Not Speaking
Jenny Diski
Why should I worry me about the last white rhino leaving the planet, or the loss of a language that no one speaks any more? To tell the truth, I’m not sure. All loss is loss and needs noting, but do I really care apart from theoretically? Philologists and linguists will care that Ayapaneco, an indigenous Mexican language, is dying out, but since it’s the first I’ve heard of it, it would be dishonest to say I minded specifically about its passing. I’m never sure about museum-making. Nothing that was dynamic – species, language, music, spiritual artifacts, anything that people have actually used to get through their lives – is ever the same when it’s simply on show in a display cabinet or in a book or recording. No harm in having it, but it isn’t doing what it was supposed to do.
I must admit that I’m much more interested in, even delighted by, the fact that the last two speakers of Ayapaneco, although neighbours, are not on speakers. For one thing, they speak different versions of the language and don’t accept they way the other talks. In any case, they don’t like each other; no one, including them it seems, can remember why. So Manuel Segovia and Isidro Velazquez, living 500 metres apart, do not use the language that only they can speak, because the great thing about language is that it is for communicating with other people. Or it isn’t. If you’ve got nothing to say, why say it? Someone said that.
Segovia and Velazquez, elderly keepers of a dying language, have declared it already dead, because, getting to the essence of being human, they don’t have anything they want to say to one another. They’re not going to waste their words on each other, even if they’re the only two that have them. Fortunately, Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist, is going between the two houses, compiling a dictionary of Ayapaneco, before the old guys fall silent for ever. Which will be useful for anyone wanting to say: ‘You bastard, you’re doing it all wrong.’
Comments
Human communities are reaching the stage where they might constitute an infestation, like locusts remorselessly destroying everything in their path. In this context, the demise of a tribal language looks like just deserts, though one is reminded that traditional societies are themselves victims of this industrially driven plague. Where there is too much humanity, our accomplishments all seem suspect and pyrrhic. We're like Oedipus: we didn't mean to do it but we did, and now we can't hold up our heads in the cosmos.
On the other hand I do agree with Philip Proust that human beings are becoming an infestation...
Polyglot Nietzsche said that the more languages a person speaks, the less well they speak their own. So, i tend to tell people that when i've learnt to speak and write English properly, i might take on another language.
When I signed on to do this dictionary project I foolishly believed that I could wrap up the work in about 8 months (I was picking up where several predecessors had left off). It turns out that even dying languages are large and complex and take years to start to truly grasp. During my seven year involvement with Ayapa a number of elderly people who spoke the language in their childhood and still remembered bits and pieces of it have since passed away. For instance, there was Manuel Segovia's cousin doña Carmela who -- according to Manuel -- didn't speak Ayapaneco very well, but "spoke it very loudly!" These are all tough, stubborn people and it's worth emphasizing that to become the last of anything requires a certain ambivalence about the rest of humanity.
While life will indeed go on if/when Ayapaneco ceases to be spoken, your readers may wish to know that it's Ayapaneco and its close relatives (the Mixe-Zoquean language family) that contributed the word "cocoa" to our common global vocabulary. Something to smile about the next time they wrap their hands around a cup of hot cocoa on a chilly morning.
2. orlp says: "a world with only one language would be every bit as bad as one without wild animals and indeed for much the same reason: lack of variety," but he is quite wrong. A world with only one language is almost inconceivable (despite what is said in point 1 above), and would quickly degenerate with the aid of a few land and resources disputes and wars into a world with quite a lot of languages, as the collapse of the Roman Empire showed. A world without any wild animals would lead to psychological death for any type of human that I would want to be or to meet, and it would take millions of years for this to be rectified.
3. The IMPORTANT bit, which I registered in order to say (though I have subscribed to LRB for 20 years, so I'm not freeloading). It is very kind of Daniel Suslak to reply to Jenny Diski's post. I would be fascinated to hear to what extent Professor Suslak has himself become a speaker of Ayapaneco which, after all, he has been studying via native speakers for over seven years, and why he has or hasn't been successful, or why he has or hasn't made this one of his goals.
And like the white rhino, the fíor-Gaeilgóir (Irish-language fundamentalist) has short sight, a thick hide and a short temper.