we have, the more likely it is we'll understand each other.
  I don't think it's the long tail that is the source of confusion, it's agreeing on a common tongue. Like Europe has a ton of small national languages, but you get by on English pretty much everywhere. I mean if you speak a language only spoken by a few million or less you have a pretty high motivation to learn a world language. It's the medium size languages that are problematic, like if tens or hundreds of millions speak the same language it's not worth the effort. You'll do fine knowing "just" Portugese, Russian, Arabic, Tamil, Urdu, Thai etc. that'll never be #1 but is still plenty. That said, there's not many competitors to English but the world is moving very slowly in any direction.
  
  --
  Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
5. Re:Not really bad. by TommyNelson · 2017-12-27 08:53 · Score: 2
  
  Apart from being incredibly callous, these remarks say more about you than they do about the subject matter, which is not just about losing a language, a culture, a people. Its about how and why these things were lost. I definitely recommend to RTFA before issuing such inane comments.
6. Re:Not really bad. by gman003 · 2017-12-27 08:55 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Language studies are valuable.
  Languages evolve slowly, so they act as evidence for human migration patterns. The exact details of the migration into the Americas is still under debate, and languages form quite a bit of evidence. Consider the extent of the Dene-Yeniseian language family - members exist in parts of Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Southwest America (Navajo is the most well-known of these languages). This is good evidence that humans entered the continent from Siberia - but also good evidence that the migration occurred in at least two distinct, widely-separated waves, as no DY language is known in South America or eastern North America. Perhaps Taushiro, the Peruvian language the article focuses on, could have provided evidence for or against that theory.
  Languages also tell us things about the human brain. There are languages with no words for relative position (eg. left or right), but speakers can simply use absolute position (eg. east or west), and more interestingly, do so correctly. Apparently keeping track of your heading is something you can just do, if your language and lifestyle require it. There was quite a bit of uproar when a study of a certain Amazon language completely upended a lot of theories about human syntax - specifically, the language seemed to not allow recursion. Every sentence is a simple declarative, not allowing things like this sub-clause you're reading right now. (I will note that the study was not very rigorous, and ongoing follow-up studies may prove it false - some of the other claims are already overturned.) But, either way, we learn something about the human mind and its capacity for language.
7. Re:Not really bad. by luis_a_espinal · 2017-12-27 09:33 · Score: 2
  
  Of the things that are going extinct, speakers of a particular language are not of great concern. Some people may see it as a tragedy but we aren't really losing much of anything. It's more romanticism over something interesting more than anything else.
  There is also a linguistic and anthropological value being lost when a language is no longer spoken. In this specific case, the loss is more tragic considering that the language loss has been caused by disease and exploitation (rather than a pure language shift done for economic, social or utilitarian reasons.)
  Such losses cannot be ascribed a monetary value, which is why a) the loss is invaluable and b) almost always inevitable.
Re:Sorry ... by Aighearach · 2017-12-27 06:19 · Score: 2

He said every dialect is its own language, and if everybody in your neighborhood moved to neighborhoods with a slightly different dialect, your "language" died.
Happens twice a month by kaur · 2017-12-27 06:42 · Score: 4, Informative

https://livinglanguages.wordpr...
This estimation can be wrong in many ways, but the point remains: languages do die all the time.
The Last Man on Earth to Speak His Language by PopeRatzo · 2017-12-27 08:24 · Score: 4, Funny

And with his dying breath, he whispered one word..."covfefe".

--
You are welcome on my lawn.
Re:A good thing by war4peace · 2017-12-27 08:24 · Score: 2

Everyone speaking the same language AND being on the same page is a HUUUGE assumption.
The Declaration of Independence alone proves your assumption wrong.

--
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Bidirectional overrides (5:erocS) by tepples · 2017-12-27 08:58 · Score: 2

The Slashdot team is disincentivized to fix character encoding issues because last time they improved character encoding support, the result was moderation score spoofing through bidirectional overrides. If you want Unicode, you could always give SoylentNews a try.
Re:Little value lost by tender-matser · 2017-12-27 09:13 · Score: 2

But in most cases little of value is lost. If it wasn't important enough for people to learn, odds are good it wasn't important in general.
That is the "best of all possible worlds" fallacy. In other words, for someone living in a cage or a basement, learning to swim or ride a bicycle is not "important" enough.

Excellent point. Speaking a different language makes it just a bit easier to engage in pointless tribalism and we really don't need more of that.
Tribalism has nothing to do with language or culture.
Rwanda is probably the only country in Africa where everybody speaks the same language and dialect, and has the same culture. That didn't prevent the most horrible genocide from happening just there.
The same with Bosnia in Europe.
The fact that Unionists and Republicans in Ulster speak the same language didn't bring them together; the level of distrust and segregation is ridiculous and mind-boggling, even for a third-worlder like me.
Most Catalans, Ukrainians, Irish, etc aren't really speaking their languages in everyday life anymore (despite being forced to learn them in school); and that rather exarcerbated nationalism instead of preventing it.
Most French of "foreign descent" that are populating the depressed "banlieues" are not able to speak any other language than French (and neither were their parents). But that doesn't mean they're accepted as full-fledged citizens; they're still 'Arabs' for all intents and purposes.
Re:Spoken vs Written by idji · 2017-12-27 11:45 · Score: 2

if you've only got one speaker left, record everything he has to say about every possible topic.