There was some discussion over at linguaphiles when Mrs. Smith's death was initially reported.
It's always sad when a language dies, but it's also an inevitability; languages are like species or nations or cultures: they develop, they grow, they thrive, and, ultimately, they reach the end of their indefinite yet finite span. Some simply die off, like so many indigenous languages around the world have, partly through the willful acts of conquerors, others through simple realities of survival; others have children, splitting off into languages that bear familial resemblance yet are no longer truly compatible.
The English we know and speak today will one day cease to be; there will be none alive who will understand and speak it as a native, even if, like Latin or Ancient Greek, it is maintained continuously through scholarship. Already dialects of English are splitting off and becoming their own creatures; Singlish -- Singaporean English -- is a dialect that may well lose mutual intelligibility with the source language, especially as China grows to eclipse the West over the next century. In a hundred years, I fully expect Standard Chinese -- or, more properly, the form Standard Chinese will have a hundred years from now -- to be the language of trade and international relations, the role English enjoys now and that French once enjoyed. Sure, in a hundred years, half the languages spoken now will no longer be living languages, but many of the languages that die in that time -- possibly the majority -- will be thoroughly documented and researched, and there will doubtless be new languages that are considered but dialects now. It hasn't been all that long since Afrikaans was just a particularly crude-sounding dialect of Dutch; now, it's a reflection of the likely path all Germanic languages will follow, as the features it lost and gained in diverging from the parent tongue parallel the evolution of English from Anglo-Saxon.
But I ramble. The point is, it is lamentable that Eyak no longer lives, especially given why it died, but it is not forgotten, and, like ourselves, that it would one day die was inevitable from the first moment it began to live.
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Date: 2008-02-10 05:59 am (UTC)It's always sad when a language dies, but it's also an inevitability; languages are like species or nations or cultures: they develop, they grow, they thrive, and, ultimately, they reach the end of their indefinite yet finite span. Some simply die off, like so many indigenous languages around the world have, partly through the willful acts of conquerors, others through simple realities of survival; others have children, splitting off into languages that bear familial resemblance yet are no longer truly compatible.
The English we know and speak today will one day cease to be; there will be none alive who will understand and speak it as a native, even if, like Latin or Ancient Greek, it is maintained continuously through scholarship. Already dialects of English are splitting off and becoming their own creatures; Singlish -- Singaporean English -- is a dialect that may well lose mutual intelligibility with the source language, especially as China grows to eclipse the West over the next century. In a hundred years, I fully expect Standard Chinese -- or, more properly, the form Standard Chinese will have a hundred years from now -- to be the language of trade and international relations, the role English enjoys now and that French once enjoyed. Sure, in a hundred years, half the languages spoken now will no longer be living languages, but many of the languages that die in that time -- possibly the majority -- will be thoroughly documented and researched, and there will doubtless be new languages that are considered but dialects now. It hasn't been all that long since Afrikaans was just a particularly crude-sounding dialect of Dutch; now, it's a reflection of the likely path all Germanic languages will follow, as the features it lost and gained in diverging from the parent tongue parallel the evolution of English from Anglo-Saxon.
But I ramble. The point is, it is lamentable that Eyak no longer lives, especially given why it died, but it is not forgotten, and, like ourselves, that it would one day die was inevitable from the first moment it began to live.