11 Fascinating Facts About the Swahili Language
With an estimated 50 to 100 million Swahili speakers worldwide, it’s time to broaden the scope – there’s more to it than Hakuna Matata – and dive deeper into this relatively unknown East African language. Here are 11 interesting facts on Swahili.
It’s a rich mix of languages
Swahili is predominantly a mix of local Bantu languages and Arabic. Decades of intensive trade along the East African coast resulted in this mix of cultures. Besides Arabic and Bantu, Swahili also has English, Persian, Portuguese, German and French influences due to trade contact.
It has roots in Arabic
Around 35% of the Swahili vocabulary comes from Arabic, but Swahili has also quite literally adopted words from English, such as: polisi – police, televisheni – television, redio – radio, and baiskeli – bicycle.
It has millions of speakers
People whose mother tongue is Swahili, about five to 15 million worldwide, are often referred to as Waswahili.
It developed as a coastal trading language
The word for the Swahili language is Kiswahili. Sawahili is the plural for the Arabic word sahil, which means ‘coast’. Ki- at the beginning means coastal language. This is because Swahili arose as a trade language along the coastline, and is also best spoken along the coast. In 1928, the Zanzibar dialect called Kiunguja was chosen as the standard Swahili.
It is spoken in many countries
Swahili is the lingua franca (a common language adopted between two non-native speakers) of the East African Union and is the official language of Tanzania (official language), Kenya (official language next to English) and of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also widely spoken in Uganda and, in smaller numbers, in Burundi, Rwanda, North Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique.
It’s international in reach
Several international media outlets have various Swahili programmes, such as BBC Swahili.
It’s easy to learn
Thinking about learning an African language? Give Swahili a try. It’s the easiest African language for English speakers to learn, as it’s one of the few Sub-Saharan African languages without lexical tone, similar to English.
It developed as a coastal trading language
The word for the Swahili language is Kiswahili. Sawahili is the plural for the Arabic word sahil, which means ‘coast’. Ki- at the beginning means coastal language. This is because Swahili arose as a trade language along the coastline, and is also best spoken along the coast. In 1928, the Zanzibar dialect called Kiunguja was chosen as the standard Swahili.
It is spoken in many countries
Swahili is the lingua franca (a common language adopted between two non-native speakers) of the East African Union and is the official language of Tanzania (official language), Kenya (official language next to English) and of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also widely spoken in Uganda and, in smaller numbers, in Burundi, Rwanda, North Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique.
It’s international in reach
Several international media outlets have various Swahili programmes, such as BBC Swahili.
It’s easy to learn
Thinking about learning an African language? Give Swahili a try. It’s the easiest African language for English speakers to learn, as it’s one of the few Sub-Saharan African languages without lexical tone, similar to English.
It’s been around for centuries
The earliest known documents of the Swahili language are letters written in Arabic script, written in 1711 in the region of Kilwa, present-day Tanzania. They are now preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa, India.
https://theculturetrip.com/africa/kenya ... -language/
Languages
Making Arabic compulsory
Pervez Hoodbhoy Published February 13, 2021
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.
IN every school of Islamabad every child shall henceforth be compelled to study the Arabic language from Grade 1 to Grade 5. Thereafter he or she shall learn Arabic grammar from Grade 6 to Grade 12. By unanimous vote, that’s what the Senate of Pakistan has decided. Introduced on Feb 1, 2021 as a private member’s bill by Senator Javed Abbasi of the PML-N, the Compulsory Teaching of Arabic Language Bill, 2020, will become an act of parliament once approved by the National Assembly. Thereafter it is likely to be applied across the country.
Should we citizens celebrate or be worried? That depends upon whether desired outcomes can be attained. Let’s therefore see what reasons were given by our lawmakers for the bill, one that will deeply impact many generations to come.
First, the bill states that proficiency in Arabic will “broaden the employment and business opportunities for the citizens of Pakistan” in rich Arab countries. While attraction to Arab oil wealth is understandable and has long been pursued, this reason is weak. Jobs and businesses go to persons with specific skills or those who have deliverables to offer.
Forcing students to learn Arabic won’t make them virtuous but setting good examples of moral behaviour might.
Just look at who gets invited to GCC countries. Westerners having zero familiarity with Arabic but high expertise are most sought after. Indians are a distant second, getting only about 10 per cent of high-level jobs with the rest performing menial and unskilled construction tasks. Pakistanis stand still further below with only 3pc at higher levels. This is because of low professional and life skills. With the Pakistani schoolchild now to be burdened with learning yet another language, achievement levels will further deteriorate.
If the Pakistani job seeker could use his school-learned Arabic to communicate with Arabs, would it improve matters? This is unlikely. Graduates from Pakistani madressahs seeking to understand the Holy Quran spend their lives trying to master classical Arabic. And yet they have zero job prospects in the Middle East. Present enrolment in Arabic language courses and university degree programmes is therefore very low. In fact, after starting such programmes over 20 to 30 years ago, some universities later closed them down.
For the boy now in an Islamabad school compelled to learn classical Arabic, communication with Arabs in their Arabic will not be easy. In fact, the poor fellow will be quite at sea. Only modern versions of Arabic are spoken in various Arab countries, not classical Arabic. Imagine that a Pakistani lad trained in ye olde Englisch — the “proper English” of Shakespeare or the Canterbury Tales — was to land up in today’s England. He might be a source of merriment but getting a job would be tough.
Second, the bill claims that school-taught Arabic will enable students to understand the Holy Quran better and so become better Muslims. Are the bill’s sponsors not aware that, beginning with Persian in the 10th century, the Quran has undergone translation into all major languages? This was necessary because it is extremely difficult for non-Arabs to understand the Quran’s wonderfully rich and nuanced classical Arabic.
Many scholars have spent entire lives performing such monumental translations, knowing that words have meanings that subtly change with time. But even so, no two translations completely agree and sometimes different interpretations emerge. Given these difficulties, absorbing the contents of the Quran through an Urdu translation is surely much easier for a Pakistani school student.
Deeply puzzling, therefore, is the statement from the minister of state for parliamentary affairs: “You cannot understand the message of Allah, if you do not know Arabic.” If true, that massively downgrades most Muslims living on this planet. The entire Muslim population of Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Iran, or Turkey cannot be made to understand or speak Arabic. And what of those long dead Muslims who tried hard to follow the teachings of Islam but never learned — nor tried to learn — the Arabic language?
That knowing Arabic — any version — can make one a better person or create unity is a bizarre thought. If true, the Arab states would be standing together instead of several rushing to recognize Israel even as it gobbles up the last bits of Palestine. Has the Arabic language made Arab states beacons of moral integrity, parsimony, and high thinking? Are our senators claiming that today’s Arabs are paragons of virtue?
But truly, it would be wonderful if teaching Arabic to kids, and further jacking up the religious content of education, could change students for the better. Just imagine! Future Pakistani lawyers would not be rampaging goons who destroy court property and randomly attack patients in hospital emergency wards; our students would be reading books rather than noisily demonstrating for their “right to cheat”; our political leaders would not be looters and our generals would no longer have secret overseas business franchises.
While some chase such delusions, others nervously search for their civilizational roots in some faraway land — Saudi Arabia earlier and now Turkey. Thus quite a few are drawn to Arabic. But curiously, Arabs show no interest in reviving Arabic. Their new generations are hell-bent upon modernizing and moving towards English. Now for several decades, an energized Arab world has been luring American universities with large sums of money to open local campuses in GCC states.
Part of that investment is paying off. The success of Al-Amal, the UAE spacecraft that entered orbit around Mars some days ago, was officially celebrated as an Arab Muslim success. While one feels happy at this, it is really the triumph of Western technology harnessed by a few forward-looking Arabs who have learnt to speak the language of modern science. A thousand years ago that language was only Arabic. But in our epoch it is only English.
In forcing kids to learn Arabic, all those sitting in Pakistan’s Senate — with just a single exception — forgot that they are Pakistanis first and that Pakistan was made for Pakistanis. Rather than behave as snivelling cultural orphans seeking shelter in a rich uncle’s house, they need to take pride in the diversity and strength of the myriad local cultures and languages that make this land and its people.
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.
Published in Dawn, February 13th, 2021
https://www.dawn.com/news/1607107/makin ... compulsory
Pervez Hoodbhoy Published February 13, 2021
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.
IN every school of Islamabad every child shall henceforth be compelled to study the Arabic language from Grade 1 to Grade 5. Thereafter he or she shall learn Arabic grammar from Grade 6 to Grade 12. By unanimous vote, that’s what the Senate of Pakistan has decided. Introduced on Feb 1, 2021 as a private member’s bill by Senator Javed Abbasi of the PML-N, the Compulsory Teaching of Arabic Language Bill, 2020, will become an act of parliament once approved by the National Assembly. Thereafter it is likely to be applied across the country.
Should we citizens celebrate or be worried? That depends upon whether desired outcomes can be attained. Let’s therefore see what reasons were given by our lawmakers for the bill, one that will deeply impact many generations to come.
First, the bill states that proficiency in Arabic will “broaden the employment and business opportunities for the citizens of Pakistan” in rich Arab countries. While attraction to Arab oil wealth is understandable and has long been pursued, this reason is weak. Jobs and businesses go to persons with specific skills or those who have deliverables to offer.
Forcing students to learn Arabic won’t make them virtuous but setting good examples of moral behaviour might.
Just look at who gets invited to GCC countries. Westerners having zero familiarity with Arabic but high expertise are most sought after. Indians are a distant second, getting only about 10 per cent of high-level jobs with the rest performing menial and unskilled construction tasks. Pakistanis stand still further below with only 3pc at higher levels. This is because of low professional and life skills. With the Pakistani schoolchild now to be burdened with learning yet another language, achievement levels will further deteriorate.
If the Pakistani job seeker could use his school-learned Arabic to communicate with Arabs, would it improve matters? This is unlikely. Graduates from Pakistani madressahs seeking to understand the Holy Quran spend their lives trying to master classical Arabic. And yet they have zero job prospects in the Middle East. Present enrolment in Arabic language courses and university degree programmes is therefore very low. In fact, after starting such programmes over 20 to 30 years ago, some universities later closed them down.
For the boy now in an Islamabad school compelled to learn classical Arabic, communication with Arabs in their Arabic will not be easy. In fact, the poor fellow will be quite at sea. Only modern versions of Arabic are spoken in various Arab countries, not classical Arabic. Imagine that a Pakistani lad trained in ye olde Englisch — the “proper English” of Shakespeare or the Canterbury Tales — was to land up in today’s England. He might be a source of merriment but getting a job would be tough.
Second, the bill claims that school-taught Arabic will enable students to understand the Holy Quran better and so become better Muslims. Are the bill’s sponsors not aware that, beginning with Persian in the 10th century, the Quran has undergone translation into all major languages? This was necessary because it is extremely difficult for non-Arabs to understand the Quran’s wonderfully rich and nuanced classical Arabic.
Many scholars have spent entire lives performing such monumental translations, knowing that words have meanings that subtly change with time. But even so, no two translations completely agree and sometimes different interpretations emerge. Given these difficulties, absorbing the contents of the Quran through an Urdu translation is surely much easier for a Pakistani school student.
Deeply puzzling, therefore, is the statement from the minister of state for parliamentary affairs: “You cannot understand the message of Allah, if you do not know Arabic.” If true, that massively downgrades most Muslims living on this planet. The entire Muslim population of Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Iran, or Turkey cannot be made to understand or speak Arabic. And what of those long dead Muslims who tried hard to follow the teachings of Islam but never learned — nor tried to learn — the Arabic language?
That knowing Arabic — any version — can make one a better person or create unity is a bizarre thought. If true, the Arab states would be standing together instead of several rushing to recognize Israel even as it gobbles up the last bits of Palestine. Has the Arabic language made Arab states beacons of moral integrity, parsimony, and high thinking? Are our senators claiming that today’s Arabs are paragons of virtue?
But truly, it would be wonderful if teaching Arabic to kids, and further jacking up the religious content of education, could change students for the better. Just imagine! Future Pakistani lawyers would not be rampaging goons who destroy court property and randomly attack patients in hospital emergency wards; our students would be reading books rather than noisily demonstrating for their “right to cheat”; our political leaders would not be looters and our generals would no longer have secret overseas business franchises.
While some chase such delusions, others nervously search for their civilizational roots in some faraway land — Saudi Arabia earlier and now Turkey. Thus quite a few are drawn to Arabic. But curiously, Arabs show no interest in reviving Arabic. Their new generations are hell-bent upon modernizing and moving towards English. Now for several decades, an energized Arab world has been luring American universities with large sums of money to open local campuses in GCC states.
Part of that investment is paying off. The success of Al-Amal, the UAE spacecraft that entered orbit around Mars some days ago, was officially celebrated as an Arab Muslim success. While one feels happy at this, it is really the triumph of Western technology harnessed by a few forward-looking Arabs who have learnt to speak the language of modern science. A thousand years ago that language was only Arabic. But in our epoch it is only English.
In forcing kids to learn Arabic, all those sitting in Pakistan’s Senate — with just a single exception — forgot that they are Pakistanis first and that Pakistan was made for Pakistanis. Rather than behave as snivelling cultural orphans seeking shelter in a rich uncle’s house, they need to take pride in the diversity and strength of the myriad local cultures and languages that make this land and its people.
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.
Published in Dawn, February 13th, 2021
https://www.dawn.com/news/1607107/makin ... compulsory
It might be appropriate to reflect on MSMS's speech: ARABIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF MUSLIM WORLDswamidada wrote:Making Arabic compulsory
Pervez Hoodbhoy Published February 13, 2021
An address by the late H.H.Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah Aga Khan at a session of Motamer al-Alam-al-Islamiyya
http://ismaili.net/sultan/5msms.html
kmaherali wrote:It might be appropriate to reflect on MSMS's speech: ARABIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF MUSLIM WORLDswamidada wrote:Making Arabic compulsory
Pervez Hoodbhoy Published February 13, 2021
An address by the late H.H.Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah Aga Khan at a session of Motamer al-Alam-al-Islamiyya
http://ismaili.net/sultan/5msms.html
When Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared Urdu should be the national language of Pakistan protests erupted in the provinces of west Pakistan as well in east Pakistan ( now Bangla Desh). Bengalis rejected Urdu as their national language, they demanded Bangla as their national language. In 1948, at Dhaka university, when Jinnah declared Urdu as national language, university students lead by Mujeebur Rahman (at that time a student leader) confronted Jinnah and there were violent protests. That was the first dangerous step towards the creation of Bangla Desh in my opinion. The language issue created mistrust among Pakistanis, and to overcome this and for the unity of Pakistan Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah delivered that speech at Moutammar Alam e Islamiyah presented by Mata Salamat. Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah was requested by then Prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan not to attend that session due to disturbance. That speech irritated the Urdu speaking class and they criticized Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah including Baba e Urdu Moulvi Abdul Haqq. At that time Arabic was the best solution for the stability and unity of Pakistan. All other main languages should have been adopted second languages including Urdu beside Arabic as national language. The misstep of early leadership caused secession of east Pakistan.
Google translation of the original article in Portuguese: https://the.ismaili/portugal/import%C3% ... ngl%C3%AAs
The importance of learning English
In an increasingly connected world and, taking our global Jamat as an example, we are pressured to learn new languages so that we can participate in global events or develop relationships and friendships that cross borders. Don't hesitate, accept the challenge!
english
Without learning a global language like English, we can feel separate from the world in the most literal sense. So why - despite our innate desire and need to expand our linguistic horizons - are we so hesitant to take up the challenge?
It is common to hear adults, or even young people, say that they are simply too old to learn a new language and that it is simply too difficult. And many - despite not wanting to admit it - hesitate because they don't feel comfortable making mistakes in front of other people. But is learning a language, as we get older, that hard?
The truth is that everyone can - and should - learn a new language, regardless of their age. Learning never really ends and, in many ways, our motivation to expand our linguistic horizons only grows with age.
Mawlana Hazar Imam has been reiterating the importance of learning new languages and, above all, knowing how to speak and read English, so that we have the best access to global knowledge.
Learning a new language is always a challenge, whatever the person's age. But for a senior it becomes something attractive because, in addition to occupying time well, it exercises the mind.
Engaging in a new language has several advantages, including:
Exercise the mind;
Feeling useful;
Occupying the time and making new friends - meeting people with the same interests;
Being able to travel to different places, where the language you have learned is spoken, which allows you not to be dependent on excursions or family members, giving you a feeling of fullness;
Allows you to get more active and excited.
If you're still not completely convinced, check out the testimonies of some students in Basic English and Intermediate English classes, by clicking on the following videos:
Testimony 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yBclevQEDg
Testimony 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOkGB1qH4LU
Testimony 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mA-eK46FRc
Testimony 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPaHo7zLGFo
To access English classes, contact Elderly Care members:
Shelina Amad (Lisbon) - 968 385 002
Mehrunissa Bhanji (Seixal) - 933 146 764
The importance of learning English
In an increasingly connected world and, taking our global Jamat as an example, we are pressured to learn new languages so that we can participate in global events or develop relationships and friendships that cross borders. Don't hesitate, accept the challenge!
english
Without learning a global language like English, we can feel separate from the world in the most literal sense. So why - despite our innate desire and need to expand our linguistic horizons - are we so hesitant to take up the challenge?
It is common to hear adults, or even young people, say that they are simply too old to learn a new language and that it is simply too difficult. And many - despite not wanting to admit it - hesitate because they don't feel comfortable making mistakes in front of other people. But is learning a language, as we get older, that hard?
The truth is that everyone can - and should - learn a new language, regardless of their age. Learning never really ends and, in many ways, our motivation to expand our linguistic horizons only grows with age.
Mawlana Hazar Imam has been reiterating the importance of learning new languages and, above all, knowing how to speak and read English, so that we have the best access to global knowledge.
Learning a new language is always a challenge, whatever the person's age. But for a senior it becomes something attractive because, in addition to occupying time well, it exercises the mind.
Engaging in a new language has several advantages, including:
Exercise the mind;
Feeling useful;
Occupying the time and making new friends - meeting people with the same interests;
Being able to travel to different places, where the language you have learned is spoken, which allows you not to be dependent on excursions or family members, giving you a feeling of fullness;
Allows you to get more active and excited.
If you're still not completely convinced, check out the testimonies of some students in Basic English and Intermediate English classes, by clicking on the following videos:
Testimony 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yBclevQEDg
Testimony 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOkGB1qH4LU
Testimony 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mA-eK46FRc
Testimony 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPaHo7zLGFo
To access English classes, contact Elderly Care members:
Shelina Amad (Lisbon) - 968 385 002
Mehrunissa Bhanji (Seixal) - 933 146 764
Google translation of the original article in Portuguese: https://the.ismaili/portugal/english4al ... m-connosco
English4All - Embark on this trip with us
Are you between 12 and 16 years old and would like to be fluent in the English language? Then this program is for you!
The Aga Khan Education Board (AKEB), in partnership with the Butterflies Learning Center, is launching the English4All program - English classes, taught at Cambridge, for young students aged between 12 and 16 years old. We will provide three levels of education:
- Young Learners - Starters, Movers and Flyers - introductory level to English - speaking, writing and everyday communication.
- Preliminary level (PET) - to develop fundamental language skills - general culture.
- First Certificate Level (FCE) - development of effective communication on various topics, with an emphasis on writing and analytical skills.
When?
From September 2021 to June 2022 - with the possibility of taking the Cambridge Exam at the end of the school year.
At where?
At the Ismaili Center, Lisbon*
Like?
You will take a scouting test at the beginning of September and then you will be integrated into the class that corresponds to your level of knowledge.
Tuition
English4All is the result of a partnership with the Butterflies Learning Centre, which allows these English classes to be made available at more affordable prices than those found in the market:
- Young Learners - Starters, Movers and Flyers: 47€/month/student
Preliminary Level (PET): 86€/month/student
- First Certificate Level (FCE): €140/month/student
- At the same time, you can also have access to a scholarship funded up to 50% by the Aga Khan Education Board (subject to the assessment of each student's financial situation and merit).
We want to help you develop functional English in an accessible way and also so that you can achieve a high degree of excellence both academically and professionally, as well as on a personal level.
Ready to sign up? Fill out this form with your parents: https://bit.ly/Formul árioEnglish4All
For more information, we are available at: [email protected](link sends email)
*If the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic does not allow, these classes will be held online.
English4All - Embark on this trip with us
Are you between 12 and 16 years old and would like to be fluent in the English language? Then this program is for you!
The Aga Khan Education Board (AKEB), in partnership with the Butterflies Learning Center, is launching the English4All program - English classes, taught at Cambridge, for young students aged between 12 and 16 years old. We will provide three levels of education:
- Young Learners - Starters, Movers and Flyers - introductory level to English - speaking, writing and everyday communication.
- Preliminary level (PET) - to develop fundamental language skills - general culture.
- First Certificate Level (FCE) - development of effective communication on various topics, with an emphasis on writing and analytical skills.
When?
From September 2021 to June 2022 - with the possibility of taking the Cambridge Exam at the end of the school year.
At where?
At the Ismaili Center, Lisbon*
Like?
You will take a scouting test at the beginning of September and then you will be integrated into the class that corresponds to your level of knowledge.
Tuition
English4All is the result of a partnership with the Butterflies Learning Centre, which allows these English classes to be made available at more affordable prices than those found in the market:
- Young Learners - Starters, Movers and Flyers: 47€/month/student
Preliminary Level (PET): 86€/month/student
- First Certificate Level (FCE): €140/month/student
- At the same time, you can also have access to a scholarship funded up to 50% by the Aga Khan Education Board (subject to the assessment of each student's financial situation and merit).
We want to help you develop functional English in an accessible way and also so that you can achieve a high degree of excellence both academically and professionally, as well as on a personal level.
Ready to sign up? Fill out this form with your parents: https://bit.ly/Formul árioEnglish4All
For more information, we are available at: [email protected](link sends email)
*If the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic does not allow, these classes will be held online.
Tut, a Language Used by Enslaved Africans, Is Resurfacing on Social Media
Rachel Pilgrim
Tue, August 17, 2021, 2:00 PM
For many of us who grew up reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou for our 9th grade English class, we remember Angelou trying to learn Tut, a complicated language used by enslaved Africans, with her friend Louise while the other kids were learning Pig Latin.
However, Tut has been the latest to enter the why-didn’t-we-learn-about-this-in-history-class forum as Black Americans have been rediscovering the lost dialect used amongst our enslaved ancestors.
According to NBC News, Tut was used in the 18th century to communicate covertly in front of slave masters. The words sound distinctively English, but require each letter of the English alphabet to have its own unique sound. For example, according to author Gloria McIlwain in the American Speech Journal, the letter i becomes “ay” and the letter h becomes “hash.” She says it’s how enslaved people in the South taught one another to read and write during a time when literacy was illegal.
African Americans are learning Tut and sharing videos, guides, and notes for speaking the language across different platforms, but some want to keep the language under wraps. Social media pages dedicated to teaching Tutnese have surfaced asking for the learning space to be exclusive to descendants of slavery, and the fear that Black people will have another cultural or social identifier coopted is a justified fear.
Tut isn’t the only language that Black Americans in the U.S. speak. Creole, in Louisiana, and Gullah, in South Carolina, are languages that have been culturally preserved amongst descendants of enslaved Africans and are still spoken today.
It is unsurprising that Tut or Tutnese was lost over the centuries; it’s unfortunately the fate that many contact languages meet over time. In a story for BBC, Nala H. Lee, a linguist at the National University of Singapore, says that when people judge contact languages, “People think of them as being less good or not real languages.” But in the last few months, Black Americans are ready to reclaim the voices of their ancestors one syllable at a time.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00776.html
Rachel Pilgrim
Tue, August 17, 2021, 2:00 PM
For many of us who grew up reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou for our 9th grade English class, we remember Angelou trying to learn Tut, a complicated language used by enslaved Africans, with her friend Louise while the other kids were learning Pig Latin.
However, Tut has been the latest to enter the why-didn’t-we-learn-about-this-in-history-class forum as Black Americans have been rediscovering the lost dialect used amongst our enslaved ancestors.
According to NBC News, Tut was used in the 18th century to communicate covertly in front of slave masters. The words sound distinctively English, but require each letter of the English alphabet to have its own unique sound. For example, according to author Gloria McIlwain in the American Speech Journal, the letter i becomes “ay” and the letter h becomes “hash.” She says it’s how enslaved people in the South taught one another to read and write during a time when literacy was illegal.
African Americans are learning Tut and sharing videos, guides, and notes for speaking the language across different platforms, but some want to keep the language under wraps. Social media pages dedicated to teaching Tutnese have surfaced asking for the learning space to be exclusive to descendants of slavery, and the fear that Black people will have another cultural or social identifier coopted is a justified fear.
Tut isn’t the only language that Black Americans in the U.S. speak. Creole, in Louisiana, and Gullah, in South Carolina, are languages that have been culturally preserved amongst descendants of enslaved Africans and are still spoken today.
It is unsurprising that Tut or Tutnese was lost over the centuries; it’s unfortunately the fate that many contact languages meet over time. In a story for BBC, Nala H. Lee, a linguist at the National University of Singapore, says that when people judge contact languages, “People think of them as being less good or not real languages.” But in the last few months, Black Americans are ready to reclaim the voices of their ancestors one syllable at a time.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00776.html
The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
In most languages, sounds can be re-arranged into any number of combinations. Not so in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language.
Languages, like human bodies, come in a variety of shapes—but only to a point. Just as people don’t sprout multiple heads, languages tend to veer away from certain forms that might spring from an imaginative mind. For example, one core property of human languages is known as duality of patterning: meaningful linguistic units (such as words) break down into smaller meaningless units (sounds), so that the words sap, pass, and asp involve different combinations of the same sounds, even though their meanings are completely unrelated.
It’s not hard to imagine that things could have been otherwise. In principle, we could have a language in which sounds relate holistically to their meanings—a high-pitched yowl might mean “finger,” a guttural purr might mean “dark,” a yodel might mean “broccoli,” and so on. But there are stark advantages to duality of patterning. Try inventing a lexicon of tens of thousands of distinct noises, all of which are easily distinguished, and you will probably find yourself wishing you could simply re-use a few snippets of sound in varying arrangements.
The sign for “lemon” resembles the motion of squeezing a lemon.
As Elizabeth Svoboda notes in her Nautilus article, “The Family That Couldn’t Say Hippopotamus,” the dominant thinking until fairly recently was that universal linguistic properties reflect genetic predispositions. Under this view, duality of patterning is much like an opposable thumb: It evolved within our species because it was advantageous, and now exists as part of our genetic heritage. We are born expecting language to have duality of patterning.
What to make, then, of the recent discovery of a language whose words are not made from smaller, meaningless units? Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a new sign language emerging in a village with high rates of inherited deafness in Israel’s Negev Desert. According to a report led by Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa, words in this language correspond to holistic gestures, much like the imaginary sound-based language described above, even though ABSL has a sizable vocabulary.
To linguists, this is akin to finding a planet on which matter is made up of molecules that don’t decompose into atoms. ABSL contrasts sharply with other sign languages like American Sign Language (ASL), which creates words by re-combining a small collection of gestural elements such as hand shapes, movements, and hand positions.
The documentary Voices From El-Sayed considered what would happen to the village when children living there started receiving cochlear implants.
ABSL provides fodder for researchers who reject the idea that there’s a genetic basis for the similarities found across languages. Instead, they argue, languages share certain properties because they all have to solve similar problems of communication under similar pressures, pressures that reflect the limits of human abilities to learn, remember, produce, and perceive information. The challenge, then, is to explain why ABSL is an outlier—if duality of patterning is the optimal solution to the problem of creating a large but manageable collection of words, why hasn’t ABSL made use of it?
One possible explanation is that the vocabulary of ABSL hasn’t yet reached a critical mass that would force it into a more combinatorial system for word-creation. This doesn’t look like the full story though. In a study by Tessa Verhoef of the University of Amsterdam, people tried to reproduce a mere 12 sounds of a “language” produced on a slide whistle. Each person’s attempts to replicate the language served as the new version of the language to be learned by the next subject, so that each new learner represented a “generation” in the life of the language. Over just 10 “generations,” learners began to change the original sounds to involve combined sequences of smaller sound patterns. The later iterations of the language were easier to learn than the original holistic sounds, suggesting there’s a learning advantage to breaking down even a very small number of complex sounds into smaller ingredients. In some cases, at least, duality of patterning kicks in at a surprisingly small number of “words.”
The signs of ABSL, though, may be easier to learn because many of them are concretely related to the things they symbolize—for example, the sign for “lemon” resembles the motion of squeezing a lemon. Another lab study led by Gareth Roberts of Yeshiva University found that both large vocabularies and abstract (as opposed to concrete) symbols encouraged the birth of duality of patterning in artificial languages. Concreteness may be easier to achieve in a gestural language than an auditory one, simply because you can illustrate more ideas using your hands than by making sounds with your mouth.
Researchers don’t yet have a clear answer for why ABSL looks as it does, but systematic lab studies may help solve this puzzle, as may the evolution of ABSL itself; Sandler and her colleagues see hints that ABSL is on the cusp of evolving a more combinatorial system. This intriguing language and the research it inspires may eventually tell us something profound about how languages emerge from the human mind, and why so many of them share some important similarities.
Julie Sedivy has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary, and is the author of Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. She is currently writing a book about losing and reclaiming a native tongue.
Watch documentary at:
https://nautil.us/blog/-the-unusual-lan ... ldnt-exist
In most languages, sounds can be re-arranged into any number of combinations. Not so in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language.
Languages, like human bodies, come in a variety of shapes—but only to a point. Just as people don’t sprout multiple heads, languages tend to veer away from certain forms that might spring from an imaginative mind. For example, one core property of human languages is known as duality of patterning: meaningful linguistic units (such as words) break down into smaller meaningless units (sounds), so that the words sap, pass, and asp involve different combinations of the same sounds, even though their meanings are completely unrelated.
It’s not hard to imagine that things could have been otherwise. In principle, we could have a language in which sounds relate holistically to their meanings—a high-pitched yowl might mean “finger,” a guttural purr might mean “dark,” a yodel might mean “broccoli,” and so on. But there are stark advantages to duality of patterning. Try inventing a lexicon of tens of thousands of distinct noises, all of which are easily distinguished, and you will probably find yourself wishing you could simply re-use a few snippets of sound in varying arrangements.
The sign for “lemon” resembles the motion of squeezing a lemon.
As Elizabeth Svoboda notes in her Nautilus article, “The Family That Couldn’t Say Hippopotamus,” the dominant thinking until fairly recently was that universal linguistic properties reflect genetic predispositions. Under this view, duality of patterning is much like an opposable thumb: It evolved within our species because it was advantageous, and now exists as part of our genetic heritage. We are born expecting language to have duality of patterning.
What to make, then, of the recent discovery of a language whose words are not made from smaller, meaningless units? Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a new sign language emerging in a village with high rates of inherited deafness in Israel’s Negev Desert. According to a report led by Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa, words in this language correspond to holistic gestures, much like the imaginary sound-based language described above, even though ABSL has a sizable vocabulary.
To linguists, this is akin to finding a planet on which matter is made up of molecules that don’t decompose into atoms. ABSL contrasts sharply with other sign languages like American Sign Language (ASL), which creates words by re-combining a small collection of gestural elements such as hand shapes, movements, and hand positions.
The documentary Voices From El-Sayed considered what would happen to the village when children living there started receiving cochlear implants.
ABSL provides fodder for researchers who reject the idea that there’s a genetic basis for the similarities found across languages. Instead, they argue, languages share certain properties because they all have to solve similar problems of communication under similar pressures, pressures that reflect the limits of human abilities to learn, remember, produce, and perceive information. The challenge, then, is to explain why ABSL is an outlier—if duality of patterning is the optimal solution to the problem of creating a large but manageable collection of words, why hasn’t ABSL made use of it?
One possible explanation is that the vocabulary of ABSL hasn’t yet reached a critical mass that would force it into a more combinatorial system for word-creation. This doesn’t look like the full story though. In a study by Tessa Verhoef of the University of Amsterdam, people tried to reproduce a mere 12 sounds of a “language” produced on a slide whistle. Each person’s attempts to replicate the language served as the new version of the language to be learned by the next subject, so that each new learner represented a “generation” in the life of the language. Over just 10 “generations,” learners began to change the original sounds to involve combined sequences of smaller sound patterns. The later iterations of the language were easier to learn than the original holistic sounds, suggesting there’s a learning advantage to breaking down even a very small number of complex sounds into smaller ingredients. In some cases, at least, duality of patterning kicks in at a surprisingly small number of “words.”
The signs of ABSL, though, may be easier to learn because many of them are concretely related to the things they symbolize—for example, the sign for “lemon” resembles the motion of squeezing a lemon. Another lab study led by Gareth Roberts of Yeshiva University found that both large vocabularies and abstract (as opposed to concrete) symbols encouraged the birth of duality of patterning in artificial languages. Concreteness may be easier to achieve in a gestural language than an auditory one, simply because you can illustrate more ideas using your hands than by making sounds with your mouth.
Researchers don’t yet have a clear answer for why ABSL looks as it does, but systematic lab studies may help solve this puzzle, as may the evolution of ABSL itself; Sandler and her colleagues see hints that ABSL is on the cusp of evolving a more combinatorial system. This intriguing language and the research it inspires may eventually tell us something profound about how languages emerge from the human mind, and why so many of them share some important similarities.
Julie Sedivy has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary, and is the author of Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. She is currently writing a book about losing and reclaiming a native tongue.
Watch documentary at:
https://nautil.us/blog/-the-unusual-lan ... ldnt-exist
Language Is the Scaffold of the Mind
Once we acquire language, we can live without it.
Can you imagine a mind without language? More specifically, can you imagine your mind without language? Can you think, plan, or relate to other people if you lack words to help structure your experiences?
Many great thinkers have drawn a strong connection between language and the mind. Oscar Wilde called language “the parent, and not the child, of thought”; Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”; and Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”
After all, language is what makes us human, what lies at the root of our awareness, our intellect, our sense of self. Without it, we cannot plan, cannot communicate, cannot think. Or can we?
Imagine growing up without words. You live in a typical industrialized household, but you are somehow unable to learn the language of your parents. That means that you do not have access to education; you cannot properly communicate with your family other than through a set of idiosyncratic gestures; you never get properly exposed to abstract ideas such as “justice” or “global warming.” All you know comes from direct experience with the world.
It might seem that this scenario is purely hypothetical. There aren’t any cases of language deprivation in modern industrialized societies, right? It turns out there are. Many deaf children born into hearing families face exactly this issue. They cannot hear and, as a result, do not have access to their linguistic environment. Unless the parents learn sign language, the child’s language access will be delayed and, in some cases, missing completely.
INNER VOICES: A set of brain regions within the left hemisphere, shown in color, responds strongly and selectively to language, but not to other thought-related processes.
Does our mind develop normally under such circumstances? Of course not. Language enables us to receive vast amounts of information we would have never acquired otherwise. The details of your parents’ wedding. The Declaration of Independence. The entrée section of the dinner menu. The entire richness of human experience condensed into a linear sequence of words. Take language away, and the amount of information you can acquire decreases dramatically.
The lack of language affects even functions that do not seem to be intrinsically “linguistic,” such as math. Developmental research shows that keeping track of exact numbers above four requires knowing the words for these numbers. Imagine trying to tell the difference between seven apples and eight apples. The task becomes almost impossible if you can’t count them—and you can’t count them if you never learn that “seven” is followed by “eight.” As a result of this language-number interdependency, many deaf children in industrialized societies fall behind in math, precisely because they did not learn to count early on.1
Without language, we cannot plan, cannot communicate, cannot think. Or can we?
Another part of your mind that needs language to develop properly is social cognition. Think about your interactions with your family and friends. Why is your mom upset? Why did your friend go inside the house just now? Understanding social situations requires inferring what the people around you are thinking.
This ability to infer another person’s thoughts is known as “theory of mind”; typically developing kids acquire this skill by age 5 or so. However, children with delayed language access have trouble imagining the mental state of other people.2 Moreover, brain regions involved in inferring others’ thoughts work differently in such children: They are active during all kinds of social situations, unable to properly distinguish scenarios that require mentalizing from those that do not.3 Theory of mind, therefore, is a prime example of a non-linguistic process that suffers if linguistic input is delayed.
So far, the evidence we have seen does suggest that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” However, what happens if language disappears once the mind is fully developed? Will we then lose the ability to use math and understand others?
Imagine you are a typical adult; let’s say you’re 40. You wake up one day, and suddenly, you realize that your language is gone. You look around the room, but no words come to mind to describe the objects you see. You’re starting to plan out your day, but no half-formed phrases rush through your mind. You unlock your smartphone, but, instead of text, you see a sea of squiggles. Desperate, you cry out for help, and someone rushes up to you—but, instead of speech, all you hear is meaningless murmur.
The condition I have just described is known as global aphasia. It arises from severe damage to the brain, often as a result of a massive stroke. While some aphasias are temporary, in some cases the damage is irreparable, and the person may lose language for life. In your case, let’s say that a dozen doctors examined you and said (or, you think they said) that nothing can be done. If the limits of your language mean the limits of your world, should you conclude the way you experience the world is now fundamentally limited? Do you even have a mind?
Desperate, you attempt to figure out what cognitive functions you still have left. Can you count? 1, 2, 3 … You take a pen and write 5+7=12. You get a little bolder and attempt to multiply 12 by 5 in your mind, then 12 by 51 on paper. It works! Turns out, losing language as an adult does not prevent you from using math.
You meet up with some friends. You cannot understand a word they say, but you try to gesticulate—at least it’s an attempt at a conversation. You notice that they exchange guilty looks, then start discussing something in hushed voices (no need, since you don’t know what they’re saying anyway). You realize that they each thought the other one was going to bring a gift. You chuckle. Even though you can’t really communicate with your friends anymore, you still know what’s on their mind.
My experience of the world is not made less by lack of language but is essentially unchanged.
Research on adult individuals with aphasia has demonstrated that math, theory of mind, and many other cognitive abilities are independent from language.4 Patients with severe language impairments perform comparably to the rest of us when asked to complete arithmetic tasks, reason about people’s intentions, determine physical causes of actions, or decide whether a drawing depicts a real-life event. Some of them play chess in their spare time. Some even engage in creative tasks. Soviet composer Vissarion Shebalin continued to write music even after a stroke that left him severely aphasic.
Neuroimaging evidence also supports the claim that language in adults is separate from the rest of cognition. In recent years, neuroscientists have isolated a network of brain regions (typically in the left hemisphere) that react almost exclusively to linguistic input.5 They respond to written sentences, spoken narratives, words, monologues, conversations, but will not activate in response to memory tasks, spatial reasoning, music, math, or social situations that do not involve dialogue. No wonder many patients with aphasia do not have impairments in other cognitive domains—language and other functions are housed in separate chunks of brain matter.
Ihave to admit, not all writers support Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s idea that language and thought are inseparable. Tom Lubbock, a British writer and illustrator whose language system gradually deteriorated because of a brain tumor, wrote in his memoir shortly before his death in 2011:
My language to describe things in the world is very small, limited. My thoughts when I look at the world are vast, limitless and normal, same as they ever were. My experience of the world is not made less by lack of language but is essentially unchanged.
So, what can we say about the role language plays in shaping our minds? Well, pick a mind that is still developing, and you will find that removing language will alter it for life. However, pick a mind that is fully formed and take all words away, and you will discover that the rest of cognition remains mostly intact. Our language is but a scaffold for our minds: indispensable during construction but not necessary for the building to remain in place.
Anna Ivanova is a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studies the neural basis of language and semantics under the wise guidance of Ev Fedorenko and Nancy Kanwisher. You can find her on Twitter as @neuranna.
https://nautil.us/issue/76/language/lan ... f-the-mind
Once we acquire language, we can live without it.
Can you imagine a mind without language? More specifically, can you imagine your mind without language? Can you think, plan, or relate to other people if you lack words to help structure your experiences?
Many great thinkers have drawn a strong connection between language and the mind. Oscar Wilde called language “the parent, and not the child, of thought”; Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”; and Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”
After all, language is what makes us human, what lies at the root of our awareness, our intellect, our sense of self. Without it, we cannot plan, cannot communicate, cannot think. Or can we?
Imagine growing up without words. You live in a typical industrialized household, but you are somehow unable to learn the language of your parents. That means that you do not have access to education; you cannot properly communicate with your family other than through a set of idiosyncratic gestures; you never get properly exposed to abstract ideas such as “justice” or “global warming.” All you know comes from direct experience with the world.
It might seem that this scenario is purely hypothetical. There aren’t any cases of language deprivation in modern industrialized societies, right? It turns out there are. Many deaf children born into hearing families face exactly this issue. They cannot hear and, as a result, do not have access to their linguistic environment. Unless the parents learn sign language, the child’s language access will be delayed and, in some cases, missing completely.
INNER VOICES: A set of brain regions within the left hemisphere, shown in color, responds strongly and selectively to language, but not to other thought-related processes.
Does our mind develop normally under such circumstances? Of course not. Language enables us to receive vast amounts of information we would have never acquired otherwise. The details of your parents’ wedding. The Declaration of Independence. The entrée section of the dinner menu. The entire richness of human experience condensed into a linear sequence of words. Take language away, and the amount of information you can acquire decreases dramatically.
The lack of language affects even functions that do not seem to be intrinsically “linguistic,” such as math. Developmental research shows that keeping track of exact numbers above four requires knowing the words for these numbers. Imagine trying to tell the difference between seven apples and eight apples. The task becomes almost impossible if you can’t count them—and you can’t count them if you never learn that “seven” is followed by “eight.” As a result of this language-number interdependency, many deaf children in industrialized societies fall behind in math, precisely because they did not learn to count early on.1
Without language, we cannot plan, cannot communicate, cannot think. Or can we?
Another part of your mind that needs language to develop properly is social cognition. Think about your interactions with your family and friends. Why is your mom upset? Why did your friend go inside the house just now? Understanding social situations requires inferring what the people around you are thinking.
This ability to infer another person’s thoughts is known as “theory of mind”; typically developing kids acquire this skill by age 5 or so. However, children with delayed language access have trouble imagining the mental state of other people.2 Moreover, brain regions involved in inferring others’ thoughts work differently in such children: They are active during all kinds of social situations, unable to properly distinguish scenarios that require mentalizing from those that do not.3 Theory of mind, therefore, is a prime example of a non-linguistic process that suffers if linguistic input is delayed.
So far, the evidence we have seen does suggest that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” However, what happens if language disappears once the mind is fully developed? Will we then lose the ability to use math and understand others?
Imagine you are a typical adult; let’s say you’re 40. You wake up one day, and suddenly, you realize that your language is gone. You look around the room, but no words come to mind to describe the objects you see. You’re starting to plan out your day, but no half-formed phrases rush through your mind. You unlock your smartphone, but, instead of text, you see a sea of squiggles. Desperate, you cry out for help, and someone rushes up to you—but, instead of speech, all you hear is meaningless murmur.
The condition I have just described is known as global aphasia. It arises from severe damage to the brain, often as a result of a massive stroke. While some aphasias are temporary, in some cases the damage is irreparable, and the person may lose language for life. In your case, let’s say that a dozen doctors examined you and said (or, you think they said) that nothing can be done. If the limits of your language mean the limits of your world, should you conclude the way you experience the world is now fundamentally limited? Do you even have a mind?
Desperate, you attempt to figure out what cognitive functions you still have left. Can you count? 1, 2, 3 … You take a pen and write 5+7=12. You get a little bolder and attempt to multiply 12 by 5 in your mind, then 12 by 51 on paper. It works! Turns out, losing language as an adult does not prevent you from using math.
You meet up with some friends. You cannot understand a word they say, but you try to gesticulate—at least it’s an attempt at a conversation. You notice that they exchange guilty looks, then start discussing something in hushed voices (no need, since you don’t know what they’re saying anyway). You realize that they each thought the other one was going to bring a gift. You chuckle. Even though you can’t really communicate with your friends anymore, you still know what’s on their mind.
My experience of the world is not made less by lack of language but is essentially unchanged.
Research on adult individuals with aphasia has demonstrated that math, theory of mind, and many other cognitive abilities are independent from language.4 Patients with severe language impairments perform comparably to the rest of us when asked to complete arithmetic tasks, reason about people’s intentions, determine physical causes of actions, or decide whether a drawing depicts a real-life event. Some of them play chess in their spare time. Some even engage in creative tasks. Soviet composer Vissarion Shebalin continued to write music even after a stroke that left him severely aphasic.
Neuroimaging evidence also supports the claim that language in adults is separate from the rest of cognition. In recent years, neuroscientists have isolated a network of brain regions (typically in the left hemisphere) that react almost exclusively to linguistic input.5 They respond to written sentences, spoken narratives, words, monologues, conversations, but will not activate in response to memory tasks, spatial reasoning, music, math, or social situations that do not involve dialogue. No wonder many patients with aphasia do not have impairments in other cognitive domains—language and other functions are housed in separate chunks of brain matter.
Ihave to admit, not all writers support Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s idea that language and thought are inseparable. Tom Lubbock, a British writer and illustrator whose language system gradually deteriorated because of a brain tumor, wrote in his memoir shortly before his death in 2011:
My language to describe things in the world is very small, limited. My thoughts when I look at the world are vast, limitless and normal, same as they ever were. My experience of the world is not made less by lack of language but is essentially unchanged.
So, what can we say about the role language plays in shaping our minds? Well, pick a mind that is still developing, and you will find that removing language will alter it for life. However, pick a mind that is fully formed and take all words away, and you will discover that the rest of cognition remains mostly intact. Our language is but a scaffold for our minds: indispensable during construction but not necessary for the building to remain in place.
Anna Ivanova is a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studies the neural basis of language and semantics under the wise guidance of Ev Fedorenko and Nancy Kanwisher. You can find her on Twitter as @neuranna.
https://nautil.us/issue/76/language/lan ... f-the-mind
United Nations Declares 7 July As World Kiswahili Day
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=nOohAUmyb7g
The United Nations has declared 7 July each year as the world’s official day to celebrate the Swahili language. It is the first African language to be recognised by the UN and have its own day of celebration. Swahili is also the only African language to have been officially recognised by the African Union. Swahili, also known by its native name Kiswahili, is a Bantu language and the native language of the Swahili people.The exact number of Swahili speakers, be they native or second-language speakers, is estimated to be between 100 million to 200 million.
In 2018, South Africa legalised the teaching of Swahili in schools as an optional subject to begin in 2020. Botswana followed in 2020, and Namibia plans to introduce the language as well. Shikomor (or Comorian), an official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore), is closely related to Swahili and is sometimes considered a dialect of Swahili.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=nOohAUmyb7g
The United Nations has declared 7 July each year as the world’s official day to celebrate the Swahili language. It is the first African language to be recognised by the UN and have its own day of celebration. Swahili is also the only African language to have been officially recognised by the African Union. Swahili, also known by its native name Kiswahili, is a Bantu language and the native language of the Swahili people.The exact number of Swahili speakers, be they native or second-language speakers, is estimated to be between 100 million to 200 million.
In 2018, South Africa legalised the teaching of Swahili in schools as an optional subject to begin in 2020. Botswana followed in 2020, and Namibia plans to introduce the language as well. Shikomor (or Comorian), an official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore), is closely related to Swahili and is sometimes considered a dialect of Swahili.
The Providence Journal
'Fearless' one teacher calls her — East Providence High School student speaks five languages
Linda Borg, The Providence Journal
Fri, January 21, 2022, 4:15 AM
EAST PROVIDENCE — Dilara Ozdemir describes her profound passion for languages — she speaks five, not counting Latin — by quoting the great South African leader Nelson Mandela.
“If you teach a man a language he understands, that will go to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
Ozdemir came here from Turkey in eighth grade, an observant Muslim who spoke little English but already had a fascination with the sounds of foreign words, which are, after all, a form of music, like birds chatting in the trees.
Dilara Ozdemir of East Providence, a student from Turkey, "will take on any challenge," says Jessica D'Orsi, one of her teachers. "She has this passion for learning about people and culture.”
“When I was three years old, my aunt asked me what the color of a nearby bridge was, and I replied “blue” in English, even though at that time the only language I could speak was Turkish,” Ozdemir wrote in an essay. “When I was five years old, I would claim that I knew Chinese, just because I knew how to say “Ni Hao,” which means “Hello.”
Honored for the 'breadth and depth of her interest in languages'
Last week, Ozdemir was one of two students to receive the Student of the Year award from the Rhode Island Foreign Language Association.
The association wrote, “Ms. Ozdemir impressed the Awards Committee with the breadth and depth of her interest in languages. She has been in the U.S. for four years, learning English, and yet she has taken on Latin, French, American Sign Language, Arabic and Spanish. ... One of her teachers describes her as a 'linguist' who ‘always wants to know more about language — whether discrete grammar points, the etymology of certain words or the connections of language and culture."
The other Student of the Year is Chiara Andrews, a Westerly High School senior who has studied French, Spanish and AP Italian. She is also studying German on her own.
Ozdemir and her family belong to a community called Hizmet, which is dedicated to doing acts of goodwill, such as building schools. In Turkey, the group was reviled by the ruling class and ultimately blamed for staging a coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who then ordered the arrests of women and children and the terrorizing of members of the community, she said.
Worried they might be targeted, Ozdemir’s parents obtained visas and escaped to the United States, where they stayed with a friend in Rhode Island. The family settled in Riverside, which reminds her of her native country because of its proximity to the ocean.
Dilara Ozdemir has applied to 13 colleges and universities, including Brown, Harvard, MIT, Boston College and Wellesley. Math is her major, for now at least.
'She’s fearless and determined'
“Last year, every single day I’d get up and bike for an hour to clear my head,” she said. Thursday. “My family is from the northeast part of Turkey near the Black Sea. It really feels like home here, being near the ocean.”
When Ozdemir arrived, she was assigned to classes for multi-language learners. Today, she is enrolled in three Advanced Placement classes and three honors classes.
Jessica D’Orsi, who teaches English and multi-language learners at East Providence High School, said that in her 15 years of teaching she has never met a student like Ozdemir.
“She’s fearless and determined. What I admire most is she will take on any challenge. She has this passion for learning about people and culture.”
The feeling is mutual. Ozdemir visits Miss D’Orsi every morning.
“She always believed in me,” she said. “I was very stressed out about taking all these AP classes. She told me, ‘You’re going to do fine.’”
Then, D’Orsi told her AP teachers, “Don’t go easy on her. She can do it.”
“We bonded over love of reading,” D’Orsi said. “We shared books.”
A math major — for now
Nothing is too daunting for Ozdemir. She has applied to 13 colleges and universities, including Brown, Harvard, MIT, Boston College and Wellesley. Math is her major, for now at least.
“Until I was eight, I wanted to be a pediatrician. Then I wanted to be a math teacher," she said. “Then I figured I didn’t have the patience to work with kids. I’m thinking of being a math professor now.”
Math has much in common with language: they both have highly structured rules. Math, at its most rarified, approaches poetry.
While it is Ozdemir’s mind that first captures new friends’ attention, it is her heart that leaves the most lasting impression.
One recent Thursday morning, she said hello to a new student and he responded in Turkish, something she taught him.
“One of my biggest dreams is to be able to speak many languages so I can touch people’s hearts," she said. "And this passion of learning languages helps me get closer to my dream every day.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fe ... 05255.html
'Fearless' one teacher calls her — East Providence High School student speaks five languages
Linda Borg, The Providence Journal
Fri, January 21, 2022, 4:15 AM
EAST PROVIDENCE — Dilara Ozdemir describes her profound passion for languages — she speaks five, not counting Latin — by quoting the great South African leader Nelson Mandela.
“If you teach a man a language he understands, that will go to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
Ozdemir came here from Turkey in eighth grade, an observant Muslim who spoke little English but already had a fascination with the sounds of foreign words, which are, after all, a form of music, like birds chatting in the trees.
Dilara Ozdemir of East Providence, a student from Turkey, "will take on any challenge," says Jessica D'Orsi, one of her teachers. "She has this passion for learning about people and culture.”
“When I was three years old, my aunt asked me what the color of a nearby bridge was, and I replied “blue” in English, even though at that time the only language I could speak was Turkish,” Ozdemir wrote in an essay. “When I was five years old, I would claim that I knew Chinese, just because I knew how to say “Ni Hao,” which means “Hello.”
Honored for the 'breadth and depth of her interest in languages'
Last week, Ozdemir was one of two students to receive the Student of the Year award from the Rhode Island Foreign Language Association.
The association wrote, “Ms. Ozdemir impressed the Awards Committee with the breadth and depth of her interest in languages. She has been in the U.S. for four years, learning English, and yet she has taken on Latin, French, American Sign Language, Arabic and Spanish. ... One of her teachers describes her as a 'linguist' who ‘always wants to know more about language — whether discrete grammar points, the etymology of certain words or the connections of language and culture."
The other Student of the Year is Chiara Andrews, a Westerly High School senior who has studied French, Spanish and AP Italian. She is also studying German on her own.
Ozdemir and her family belong to a community called Hizmet, which is dedicated to doing acts of goodwill, such as building schools. In Turkey, the group was reviled by the ruling class and ultimately blamed for staging a coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who then ordered the arrests of women and children and the terrorizing of members of the community, she said.
Worried they might be targeted, Ozdemir’s parents obtained visas and escaped to the United States, where they stayed with a friend in Rhode Island. The family settled in Riverside, which reminds her of her native country because of its proximity to the ocean.
Dilara Ozdemir has applied to 13 colleges and universities, including Brown, Harvard, MIT, Boston College and Wellesley. Math is her major, for now at least.
'She’s fearless and determined'
“Last year, every single day I’d get up and bike for an hour to clear my head,” she said. Thursday. “My family is from the northeast part of Turkey near the Black Sea. It really feels like home here, being near the ocean.”
When Ozdemir arrived, she was assigned to classes for multi-language learners. Today, she is enrolled in three Advanced Placement classes and three honors classes.
Jessica D’Orsi, who teaches English and multi-language learners at East Providence High School, said that in her 15 years of teaching she has never met a student like Ozdemir.
“She’s fearless and determined. What I admire most is she will take on any challenge. She has this passion for learning about people and culture.”
The feeling is mutual. Ozdemir visits Miss D’Orsi every morning.
“She always believed in me,” she said. “I was very stressed out about taking all these AP classes. She told me, ‘You’re going to do fine.’”
Then, D’Orsi told her AP teachers, “Don’t go easy on her. She can do it.”
“We bonded over love of reading,” D’Orsi said. “We shared books.”
A math major — for now
Nothing is too daunting for Ozdemir. She has applied to 13 colleges and universities, including Brown, Harvard, MIT, Boston College and Wellesley. Math is her major, for now at least.
“Until I was eight, I wanted to be a pediatrician. Then I wanted to be a math teacher," she said. “Then I figured I didn’t have the patience to work with kids. I’m thinking of being a math professor now.”
Math has much in common with language: they both have highly structured rules. Math, at its most rarified, approaches poetry.
While it is Ozdemir’s mind that first captures new friends’ attention, it is her heart that leaves the most lasting impression.
One recent Thursday morning, she said hello to a new student and he responded in Turkish, something she taught him.
“One of my biggest dreams is to be able to speak many languages so I can touch people’s hearts," she said. "And this passion of learning languages helps me get closer to my dream every day.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fe ... 05255.html
Re: Languages
I Gave Up English for Lent
Last year, I gave up English for Lent. For 40 days, with the exception of conversations, my own activities — the books I read, the television I watched, the podcasts I heard — had to be in one of the non-English languages I could understand, which included Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Chinese, to varying degrees. As a college senior living in New Jersey at the time, I also made an exception for school; I had to graduate, after all, from a university in a country where English is a necessary part of getting by.
This was a challenge that had been years in the making. Although I speak Korean with my parents at home, English — which I first learned at the age of 4 — is my strongest language. Growing up in Hong Kong, I spent 14 years at international schools with many classmates who, like me, spoke better English than they did their parents’ native tongues. I knew Korean, Chinese and English by the age of 10, but I couldn’t speak all of these languages in the breezy, cosmopolitan way I wanted. Instead, the three asserted a hierarchy in which English became dominant, challenging my relationships with people and traditions closest to my heart.
At the core of the Christian practice of Lent, which takes place in the 40 days after Ash Wednesday to prepare for Easter Sunday, is the goal of spiritually cleansing oneself in memory of Jesus’ 40-day fast in the desert. By combining intentional sacrifices with prayer and reflection, Lent offers a consistent space to inspect one’s life. Sacrifices can range from giving up common indulgences to adopting new habits; nonbelievers, too, have increasingly adopted the secular elements of Lenten practice as a means for self-reflection and growth.
As someone who was approaching Lent after a long hiatus from faith, I wanted to give up a precious thing whose absence would make room for something revelatory. I wondered: What if I gave up language?
At first, the idea terrified me. But my apprehension convinced me that this would be a good test both of who I was and what I could do. Giving up English would deconstruct not only an integral part of my identity, but also the way in which I daily build it up. And isn’t this deconstruction at the heart of Lent, at the end of which Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and the opportunity to begin again?
And so the 40 days began. In lieu of podcasts like The Daily, I would wake up and listen to 10-minute newsreels from Brazil, where I’d spent a gap year after high school. As the frigid New Jersey winter slowly turned to spring, I would listen to stories about Carnaval and vaccination rates in São Paulo. In the evenings, I would make my way through Spanish-language Netflix shows or scour news websites in Korean.
One morning, I wrote in my journal about a dream I’d had about a close friend who I had fallen out with. I forced myself to describe our dream-dialogue in a language he didn’t speak. “This language was never ours,” I wrote, in Portuguese, “but I will try to express what I saw and felt anyway.” Although writing in a language foreign to our relationship impersonalized the hurt, it also doubled the frustration I felt: first at having lost the friendship, and again at being unable to write about it in the cathartically expressive way I needed.
Through processes like these, I was reminded of how English — or rather, the ease with which I could inhabit it and feel as if I didn’t need anything else — was intricately linked to my relationships with my family and my faith. Throughout my childhood, I followed my parents to a Korean Catholic church in Hong Kong, where my inability to fully understand the priest’s Korean-language sermons made it difficult for my faith to grow. To this day, all the prayers I have memorized are in Korean, but reciting them brings less spiritual comfort than it does a familiar ease, in the way a lullaby might.
Outside of church, I faced a similar roadblock when I wanted to have deeper, more honest conversations with my parents. Plagued by the belief that there was a language barrier between us, I would refrain from sharing certain things: like the literature I was reading, what these books taught me about myself, or reflections I had about my changing relationship to religion. How could I explain, in a language I associated with their parenting and my childhood, that my nascent adult identity demanded a different kind of prayer — one that, instead of asking for simple forgiveness, broached topics of misplaced intimacies, difficult decisions and a desire to grow apart from my parents so I could become a person of my own?
But as I worked to express myself fully in multiple tongues, the power that a single language held in my life began to weaken. If I had the willpower to eschew English for 40 days, I could channel the same energy into intentionally enriching other languages and other relationships. It was a challenge my parents partook in all the time. If they, as nonnative speakers of English, made the effort to understand me, why couldn’t I do the same for them?
I challenged myself to broach difficult topics with my parents for the first time: What it meant to be a person of color in America, how it felt to endure heartbreak and how I had returned to a faith that they, having moved back to Korea, had begun to relinquish. In the process, I became a better daughter, writer, friend and a person of faith, if faith is intrinsically linked to the belief that one is but a small part in a greater cosmos of things. When we feel trapped and overwhelmed by the immediate world we inhabit, it is consoling to know that lovely moments are being lived and breathed in languages we might not even speak.
Navigating a linguistically plural world isn’t the purview of only those who speak multiple tongues. Those who know just one can read books in translation, for example, or read translators’ accounts of working with their source texts. You could listen to music from another country, even if it is in a language you do not understand, or watch a foreign-language film with subtitles. By doing so, you will encounter new genres, new sounds and new metaphors that will enhance the way you engage not only with the rest of the world, but with yourself. What is uniquely yours to offer can be gleaned only by what you can — and have already — received from the generosity of others, and an annual tradition of intentionality may be a great opportunity to do just that.
All of us, no matter what languages we are born speaking and which ones we later adopt, are constantly coming to terms with parts of our identities that simultaneously define and confound us. Any chance to grasp onto what confuses us most about ourselves and turn that into clarity is a welcome one. For me, this opportunity arrived in the form of Lent, which to our benefit arrives every year just as winter is becoming a fresh, welcoming spring: an invitation to prepare ourselves to grow in ways we may not expect.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Last year, I gave up English for Lent. For 40 days, with the exception of conversations, my own activities — the books I read, the television I watched, the podcasts I heard — had to be in one of the non-English languages I could understand, which included Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Chinese, to varying degrees. As a college senior living in New Jersey at the time, I also made an exception for school; I had to graduate, after all, from a university in a country where English is a necessary part of getting by.
This was a challenge that had been years in the making. Although I speak Korean with my parents at home, English — which I first learned at the age of 4 — is my strongest language. Growing up in Hong Kong, I spent 14 years at international schools with many classmates who, like me, spoke better English than they did their parents’ native tongues. I knew Korean, Chinese and English by the age of 10, but I couldn’t speak all of these languages in the breezy, cosmopolitan way I wanted. Instead, the three asserted a hierarchy in which English became dominant, challenging my relationships with people and traditions closest to my heart.
At the core of the Christian practice of Lent, which takes place in the 40 days after Ash Wednesday to prepare for Easter Sunday, is the goal of spiritually cleansing oneself in memory of Jesus’ 40-day fast in the desert. By combining intentional sacrifices with prayer and reflection, Lent offers a consistent space to inspect one’s life. Sacrifices can range from giving up common indulgences to adopting new habits; nonbelievers, too, have increasingly adopted the secular elements of Lenten practice as a means for self-reflection and growth.
As someone who was approaching Lent after a long hiatus from faith, I wanted to give up a precious thing whose absence would make room for something revelatory. I wondered: What if I gave up language?
At first, the idea terrified me. But my apprehension convinced me that this would be a good test both of who I was and what I could do. Giving up English would deconstruct not only an integral part of my identity, but also the way in which I daily build it up. And isn’t this deconstruction at the heart of Lent, at the end of which Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and the opportunity to begin again?
And so the 40 days began. In lieu of podcasts like The Daily, I would wake up and listen to 10-minute newsreels from Brazil, where I’d spent a gap year after high school. As the frigid New Jersey winter slowly turned to spring, I would listen to stories about Carnaval and vaccination rates in São Paulo. In the evenings, I would make my way through Spanish-language Netflix shows or scour news websites in Korean.
One morning, I wrote in my journal about a dream I’d had about a close friend who I had fallen out with. I forced myself to describe our dream-dialogue in a language he didn’t speak. “This language was never ours,” I wrote, in Portuguese, “but I will try to express what I saw and felt anyway.” Although writing in a language foreign to our relationship impersonalized the hurt, it also doubled the frustration I felt: first at having lost the friendship, and again at being unable to write about it in the cathartically expressive way I needed.
Through processes like these, I was reminded of how English — or rather, the ease with which I could inhabit it and feel as if I didn’t need anything else — was intricately linked to my relationships with my family and my faith. Throughout my childhood, I followed my parents to a Korean Catholic church in Hong Kong, where my inability to fully understand the priest’s Korean-language sermons made it difficult for my faith to grow. To this day, all the prayers I have memorized are in Korean, but reciting them brings less spiritual comfort than it does a familiar ease, in the way a lullaby might.
Outside of church, I faced a similar roadblock when I wanted to have deeper, more honest conversations with my parents. Plagued by the belief that there was a language barrier between us, I would refrain from sharing certain things: like the literature I was reading, what these books taught me about myself, or reflections I had about my changing relationship to religion. How could I explain, in a language I associated with their parenting and my childhood, that my nascent adult identity demanded a different kind of prayer — one that, instead of asking for simple forgiveness, broached topics of misplaced intimacies, difficult decisions and a desire to grow apart from my parents so I could become a person of my own?
But as I worked to express myself fully in multiple tongues, the power that a single language held in my life began to weaken. If I had the willpower to eschew English for 40 days, I could channel the same energy into intentionally enriching other languages and other relationships. It was a challenge my parents partook in all the time. If they, as nonnative speakers of English, made the effort to understand me, why couldn’t I do the same for them?
I challenged myself to broach difficult topics with my parents for the first time: What it meant to be a person of color in America, how it felt to endure heartbreak and how I had returned to a faith that they, having moved back to Korea, had begun to relinquish. In the process, I became a better daughter, writer, friend and a person of faith, if faith is intrinsically linked to the belief that one is but a small part in a greater cosmos of things. When we feel trapped and overwhelmed by the immediate world we inhabit, it is consoling to know that lovely moments are being lived and breathed in languages we might not even speak.
Navigating a linguistically plural world isn’t the purview of only those who speak multiple tongues. Those who know just one can read books in translation, for example, or read translators’ accounts of working with their source texts. You could listen to music from another country, even if it is in a language you do not understand, or watch a foreign-language film with subtitles. By doing so, you will encounter new genres, new sounds and new metaphors that will enhance the way you engage not only with the rest of the world, but with yourself. What is uniquely yours to offer can be gleaned only by what you can — and have already — received from the generosity of others, and an annual tradition of intentionality may be a great opportunity to do just that.
All of us, no matter what languages we are born speaking and which ones we later adopt, are constantly coming to terms with parts of our identities that simultaneously define and confound us. Any chance to grasp onto what confuses us most about ourselves and turn that into clarity is a welcome one. For me, this opportunity arrived in the form of Lent, which to our benefit arrives every year just as winter is becoming a fresh, welcoming spring: an invitation to prepare ourselves to grow in ways we may not expect.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Languages
When You Hear the F-Word, Try Picking Up More Than One Meaning
People occasionally complain to me that so many today seem to lean on profanity rather than utilizing the other lexical resources at their disposal. “Why do they have to keep using that word over and over? What is that?” I was asked by someone of a certain age, for example, when I spoke at a gathering of academics last week.
We all can guess which word he meant — it starts with f — but I don’t hear it the way he does. It’s partly because we sometimes miss the richness of meaning in our profanity and partly because we tend to miss the richness of how we use the rest of our vocabulary. Our default sense of a word involves a single meaning: Even when a word such as “candle,” typically used as a noun, is used as a verb, it still means holding a candle or a light up to better see something. But so very many words are used in a wide range of meanings, and while idioms are part of that range, even they are only the beginning.
The morning before the event I spoke at, for example, I watched the new Blu-ray restoration of the first “A Star Is Born” film, from 1937. (Film fans should get a look; this is one of the major early Technicolor films, and it now looks splendid.) In one scene, Norman (played beautifully by Fredric March, whose purported membership in the Ku Klux Klan I took issue with last fall) playfully replies to ribbing from Esther (Janet Gaynor) with: “And don’t throw that up to me now.”
I had never heard that expression but easily found it in an older book, and its meaning is evident. To use it back then meant that one knew not only the basic meaning of the word “throw” but also its use in this expression, which is so abstractly connected to the action of hurling or tossing that it qualifies as a separate piece of mental data. The expression is, put differently, an idiom — a different “word” in itself, under ways that many linguists analyze how language is stored and produced in the brain.
But there are intermediate cases between basic meaning and bona fide idiom. When we say that someone threw up, is that an idiom? Part of the essence of an idiom is that you wouldn’t immediately know its meaning out of context — “chewing the fat,” “being stood up,” “throw that up to me,” etc. In contrast, the relationship of “throw up” to throwing is, upon a bit of reflection, rather obvious; it’s why people also say “hurl” or “upchuck” to mean the same thing. If people are learning English, do we consider their recognition that this is how we routinely refer to that action as having grasped one of our idioms? Not really. “Throw up,” in this sense, is a word that happens to have two parts that we write separately.
What we think of as one word with one meaning can in use actually be many, many more words, and not just in the sense of stark and obvious homonyms such as “spring” as a season and “spring” as a coil. This is beautifully illustrated with my favorite example: “pick up.” Its basic meaning is to lift something. But we also pick up our kids from school. Someone might pick someone up at a bar. You pick up a disease, or someone says you’ve picked up the habit of overusing certain salty words. In all those cases, we see a relationship with the “lift” meaning. Few would say that when we talk of picking up our kids, we are tossing in an idiom. Rather, these uses of “pick up” are something more mundane than idioms; they are words of their own.
That these are separate words is especially clear when the relationship with lifting gets more abstract: A car picks up speed; a cocktail picks up your spirits; we pick up a sound from far off; we pick up where we left off. Yes, “pick” and “up” are words in their own right, but in this case a combination of the two is the source of what are actually many more words, and this is the case with countless others. Think a bit about the different things “make up” can mean, for example. Yet no one would be accused of overusing the words “pick” or “make,” much less the word “up.” The key is how we use them.
And this brings us back to the profanity issue. When we perceive a word as used a lot or too much, it’s often being used to mean multiple things. The casual usage of “like” divides into about four different usages, some having drifted pretty dramatically from its stock definition. The N-word that ends with “er” and the N-word that ends with “a” are, for all intents and purposes (idiom alert!), different words now, and the latter is also developing into, of all things, new pronouns. What we might hear as a mere matter of yet another F-bomb is actually a vocabular sapling sprouting apace, with branches growing in different directions. As I put it in “Nine Nasty Words” (with wording a notch too zesty to print here), the F-word can convey destruction, deception, dismissal, dauntingness and down-to-earthness.
Russian speakers seem to get this more readily about profanity than English speakers. There is a tradition among Russians of cherishing its richness; for example, a Russian I am especially fond of has given me dense, sober volumes chronicling and exploring their profanity. Hence, what some bemoan as too much profanity is, to me, the equivalent of the glories of what Russians call mat, or dirty language. As the writer Edward Topol wrote in “Dermo!: The Real Russian Tolstoy Never Used,” a nonnative speaker who learns “even one-third of this lexicon can be sure of being the most popular and honored foreigner at any Russian gathering.”
Linguists are sometimes thought to be permissive about usage matters, but we recognize how fertile English’s assortment of four-letter words — our mat — and even our unsung words like “pick up” and “make up” are. Think further of “turn out,” including the Black English usage of it I mentioned recently, and this is why the linguist hears a lexical smorgasbord in normal people expressing themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/opin ... 778d3e6de3
People occasionally complain to me that so many today seem to lean on profanity rather than utilizing the other lexical resources at their disposal. “Why do they have to keep using that word over and over? What is that?” I was asked by someone of a certain age, for example, when I spoke at a gathering of academics last week.
We all can guess which word he meant — it starts with f — but I don’t hear it the way he does. It’s partly because we sometimes miss the richness of meaning in our profanity and partly because we tend to miss the richness of how we use the rest of our vocabulary. Our default sense of a word involves a single meaning: Even when a word such as “candle,” typically used as a noun, is used as a verb, it still means holding a candle or a light up to better see something. But so very many words are used in a wide range of meanings, and while idioms are part of that range, even they are only the beginning.
The morning before the event I spoke at, for example, I watched the new Blu-ray restoration of the first “A Star Is Born” film, from 1937. (Film fans should get a look; this is one of the major early Technicolor films, and it now looks splendid.) In one scene, Norman (played beautifully by Fredric March, whose purported membership in the Ku Klux Klan I took issue with last fall) playfully replies to ribbing from Esther (Janet Gaynor) with: “And don’t throw that up to me now.”
I had never heard that expression but easily found it in an older book, and its meaning is evident. To use it back then meant that one knew not only the basic meaning of the word “throw” but also its use in this expression, which is so abstractly connected to the action of hurling or tossing that it qualifies as a separate piece of mental data. The expression is, put differently, an idiom — a different “word” in itself, under ways that many linguists analyze how language is stored and produced in the brain.
But there are intermediate cases between basic meaning and bona fide idiom. When we say that someone threw up, is that an idiom? Part of the essence of an idiom is that you wouldn’t immediately know its meaning out of context — “chewing the fat,” “being stood up,” “throw that up to me,” etc. In contrast, the relationship of “throw up” to throwing is, upon a bit of reflection, rather obvious; it’s why people also say “hurl” or “upchuck” to mean the same thing. If people are learning English, do we consider their recognition that this is how we routinely refer to that action as having grasped one of our idioms? Not really. “Throw up,” in this sense, is a word that happens to have two parts that we write separately.
What we think of as one word with one meaning can in use actually be many, many more words, and not just in the sense of stark and obvious homonyms such as “spring” as a season and “spring” as a coil. This is beautifully illustrated with my favorite example: “pick up.” Its basic meaning is to lift something. But we also pick up our kids from school. Someone might pick someone up at a bar. You pick up a disease, or someone says you’ve picked up the habit of overusing certain salty words. In all those cases, we see a relationship with the “lift” meaning. Few would say that when we talk of picking up our kids, we are tossing in an idiom. Rather, these uses of “pick up” are something more mundane than idioms; they are words of their own.
That these are separate words is especially clear when the relationship with lifting gets more abstract: A car picks up speed; a cocktail picks up your spirits; we pick up a sound from far off; we pick up where we left off. Yes, “pick” and “up” are words in their own right, but in this case a combination of the two is the source of what are actually many more words, and this is the case with countless others. Think a bit about the different things “make up” can mean, for example. Yet no one would be accused of overusing the words “pick” or “make,” much less the word “up.” The key is how we use them.
And this brings us back to the profanity issue. When we perceive a word as used a lot or too much, it’s often being used to mean multiple things. The casual usage of “like” divides into about four different usages, some having drifted pretty dramatically from its stock definition. The N-word that ends with “er” and the N-word that ends with “a” are, for all intents and purposes (idiom alert!), different words now, and the latter is also developing into, of all things, new pronouns. What we might hear as a mere matter of yet another F-bomb is actually a vocabular sapling sprouting apace, with branches growing in different directions. As I put it in “Nine Nasty Words” (with wording a notch too zesty to print here), the F-word can convey destruction, deception, dismissal, dauntingness and down-to-earthness.
Russian speakers seem to get this more readily about profanity than English speakers. There is a tradition among Russians of cherishing its richness; for example, a Russian I am especially fond of has given me dense, sober volumes chronicling and exploring their profanity. Hence, what some bemoan as too much profanity is, to me, the equivalent of the glories of what Russians call mat, or dirty language. As the writer Edward Topol wrote in “Dermo!: The Real Russian Tolstoy Never Used,” a nonnative speaker who learns “even one-third of this lexicon can be sure of being the most popular and honored foreigner at any Russian gathering.”
Linguists are sometimes thought to be permissive about usage matters, but we recognize how fertile English’s assortment of four-letter words — our mat — and even our unsung words like “pick up” and “make up” are. Think further of “turn out,” including the Black English usage of it I mentioned recently, and this is why the linguist hears a lexical smorgasbord in normal people expressing themselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Languages
BBC
Why Urdu language draws ire of India’s right-wing
Zoya Mateen - BBC News, Delhi
Sun, May 15, 2022, 6:36 PM
Mohammed Ghalib, a katib - traditional calligrapher - in Urdu Bazaar, Old Delhi, India.
Urdu is a hugely popular and widespread language in India but some want to disown it
Who does Urdu belong to?
India's right-wing seems to think it's a foreign import, forced upon by so-called Islamic invaders.
The latest fracas happened in April when a reporter from a far-right new channel barged into a popular fast-food chain and heckled its employees for labelling a bag of snacks in what she thought was Urdu. The label turned out to be in Arabic, which many say underlines the broad-brush attempt to classify anything that has roots in Islamic culture as the same.
Last year, clothing retailer Fabindia was forced to withdraw an advert whose campaign title was in Urdu after protests from ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders.
In the past, politicians elected to state assemblies have been barred from taking oath in Urdu; artists have been stopped from painting Urdu graffiti; and cities and neighbourhoods have been renamed. Petitions have been filed seeking the removal of Urdu words from school textbooks.
Such attacks on Urdu, many believe, is part of a larger push to marginalise India's Muslim population.
"It clearly shows that there is a pattern of attack on symbols associated with Muslims," says Rizwan Ahmad, professor of sociolinguistics at Qatar University.
Others say it also fits a broader right-wing agenda of the political rewriting of India's past.
"The only way that the political project of shackling Indian languages by religion can proceed is by cutting off modern Indians from a huge amount of their history," historian Audrey Truschke says.
"That severing may serve the current government's interests, but it is a cruel denial of heritage for everyone else."
The BBC tried to reach out to three BJP leaders in connection with this story but met with no response.
A supple and expressive language, Urdu has been the preferred choice for some of India's most famous poets and writers. Some of India's most acclaimed writing has come from Urdu writers like Saadat Hassan Manto and Ismat Chughtai.
Urdu's elegance and emphasis on smooth diction have inspired both fiery nationalist poetry and romantic ghazals (semi-classical songs). It has also been the beating heart of Bollywood songs.
Opponents of the language say that Urdu belongs to Muslims whereas Hindus only speak Hindi. But history and lived experiences show quite the opposite.
What we know as Urdu today can be traced back to Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, all of which arrived in India through waves of trade and conquests.
"This common tongue was born out of the cultural hybridisation that happened in the Indian subcontinent," historian Alok Rai says.
"And it acquired different names over its evolution: Hindavi, Hindustani, Hindi, Urdu or Rekhta."
Dr Rai says that 'Urdu' - using quotes to differentiate it from its spoken forms - was the literary style invented in the last years of the Mughal dynasty in the late 18th Century by the aristocracy that clustered around the courts in Delhi.
This 'Urdu' was not seen as a Muslim language, as it is today, but had a class element - it was the tongue spoken by the elite of north India, which included Hindus as well.
'Hindi', on the other hand, was the literary style that developed in the late 19-20th Century in present-day Uttar Pradesh state, drawing from the same common base "but seeking to mark a difference".
While 'Urdu' borrowed words mostly from Persian - the elite lingua franca of medieval India - 'Hindi' took them from Sanskrit, the language of ancient Hindu texts.
"So both the languages rest on a shared grammatical base," Dr Rai explains, "but both Hindi and Urdu have also for political reasons developed myths of origin" .
What Dr Rai says is that speakers of both communities laid claim to what was a common language but ended up dividing it out of their anxiety of maintaining a separate identity.
"The whole situation would be slightly farcical if it didn't have such tragic consequences," he says.
The right-wing thinks Urdu belongs to Muslims whereas Hindus only speak Hindi - but that is far from the truth
The division was strengthened under British rule, who began to identify Hindi with Hindus, and Urdu with Muslims. But the portrayal of Urdu as foreign is also not new in right-wing discourse.
Mr Ahmad says Hindu nationalists in the late 19th Century claimed legitimacy for Hindi as the official language of courts in north India. The British had changed the official language from Persian to Urdu in 1837.
The division reached its peak in the years leading to 1947 when India was partitioned into two separate states. "Urdu became one of the causes pursued by the Muslim League [which endorsed the idea of separate state for India's Muslims] and "an access to mobilisation for the demand of Pakistan", Dr Rai says.
Not surprisingly Urdu became an easy target - Uttar Pradesh banned it in schools and Dr Ahmad says that a lot of Hindus also abandoned the language at the time.
Dr Truschke says that with Urdu, the right-wing has tried to create a past which doesn't exist: "If Urdu is suddenly supposed to be an exclusively Muslim language, are we never to speak again of the many Hindus who have written in Urdu or that some of our earliest Hindi manuscripts are in Perso-Arabic script?"
Schools in Uttar Pradesh state had banned Urdu in schools after Partition
Also, what about Urdu words which are liberally used in Hindi speech?
"The word jeb or pocket comes from Arabic via Persian. What is the Hindi equivalent? Probably none. And what about the timeless words like mohabbat (love) or dil (heart)?," Dr Ahmad says.
At the same time, languages are also markers of a faith, he adds.
"Urdu-speaking Muslims are more likely to use the word maghrib for sunset than Hindus. This is not different from how the language of upper caste Hindus shows difference from that of the lower caste in the same village - each language exists on a continuum."
Mr Rai says that attempts to remove Urdu from Hindi has "degraded" the latter.
"This Hindi is not the language of popular speech, it is sterile and devoid of emotional resonance."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/wh ... 31982.html
Why Urdu language draws ire of India’s right-wing
Zoya Mateen - BBC News, Delhi
Sun, May 15, 2022, 6:36 PM
Mohammed Ghalib, a katib - traditional calligrapher - in Urdu Bazaar, Old Delhi, India.
Urdu is a hugely popular and widespread language in India but some want to disown it
Who does Urdu belong to?
India's right-wing seems to think it's a foreign import, forced upon by so-called Islamic invaders.
The latest fracas happened in April when a reporter from a far-right new channel barged into a popular fast-food chain and heckled its employees for labelling a bag of snacks in what she thought was Urdu. The label turned out to be in Arabic, which many say underlines the broad-brush attempt to classify anything that has roots in Islamic culture as the same.
Last year, clothing retailer Fabindia was forced to withdraw an advert whose campaign title was in Urdu after protests from ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders.
In the past, politicians elected to state assemblies have been barred from taking oath in Urdu; artists have been stopped from painting Urdu graffiti; and cities and neighbourhoods have been renamed. Petitions have been filed seeking the removal of Urdu words from school textbooks.
Such attacks on Urdu, many believe, is part of a larger push to marginalise India's Muslim population.
"It clearly shows that there is a pattern of attack on symbols associated with Muslims," says Rizwan Ahmad, professor of sociolinguistics at Qatar University.
Others say it also fits a broader right-wing agenda of the political rewriting of India's past.
"The only way that the political project of shackling Indian languages by religion can proceed is by cutting off modern Indians from a huge amount of their history," historian Audrey Truschke says.
"That severing may serve the current government's interests, but it is a cruel denial of heritage for everyone else."
The BBC tried to reach out to three BJP leaders in connection with this story but met with no response.
A supple and expressive language, Urdu has been the preferred choice for some of India's most famous poets and writers. Some of India's most acclaimed writing has come from Urdu writers like Saadat Hassan Manto and Ismat Chughtai.
Urdu's elegance and emphasis on smooth diction have inspired both fiery nationalist poetry and romantic ghazals (semi-classical songs). It has also been the beating heart of Bollywood songs.
Opponents of the language say that Urdu belongs to Muslims whereas Hindus only speak Hindi. But history and lived experiences show quite the opposite.
What we know as Urdu today can be traced back to Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, all of which arrived in India through waves of trade and conquests.
"This common tongue was born out of the cultural hybridisation that happened in the Indian subcontinent," historian Alok Rai says.
"And it acquired different names over its evolution: Hindavi, Hindustani, Hindi, Urdu or Rekhta."
Dr Rai says that 'Urdu' - using quotes to differentiate it from its spoken forms - was the literary style invented in the last years of the Mughal dynasty in the late 18th Century by the aristocracy that clustered around the courts in Delhi.
This 'Urdu' was not seen as a Muslim language, as it is today, but had a class element - it was the tongue spoken by the elite of north India, which included Hindus as well.
'Hindi', on the other hand, was the literary style that developed in the late 19-20th Century in present-day Uttar Pradesh state, drawing from the same common base "but seeking to mark a difference".
While 'Urdu' borrowed words mostly from Persian - the elite lingua franca of medieval India - 'Hindi' took them from Sanskrit, the language of ancient Hindu texts.
"So both the languages rest on a shared grammatical base," Dr Rai explains, "but both Hindi and Urdu have also for political reasons developed myths of origin" .
What Dr Rai says is that speakers of both communities laid claim to what was a common language but ended up dividing it out of their anxiety of maintaining a separate identity.
"The whole situation would be slightly farcical if it didn't have such tragic consequences," he says.
The right-wing thinks Urdu belongs to Muslims whereas Hindus only speak Hindi - but that is far from the truth
The division was strengthened under British rule, who began to identify Hindi with Hindus, and Urdu with Muslims. But the portrayal of Urdu as foreign is also not new in right-wing discourse.
Mr Ahmad says Hindu nationalists in the late 19th Century claimed legitimacy for Hindi as the official language of courts in north India. The British had changed the official language from Persian to Urdu in 1837.
The division reached its peak in the years leading to 1947 when India was partitioned into two separate states. "Urdu became one of the causes pursued by the Muslim League [which endorsed the idea of separate state for India's Muslims] and "an access to mobilisation for the demand of Pakistan", Dr Rai says.
Not surprisingly Urdu became an easy target - Uttar Pradesh banned it in schools and Dr Ahmad says that a lot of Hindus also abandoned the language at the time.
Dr Truschke says that with Urdu, the right-wing has tried to create a past which doesn't exist: "If Urdu is suddenly supposed to be an exclusively Muslim language, are we never to speak again of the many Hindus who have written in Urdu or that some of our earliest Hindi manuscripts are in Perso-Arabic script?"
Schools in Uttar Pradesh state had banned Urdu in schools after Partition
Also, what about Urdu words which are liberally used in Hindi speech?
"The word jeb or pocket comes from Arabic via Persian. What is the Hindi equivalent? Probably none. And what about the timeless words like mohabbat (love) or dil (heart)?," Dr Ahmad says.
At the same time, languages are also markers of a faith, he adds.
"Urdu-speaking Muslims are more likely to use the word maghrib for sunset than Hindus. This is not different from how the language of upper caste Hindus shows difference from that of the lower caste in the same village - each language exists on a continuum."
Mr Rai says that attempts to remove Urdu from Hindi has "degraded" the latter.
"This Hindi is not the language of popular speech, it is sterile and devoid of emotional resonance."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/wh ... 31982.html
Recording India’s Linguistic Riches as Leaders Push Hindi as Nation’s Tongue
Ganesh Devy has spent decades documenting India’s hundreds of distinct languages. Up next: a 12,000-year history of India he hopes will help counter the government’s Hindu-first campaign.
Ganesh Narayan Devy has spearheaded an enormous scholarly effort to chronicle India’s rich linguistic diversity.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
By Sameer Yasir
June 11, 2022, 3:00 a.m. ET
DHARWAD, India — The task was gargantuan: assembling a team of more than 3,500 language specialists, academics and enthusiastic amateurs to determine just how many distinct languages still exist in India, a country of stunning linguistic diversity.
Ganesh Narayan Devy has been obsessed with that question since, as a young scholar of literature, he came across a linguistic census from 1971 that listed 108 mother tongues spoken by Indians. At the end of the report, at No. 109, it said “all others.”
“I wondered what ‘all others’ could be,” he said.
It turns out to be a huge number: His team’s survey, perhaps the most exhaustive such effort ever in India, has researched 780 languages currently being used in the country, with hundreds more left to be studied.
India’s Constitution, in contrast, lists 22 languages, and the last government census in 2011 named 121 “major” languages with 10,000 speakers or more.
Mr. Devy’s findings, which he has been gradually publishing in a series of scholarly volumes, come at a sensitive time, as the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing to adopt Hindi as the national language, part of its broader Hindu-first vision for India.
As his language research is being rolled out, Mr. Devy has immersed himself in a new project that takes on what is perhaps an even bigger and more contentious issue in India’s culture wars: the country’s long history.
His “The Origins of Indian Civilization and Histories of India” aims to trace the trajectory of the entire subcontinent since the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago. He has recruited 80 historians from around the world to work with him.
The ambitious work is intended as a rejoinder to the campaign by India’s governing party to rewrite the nation’s history books, including by excising sections on Muslim rulers and changing the Muslim names for places.
“History is being taught to spread political bigotry in this country,” Mr. Devy said. “Someone needed to show a mirror to the ruling class.”
His passions for both India’s languages and the advent and course of its civilization converge in his work with India’s vast population of long-oppressed Adivasis, or “original people.”
Adivasi is an umbrella term for Indigenous groups in India, covering a population of more than 100 million people, with a tremendous diversity in ethnicities, culture, languages and even language families.
Adivasi idols and artifacts at Vaacha, the Museum of Voice, at the Adivasi Academy in Tejgarh, India. The academy was founded by Mr. Devy.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Many of these languages have already died, or are fast disappearing. And when a language goes extinct, it’s not only words that are lost.
Language is the way, Mr. Devy said, that a community constructs its ideas of time and space. People who abandon their first language to take on another often lose this distinct perspective along with it, he said.
“The world may be one scene out there, but the language constructs it in a unique way,” he said. “So this unique worldview is lost.”
For decades, India has been hemorrhaging languages, having lost over 300 since independence in 1947, Mr. Devy said, with many more on the verge of disappearing as the number of speakers drops below 10,000.
Conducting his research for the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, Mr. Devy said, was like walking into a graveyard littered with corpses.
He described how a woman of the Boa tribe on the Andaman Islands who died in 2010 would, during her final years, “speak a lot with birds because there was no one around to speak her language.”
His research, which received no government funding, has been published in 50 of what will ultimately comprise close to 100 volumes. The books capture a language’s history, samples of songs and stories, and important terms. He started the project with his own savings; the Tata Trusts, an Indian philanthropic organization, has since contributed about $100,000.
Books about India’s linguistic diversity edited by Mr. Devy.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
His linguistic research has taken him all across India, from the Himalayas where he said he thought the cold would kill him, to hill tribes living in jungles. And sometimes his research has challenged his own worldview.
“While collecting songs from the Banjara community, they insisted that I must honor them by accepting the gift they give me,” Mr. Devy said, referring to a community of nomadic traders. “The highest respect is expressed among them by asking the guest to eat the ear of a roasted goat. I had to accept it, despite being a vegetarian for decades.”
Many of the 3,500 people who have contributed to the language project are amateur scholars who share Mr. Devy’s obsession.
In Orissa State, where he was collecting language samples from tribal areas, a driver employed in a government office had made it a habit to jot down new or strange words he heard from people in villages. “He had done it for all his working life,” Mr. Devy said, “without knowing if his ‘research’ ever would be of any use. He gave away his entire notebook to me, his treasure trove.”
While Hindi is India’s most widely spoken native language, Mr. Devy said the current government inflates the total, with what he said are nearly 50 separate languages counted under the “Hindi” banner.
“Bhojpuri — spoken by more than 50 million, with its own cinema, theater, literature, vocabulary and style — is shown as ‘Hindi,’” he said.
Amit Shah, India’s powerful home minister, has often promoted the idea of using Hindi to replace English as the de facto national language of communication.
“If there is one language that has the ability to string the nation together in unity, it is the Hindi language,” Mr. Shah said in 2019.
India’s Constitution designates both Hindi and English as official languages for government business, but it’s not compulsory to teach Hindi in public schools in some states, and many millions of Indians do not speak the language.
The government wants to change that.
“Time has come to make the official language an important part of the unity of the country,” Mr. Shah said in April, staking out a stance that generates resentment among Indians who do not speak Hindi
Mr. Devy suggested the government’s efforts could backfire.
“Whenever there is a war on your mother tongue, there is division — and identity becomes strong,” he said.
Many Hindus, Mr. Devy noted, do not speak Hindi as their first language. “People in the south do not look at Hinduism as being Hindi-based,” he said. “Far from it, they think the tolerant version of Hinduism that they developed through the centuries is the more authentic Hinduism.”
Mr. Devy was born in 1950, in Bhor, a small village in Maharashtra State. When he was 10 his father went bankrupt, forcing his son to start working at 15.
Among other jobs, he worked in a mine in the coastal state of Goa. To improve his language skills, he recalled, he read 300 pages of English-language books daily.
He eventually earned a master’s degree in English literature and wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Sri Aurobindo, a nationalist pioneer in India.
After teaching English for 16 years at the university level, he quit in 1996 and soon moved to a village in Gujarat State that is home to many Indigenous tribes. There, he set up the Adivasi Academy, which has a multilingual school, a health center and a library of over 60,000 books, including a section devoted to tribal archives.
Mr. Devy lecturing at the Adivasi Academy in May.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Mr. Devy has long been active in social justice causes, and recently coordinated several peaceful protests against a new citizenship law that critics say is unconstitutional because it discriminates based on religion, chipping away at the state’s secular foundation.
In 2015, dozens of authors and poets castigated the Modi government over the killing of Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi, a critic of idol worship who spoke out against deadly attacks by right-wing Hindu mobs against Muslims, and who was himself shot dead by gunmen.
Adivasi tribal artifacts displayed under a tree at the academy.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
When India’s prestigious National Academy of Letters failed to speak out against the killing, Mr. Devy returned its award — India’s highest literary honor — given to him in 1992 for his critically acclaimed book “After Amnesia.”
“They can kill me, too,” Mr. Devy said, adding, “I am ready to die, but I will not stop.”
Adivasi musical instruments on display at the Adivasi Academy.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
For all his social activism, his life’s work remains India’s languages and history.
In his research, he found dozens of secret languages spoken by tribal communities as a way to keep their communications from prying ears, including researchers eager to decode the mystery.
He has discovered a form of Portuguese spoken in dozens of Indian villages in coastal areas. In the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, there are 16 languages that, combined, have 200 words for snow, including one for “snow falling when the moon is up.”
Recording the rich tapestry of India’s languages, Mr. Devy is convinced, has a role to play in keeping India a multicultural state, as it has been for millennia.
So does telling a comprehensive history that emphasizes evidence over ideology.
“We will restore every bit of history that they are destroying,” he said. “It will take time, but we will win.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Ganesh Narayan Devy has spearheaded an enormous scholarly effort to chronicle India’s rich linguistic diversity.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
By Sameer Yasir
June 11, 2022, 3:00 a.m. ET
DHARWAD, India — The task was gargantuan: assembling a team of more than 3,500 language specialists, academics and enthusiastic amateurs to determine just how many distinct languages still exist in India, a country of stunning linguistic diversity.
Ganesh Narayan Devy has been obsessed with that question since, as a young scholar of literature, he came across a linguistic census from 1971 that listed 108 mother tongues spoken by Indians. At the end of the report, at No. 109, it said “all others.”
“I wondered what ‘all others’ could be,” he said.
It turns out to be a huge number: His team’s survey, perhaps the most exhaustive such effort ever in India, has researched 780 languages currently being used in the country, with hundreds more left to be studied.
India’s Constitution, in contrast, lists 22 languages, and the last government census in 2011 named 121 “major” languages with 10,000 speakers or more.
Mr. Devy’s findings, which he has been gradually publishing in a series of scholarly volumes, come at a sensitive time, as the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing to adopt Hindi as the national language, part of its broader Hindu-first vision for India.
As his language research is being rolled out, Mr. Devy has immersed himself in a new project that takes on what is perhaps an even bigger and more contentious issue in India’s culture wars: the country’s long history.
His “The Origins of Indian Civilization and Histories of India” aims to trace the trajectory of the entire subcontinent since the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago. He has recruited 80 historians from around the world to work with him.
The ambitious work is intended as a rejoinder to the campaign by India’s governing party to rewrite the nation’s history books, including by excising sections on Muslim rulers and changing the Muslim names for places.
“History is being taught to spread political bigotry in this country,” Mr. Devy said. “Someone needed to show a mirror to the ruling class.”
His passions for both India’s languages and the advent and course of its civilization converge in his work with India’s vast population of long-oppressed Adivasis, or “original people.”
Adivasi is an umbrella term for Indigenous groups in India, covering a population of more than 100 million people, with a tremendous diversity in ethnicities, culture, languages and even language families.
Adivasi idols and artifacts at Vaacha, the Museum of Voice, at the Adivasi Academy in Tejgarh, India. The academy was founded by Mr. Devy.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Many of these languages have already died, or are fast disappearing. And when a language goes extinct, it’s not only words that are lost.
Language is the way, Mr. Devy said, that a community constructs its ideas of time and space. People who abandon their first language to take on another often lose this distinct perspective along with it, he said.
“The world may be one scene out there, but the language constructs it in a unique way,” he said. “So this unique worldview is lost.”
For decades, India has been hemorrhaging languages, having lost over 300 since independence in 1947, Mr. Devy said, with many more on the verge of disappearing as the number of speakers drops below 10,000.
Conducting his research for the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, Mr. Devy said, was like walking into a graveyard littered with corpses.
He described how a woman of the Boa tribe on the Andaman Islands who died in 2010 would, during her final years, “speak a lot with birds because there was no one around to speak her language.”
His research, which received no government funding, has been published in 50 of what will ultimately comprise close to 100 volumes. The books capture a language’s history, samples of songs and stories, and important terms. He started the project with his own savings; the Tata Trusts, an Indian philanthropic organization, has since contributed about $100,000.
Books about India’s linguistic diversity edited by Mr. Devy.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
His linguistic research has taken him all across India, from the Himalayas where he said he thought the cold would kill him, to hill tribes living in jungles. And sometimes his research has challenged his own worldview.
“While collecting songs from the Banjara community, they insisted that I must honor them by accepting the gift they give me,” Mr. Devy said, referring to a community of nomadic traders. “The highest respect is expressed among them by asking the guest to eat the ear of a roasted goat. I had to accept it, despite being a vegetarian for decades.”
Many of the 3,500 people who have contributed to the language project are amateur scholars who share Mr. Devy’s obsession.
In Orissa State, where he was collecting language samples from tribal areas, a driver employed in a government office had made it a habit to jot down new or strange words he heard from people in villages. “He had done it for all his working life,” Mr. Devy said, “without knowing if his ‘research’ ever would be of any use. He gave away his entire notebook to me, his treasure trove.”
While Hindi is India’s most widely spoken native language, Mr. Devy said the current government inflates the total, with what he said are nearly 50 separate languages counted under the “Hindi” banner.
“Bhojpuri — spoken by more than 50 million, with its own cinema, theater, literature, vocabulary and style — is shown as ‘Hindi,’” he said.
Amit Shah, India’s powerful home minister, has often promoted the idea of using Hindi to replace English as the de facto national language of communication.
“If there is one language that has the ability to string the nation together in unity, it is the Hindi language,” Mr. Shah said in 2019.
India’s Constitution designates both Hindi and English as official languages for government business, but it’s not compulsory to teach Hindi in public schools in some states, and many millions of Indians do not speak the language.
The government wants to change that.
“Time has come to make the official language an important part of the unity of the country,” Mr. Shah said in April, staking out a stance that generates resentment among Indians who do not speak Hindi
Mr. Devy suggested the government’s efforts could backfire.
“Whenever there is a war on your mother tongue, there is division — and identity becomes strong,” he said.
Many Hindus, Mr. Devy noted, do not speak Hindi as their first language. “People in the south do not look at Hinduism as being Hindi-based,” he said. “Far from it, they think the tolerant version of Hinduism that they developed through the centuries is the more authentic Hinduism.”
Mr. Devy was born in 1950, in Bhor, a small village in Maharashtra State. When he was 10 his father went bankrupt, forcing his son to start working at 15.
Among other jobs, he worked in a mine in the coastal state of Goa. To improve his language skills, he recalled, he read 300 pages of English-language books daily.
He eventually earned a master’s degree in English literature and wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Sri Aurobindo, a nationalist pioneer in India.
After teaching English for 16 years at the university level, he quit in 1996 and soon moved to a village in Gujarat State that is home to many Indigenous tribes. There, he set up the Adivasi Academy, which has a multilingual school, a health center and a library of over 60,000 books, including a section devoted to tribal archives.
Mr. Devy lecturing at the Adivasi Academy in May.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Mr. Devy has long been active in social justice causes, and recently coordinated several peaceful protests against a new citizenship law that critics say is unconstitutional because it discriminates based on religion, chipping away at the state’s secular foundation.
In 2015, dozens of authors and poets castigated the Modi government over the killing of Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi, a critic of idol worship who spoke out against deadly attacks by right-wing Hindu mobs against Muslims, and who was himself shot dead by gunmen.
Adivasi tribal artifacts displayed under a tree at the academy.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
When India’s prestigious National Academy of Letters failed to speak out against the killing, Mr. Devy returned its award — India’s highest literary honor — given to him in 1992 for his critically acclaimed book “After Amnesia.”
“They can kill me, too,” Mr. Devy said, adding, “I am ready to die, but I will not stop.”
Adivasi musical instruments on display at the Adivasi Academy.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
For all his social activism, his life’s work remains India’s languages and history.
In his research, he found dozens of secret languages spoken by tribal communities as a way to keep their communications from prying ears, including researchers eager to decode the mystery.
He has discovered a form of Portuguese spoken in dozens of Indian villages in coastal areas. In the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, there are 16 languages that, combined, have 200 words for snow, including one for “snow falling when the moon is up.”
Recording the rich tapestry of India’s languages, Mr. Devy is convinced, has a role to play in keeping India a multicultural state, as it has been for millennia.
So does telling a comprehensive history that emphasizes evidence over ideology.
“We will restore every bit of history that they are destroying,” he said. “It will take time, but we will win.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3
ELC programme reaches new heights
Access to consistent and good quality English language learning in Central Asia and the Middle East is variable and, particularly in remote districts, finding qualified English language training is a major challenge. In response, the Jamati institutions launched the English Language Connections (ELC) programme, which is growing fast.
Proficiency in the English language is essential for accessing quality higher education, employment with better earnings potential, and international business opportunities.
The English Language Connections (ELC) programme was launched as a pilot in September 2020, as a partnership between the Council for Canada and the Council for Afghanistan. The goal was to develop an internationally recognized English language teaching programme. The instruction of English learning is based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), an international standard for describing language ability.
The initial plan was to send four skilled teachers to Afghanistan. Due to Covid the team had to pivot and rethink its approach. The delivery of the pilot was re-designed as virtual classrooms using a well-established learning platform called Off2Class and delivered through Zoom. “Learning a language when you are an adult is a challenge because one may lack study skills, time and confidence,” said Farah Babul, International Curriculum Design Lead. “The English language programme for our adult Jamats is designed to make language learning a fun, engaging and social experience where adults learn language that will be useful for getting jobs, making friends and practical tasks like shopping.”
The pilot ELC programme included building English skills of teachers within our institutions. Approximately 100 teachers as learners in Afghanistan were selected by the Council for Afghanistan. After an initial learner assessment, virtual classroom assignments were made. Each class of 10-12 learners was assigned a TKN volunteer Educator and a Teaching Assistant.
The pilot team was made up of 38 TKN and a non-TKN volunteers with professional backgrounds in their specified role, with recruitment support from the TKN Global Office to ensure we were leading in best practice to become the standard by which English language initiatives were designed. “The ELC programme is changing the lives of students in Afghanistan, India, Syria, Turkey, Iran and elsewhere,” said Nusri Hassam, Curriculum Lead for Iran. “This is all due to the courage and competency of international teachers giving freely of their TKN and many of whom have bonded and made some lifelong friendships as they continue to pave the path for ELC year 3 coming up next.”
The success of the pilot was due to the professional expertise of every volunteer and the project managers in each country. “Having the opportunity to teach English to our brothers and sisters in Afghanistan is not only fulfilling but it has been pretty incredible. Watching their enthusiasm and growth has been a true gift.” said Farzana Karmali, Curriculum Lead for Afghanistan. “A virus that turned the rest of the world upside down also gave birth to an online programme created new possibilities for our Jamat in other parts of the world. We were able to create something positive out of an otherwise negative circumstance, and the connections that now exist between our students and staff will hopefully impact them well beyond the programme.”
ELC has grown to the countries of Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, India, Turkey, and UAE, with over 200 international volunteers filling roles in programme management, academics, teaching assistants and coaches. “The dedication, commitment and professionalism of both the Afghanistan and international volunteers has made our English language project so successful. To facilitate English language learning to individuals in our Jamat in the farthest areas of Afghanistan with technology will have lasting impact,” said Ehsamuddin Dilawar, Chairman of the Aga Khan Education Board for Afghanistan.
In the two years that ELC has been running, these are some of the major accomplishments:
- Initial results are demonstrating growing improvement of English skills of murids in the programme
- Growth of English language projects to include industry best English language platforms for virtual classrooms (Off2Class) and self-paced learning (Learning Upgrade)
- The thirst, enthusiasm and personal commitment of learners to invest time to improve their English to benefit present and future generations.
- The tremendous growth from the initial 100 learners in Afghanistan to an approximate, One thousand-sixty (1960) learners in the English Language Connections programme. Approximately 230 learners are in Afghanistan, 61 in Syria, 44 in Iran in virtual classrooms using Off2Class and 225 in India, - 1300 in Turkey, 290 in Afghanistan, 25 in the UAE learning English through Learning Upgrade.
- The professional expertise, resiliency, incredible commitment, and tireless drive of the over 160 international volunteers to help improve the lives of the murids they serve
“I feel very humbled and blessed to be able to put a smile on our students’ faces every week and play a small part in improving the quality of their lives, personally and professionally,” said Educator Nadia Gilani.
“In doing so, we are gaining much more ourselves. I look forward to our class every week, and it gives me immense joy to see perfect attendance. It has given me an insight into their lives, their culture, their language learning barriers, and so much more. It is indeed an enriching experience for me as an educator. It is aptly said, 'Once a teacher, always a student!' I love what I do, and I’m eternally grateful for this opportunity.”
https://the.ismaili/tkn/elc-programme-r ... -173435533
What should Kiswahili tell the world?
Saba Saba Day is coming: What should Kiswahili tell the world?
Tanzania's founding President Mwalimu Julius Nyerere.
I am in a celebration mood, and I hope you will join me, as indeed, we have cause to celebrate.
The only cloud on my mind just now is the colossal loss of Mzee Joe Kadhi, the doyen, grand master and teacher of all of us who aspire to quality journalistic writing.
My more knowledgeable colleagues continue to give us descriptions and evaluations of this exceptional media man, a major contributor to our NMG tradition.
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Austin Bukenya: Kiswahili World Day a Thanksgiving present for me https://nation.africa/kenya/life-and-st ... e--3632280
Back to the celebrations, however, I have two main reasons for feeling glad and grateful. You know, one of the secrets of living a long and happy life is this ability to recognise good happenings and feeling good about them. It recharges you and enables you to continue with life’s struggles with renewed vigour. So, here I am celebrating, first, the completion of the first half of 2022 and, secondly, the approaching “Saba Saba” Day.
Regarding the half year, every season comes with its challenges, and 2022 is no exception, with its soaring prices and even the rising temperature of the political contests.
On second thoughts, however, do you notice that these six months are the first solid spell of time, since early 2020, that we have lived without any restrictions, closures, curfews and lockdowns?
Life may never be quite the same again, and we should not completely let our guard, and our masks, down, as Warrior Kagwe and his team reminded us recently. Still, the newfound freedom and confidence is worth a toast and a humble Alhamdulillah.
As for the “Saba Saba”, it is the seventh day of the seventh month. Indeed, it is this date that people mark with various significances.
1990 Kamukunji Rally
In Kenya, as I told you, its freshest memory is of the 1990 Kamukunji Rally, a landmark in the struggle for democratic space.
In Tanzania, in my young adult days, we celebrated 7th July in memory of the date in 1954 when Mwalimu Julius Nyerere launched the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the party that led Tanganyika to uhuru. It later merged with the Afro-Shiraz party of Zanzibar to form Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the current ruling party in the United Republic of Tanzania.
The latest “Saba Saba”, however, is the Kiswahili Language World Day (Siku ya Kiswahili Duniani) to be observed next Thursday, July 7. This will be the inaugural celebration of the day, recommended and authorised by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). I asked you to plan and prepare your own celebrations of this day, when Kiswahili is officially elevated to the status of a global language. I am sure you are all set for the celebrations.
The East African Kiswahili Commission will, appropriately, host the main East African function in Zanzibar, where the Commission is headquartered. I will tell you more about the “hafla” (function and party) after witnessing the events.
I have, however, been asked to participate in a Symposium (a baraza) at the celebrations, and this is what made me come to you, not only to share with you my excitement but also to seek your advice on what I should say. Incidentally, the proceeding will be live and face-to-face this time, not virtual as such events have mostly been since the outbreak of the pandemic.
Down to business, six main speakers, one from each member state of the East African Community, will present the main topics at the Symposium. The eminent presenters include my close friends, Prof Mlinzi Mulokozi of Tanzania and Kenya’s Prof Clara Momanyi, the most fluent speaker of Kiswahili I know. Do I not have reason to fear and tremble at the prospect of sharing a platform with these stalwarts and experts of our beloved language?
Official language
Anyway, my concern is the content of my contribution to the baraza, and this is where I need your advice. My topic is “Kiswahili as an official language of the East African Community: challenges and the future”. I need not give you the whole title in Kiswahili, but my main focus as I ponder what to say is with the key words there, like “lugha rasmi” (official language), “changamoto” (challenges) and “mustakabali” (future, prospects). I would love to hear your views regarding these matters, and if I get them in time, I will share them with the august audience in Zanzibar.
Meanwhile, I am bubbling with excitement at the prospect of actively marking the Kiswahili Language World Day, with the East African Kiswahili Commission, and in Zanzibar. Each of these three has special significance for me. About Kiswahili, I need not din my “addiction” into your ears yet again. My cup truly overflows as I see it receive its long-deserved recognition on the international scene.
The East African Kiswahili Commission has played a surprisingly strong role in the evolution of my linguistic thinking. Although I was involved in formulating the framework for its establishment and modus operandi, I now realise that that very process contributed very richly to my awareness of how language operates and should operate in a multilingual and pluralistic context like that of the East African Community. The regular invitations from my colleague and friend, Prof Inyani Simala, the first Executive Secretary of the Commission, to participate in all its early activities have also been a great learning experience for me.
As for Zanzibar, which I first visited in 1965, and last in 2018, call me sentimental if you will, but I am one of the many who think it is magic. Each and every one of my visits, whether business or pleasure, remains memorable. It was, for example, in Zanzibar, on an editorial assignment, that I watched the live broadcast of Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2004. Recently I have been enchanted by the brilliant reports of my young friend, Sheba Hirst, who attended this year’s Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) on the island.
I wonder if the magic will get me again this time.
Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and [email protected]
https://nation.africa/kenya/life-and-st ... d--3866152
Tanzania's founding President Mwalimu Julius Nyerere.
I am in a celebration mood, and I hope you will join me, as indeed, we have cause to celebrate.
The only cloud on my mind just now is the colossal loss of Mzee Joe Kadhi, the doyen, grand master and teacher of all of us who aspire to quality journalistic writing.
My more knowledgeable colleagues continue to give us descriptions and evaluations of this exceptional media man, a major contributor to our NMG tradition.
RELATED
Austin Bukenya: Kiswahili World Day a Thanksgiving present for me https://nation.africa/kenya/life-and-st ... e--3632280
Back to the celebrations, however, I have two main reasons for feeling glad and grateful. You know, one of the secrets of living a long and happy life is this ability to recognise good happenings and feeling good about them. It recharges you and enables you to continue with life’s struggles with renewed vigour. So, here I am celebrating, first, the completion of the first half of 2022 and, secondly, the approaching “Saba Saba” Day.
Regarding the half year, every season comes with its challenges, and 2022 is no exception, with its soaring prices and even the rising temperature of the political contests.
On second thoughts, however, do you notice that these six months are the first solid spell of time, since early 2020, that we have lived without any restrictions, closures, curfews and lockdowns?
Life may never be quite the same again, and we should not completely let our guard, and our masks, down, as Warrior Kagwe and his team reminded us recently. Still, the newfound freedom and confidence is worth a toast and a humble Alhamdulillah.
As for the “Saba Saba”, it is the seventh day of the seventh month. Indeed, it is this date that people mark with various significances.
1990 Kamukunji Rally
In Kenya, as I told you, its freshest memory is of the 1990 Kamukunji Rally, a landmark in the struggle for democratic space.
In Tanzania, in my young adult days, we celebrated 7th July in memory of the date in 1954 when Mwalimu Julius Nyerere launched the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the party that led Tanganyika to uhuru. It later merged with the Afro-Shiraz party of Zanzibar to form Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the current ruling party in the United Republic of Tanzania.
The latest “Saba Saba”, however, is the Kiswahili Language World Day (Siku ya Kiswahili Duniani) to be observed next Thursday, July 7. This will be the inaugural celebration of the day, recommended and authorised by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). I asked you to plan and prepare your own celebrations of this day, when Kiswahili is officially elevated to the status of a global language. I am sure you are all set for the celebrations.
The East African Kiswahili Commission will, appropriately, host the main East African function in Zanzibar, where the Commission is headquartered. I will tell you more about the “hafla” (function and party) after witnessing the events.
I have, however, been asked to participate in a Symposium (a baraza) at the celebrations, and this is what made me come to you, not only to share with you my excitement but also to seek your advice on what I should say. Incidentally, the proceeding will be live and face-to-face this time, not virtual as such events have mostly been since the outbreak of the pandemic.
Down to business, six main speakers, one from each member state of the East African Community, will present the main topics at the Symposium. The eminent presenters include my close friends, Prof Mlinzi Mulokozi of Tanzania and Kenya’s Prof Clara Momanyi, the most fluent speaker of Kiswahili I know. Do I not have reason to fear and tremble at the prospect of sharing a platform with these stalwarts and experts of our beloved language?
Official language
Anyway, my concern is the content of my contribution to the baraza, and this is where I need your advice. My topic is “Kiswahili as an official language of the East African Community: challenges and the future”. I need not give you the whole title in Kiswahili, but my main focus as I ponder what to say is with the key words there, like “lugha rasmi” (official language), “changamoto” (challenges) and “mustakabali” (future, prospects). I would love to hear your views regarding these matters, and if I get them in time, I will share them with the august audience in Zanzibar.
Meanwhile, I am bubbling with excitement at the prospect of actively marking the Kiswahili Language World Day, with the East African Kiswahili Commission, and in Zanzibar. Each of these three has special significance for me. About Kiswahili, I need not din my “addiction” into your ears yet again. My cup truly overflows as I see it receive its long-deserved recognition on the international scene.
The East African Kiswahili Commission has played a surprisingly strong role in the evolution of my linguistic thinking. Although I was involved in formulating the framework for its establishment and modus operandi, I now realise that that very process contributed very richly to my awareness of how language operates and should operate in a multilingual and pluralistic context like that of the East African Community. The regular invitations from my colleague and friend, Prof Inyani Simala, the first Executive Secretary of the Commission, to participate in all its early activities have also been a great learning experience for me.
As for Zanzibar, which I first visited in 1965, and last in 2018, call me sentimental if you will, but I am one of the many who think it is magic. Each and every one of my visits, whether business or pleasure, remains memorable. It was, for example, in Zanzibar, on an editorial assignment, that I watched the live broadcast of Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2004. Recently I have been enchanted by the brilliant reports of my young friend, Sheba Hirst, who attended this year’s Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) on the island.
I wonder if the magic will get me again this time.
Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and [email protected]
https://nation.africa/kenya/life-and-st ... d--3866152
World Kiswahili Language Day
Summary
In November 2021 at its 41st Session in Paris, the General Conference of UNESCO declared July 7th World Kiswahili Language Day. By Resolution 41 C/61, Member States recognized the critical role played by Kiswahili in promoting cultural diversity, creating awareness, and fostering dialogue among civilizations.
Description
On July 7th 2022, the Permanent Mission of the United Republic of Tanzania to the United Nations and UNESCO will held the first international celebration of the World's Kiswahili Language Day at the United Nations Headquarter in New York.
The event will serve as a platform for promoting the potential of Kiswahili to achieve both the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and the African Union Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want. Member States, UN organizations, civil society, academia and youth representatives will participate in the event and share their knowledge on how to preserve Kiswahili and promote its unique cultural identity.
Related Sites and Documents
Concept Note
https://media.un.org/en/asset/k10/k10ur2q60b
In November 2021 at its 41st Session in Paris, the General Conference of UNESCO declared July 7th World Kiswahili Language Day. By Resolution 41 C/61, Member States recognized the critical role played by Kiswahili in promoting cultural diversity, creating awareness, and fostering dialogue among civilizations.
Description
On July 7th 2022, the Permanent Mission of the United Republic of Tanzania to the United Nations and UNESCO will held the first international celebration of the World's Kiswahili Language Day at the United Nations Headquarter in New York.
The event will serve as a platform for promoting the potential of Kiswahili to achieve both the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and the African Union Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want. Member States, UN organizations, civil society, academia and youth representatives will participate in the event and share their knowledge on how to preserve Kiswahili and promote its unique cultural identity.
Related Sites and Documents
Concept Note
https://media.un.org/en/asset/k10/k10ur2q60b
In Israel, a Biblical Tongue Meets Gender Politics
A linguistic revolution is underway in the quest for more gender-inclusive language for Hebrew, whose modern form adopted grammatical norms from 3,000 years ago. Not everybody is on board.
This sign outside a Tel Aviv men’s clothing store reads “Come in if you’re a man,” with text below adding that it is “written in masculine language but is intended for men, women and everything in between.”Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
JERUSALEM — Hebrew, with its roots in a biblical patriarchy, and reinvented 3,000 years later to become the lingua franca of today’s Israel, has become the focus of efforts to make it more gender inclusive in the modern age.
Hardly a sentence can be uttered in Hebrew without gender coming up; every object has an assigned gender — a table is masculine and a door is feminine, for example — and the language lacks gender-neutral terms for people and groups of people.
But in recent years, many Israelis have been pushing to modify Hebrew and even its alphabet to deal with what they see as inherent biases in a language whose modern form retained the grammatical norms of biblical times.
“When I want to send a message to a group including men, women and nonbinary people, how do I address that group in a way that includes everyone?” asked Michal Shomer, an activist who has been pushing to make Hebrew less gender-specific and who has created a set of all-inclusive characters for the Hebrew alphabet.
“Research has shown that using the ‘standard’ masculine form has a negative impact on girls and women and their chance to succeed in modern society,” she added.
Michal Shomer with her book “Multi-Gender Hebrew,” which offers a set of all-inclusive characters for the Hebrew alphabet.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
The lack of gender-neutral pronouns and constructs in Hebrew means that the masculine plural form of verbs and pronouns has long been used as the standard form when referring to, or addressing, a mixed crowd, for example.
Now, when addressing or referring to a mixed or general group of people, Israelis are increasingly using both the masculine and feminine forms of each verb and pronoun, along with corresponding adjectives, or are mixing them up in an effort to create a more inclusive Hebrew.
Such efforts, however, have been criticized by some Israelis as cumbersome and needless tinkering with the cherished official language of the Jewish state that is a binding marker of identity. It has also resulted in a backlash from religious conservatives.
Critics complain that the constant doubling up of genders turns each phrase into a potential tongue twister and stymies the natural flow of speech and prose.
“To repeat that more than once is awful, the text becomes one big annoyance, you don’t want to hear it anymore!” grumbled Ruvik Rosenthal, a language maven who in his latest book, “My Life, My Language,” titled a chapter about gender and Israel’s lingua franca “In praise of sex-maniac Hebrew,” borrowing a phrase from Yona Wallach, a feminist poet.
Dr. Rosenthal said he supports the push for more inclusive language, but also pointed out what he views as some of its limitations. Referring to what he called “engineered” writing — the use of slash signs and dots in a belabored effort to incorporate both gender endings that has become more common in Israel in recent years — Dr. Rosenthal added, “It’s not grammatical. It’s ugly, it’s complicated and in practical terms it’s not suited to speech.”
The Israeli author Ruvik Rosenthal, a critic of gender-neutral Hebrew, said, “It’s ugly, it’s complicated and in practical terms it’s not suited to speech.”Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Some ultraconservatives and strict Orthodox Jews oppose the new focus on linguistic equality, since they reject the principle of equality in general. Avi Maoz, a lawmaker from a party opposed to L.G.B.T.Q. rights, has protested against the use on government forms of a gender-neutral formula for ascertaining parental information, “Parent 1” and “Parent 2,” which includes same-sex couples.
In a measure of how seriously many Israelis relate to their language, the social media platforms of the venerable Academy of the Hebrew Language, the state’s authority on Hebrew scholarship, are among the most popular in the country, with more than a million views a month.
The academy, charged with coining Hebrew words to keep up with the times and maintaining grammatical standards, finds itself arbitrating between linguistic anarchy and societal change.
Called upon to weigh in on the gender debate, it has recommended the moderate and judicious use of both the masculine and feminine forms in certain settings, without going overboard.
But its scholars are also skeptical about the new language campaigns.
A cabinet containing Jewish holy books at a synagogue in Tel Aviv. Modern Hebrew has retained the grammatical norms of the ancient form — and, some Israelis say, its inherent gender biases.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
“People feel that if they speak this way and not that way, things will work out as they want,” said Ronit Gadish, head of the Academy’s Scientific Secretariat, which is charged with setting norms for modern Hebrew. “Gender equality sits on that platform. People delude themselves that if they change the language to fit their agenda, they will win their battles for some cause or other.”
Hebrew is by no means the only language that has been the target of calls for change. Many world languages, like French, make every noun either masculine or feminine. And the United Nations has issued guidelines for nondiscriminatory communications in the six official languages of the organization: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
Nor is gender inclusivity the only existential issue facing Hebrew. Many Israelis pepper their speech with English terms, and among tech entrepreneurs in particular, English professional terms are often used in the original or in some cannibalized, Hebraicized form.
But it’s the gender issue that is causing the most angst in Israel.
Merav Michaeli, the feminist leader of the Labor party, is widely credited with having led the charge for a more inclusive Hebrew. At first she tended to favor only using the feminine form, but has switched to more frequent use of both.
Among the native Arabic-speaking citizens who make up a fifth of the Israeli population, no such prominent movement for more gender-inclusive language appears to have arisen as yet, though some young, progressive Palestinians mostly associated with the feminist movement make a point of addressing mixed groups in feminine forms.
“Research has shown that using the ‘standard’ masculine form has a negative impact on girls and women and their chance to succeed in modern society,” Ms. Shomer said.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Chaim Levinson, a Hebrew-speaking journalist and radio host, said he had trouble with the new “multi-gender” language campaign.
“It doesn’t come naturally to people; it takes a lot of effort,” he said.
“The religiously observant are against multi-gender language because of equality,” he added. “I’m against clumsiness. For my part, let it all be in the feminine form.”
At the beginning of this academic year, Mr. Levinson, who also teaches new media at a college in Jerusalem, received a letter from the college in his inbox with a link to a 24-page manual of gender-inclusive language guidelines.
It was subtitled, “Language creates reality.” But some experts say it should be the other way round.
“The public’s distress is clear,” said Vicky Teplitsky Ben-Saadon, the coordinator of terminology at the Hebrew language academy’s Scientific Secretariat, referring to the number of queries the institute receives on the matter. “Linguistically, we at the academy are not the owners of Hebrew. We don’t invent it,” she said, adding, “We determine a standard based on what has proven itself. A living language develops as it develops.”
{img]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/07 ... &auto=webp[/img]
Vicky Teplitsky Ben-Saadon, left, the coordinator of terminology at the Hebrew Language Academy’s Scientific Secretariat, with Ronit Gadish, right, the head of the secretariat.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Some American students and academics have tried to build gender-inclusive language projects for Hebrew, but they have not caught on here.
Then there is Ms. Shomer’s innovation of a dozen new Hebrew characters — 11 all-inclusive letters combining masculine and feminine markers and one new vowel sign. A visual communications designer, she created the system as part of her graduation project.
Critics say that the combined glyphs are unpronounceable and mostly good for graphic signage, such as the multi-gender “Welcome” signs using her characters now hanging outside many Israeli schools.
But according to Ms. Shomer, there have been more than 12,000 downloads of her free program with the new inclusive characters since it was released in early 2021.
“Letters are not added to a language in one day,” she said. “I am patient. I know that change takes time.”
The entrance to a school in Tel Aviv with a gender-neutral welcome sign above its door, using Ms. Shomer’s characters.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
This sign outside a Tel Aviv men’s clothing store reads “Come in if you’re a man,” with text below adding that it is “written in masculine language but is intended for men, women and everything in between.”Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
JERUSALEM — Hebrew, with its roots in a biblical patriarchy, and reinvented 3,000 years later to become the lingua franca of today’s Israel, has become the focus of efforts to make it more gender inclusive in the modern age.
Hardly a sentence can be uttered in Hebrew without gender coming up; every object has an assigned gender — a table is masculine and a door is feminine, for example — and the language lacks gender-neutral terms for people and groups of people.
But in recent years, many Israelis have been pushing to modify Hebrew and even its alphabet to deal with what they see as inherent biases in a language whose modern form retained the grammatical norms of biblical times.
“When I want to send a message to a group including men, women and nonbinary people, how do I address that group in a way that includes everyone?” asked Michal Shomer, an activist who has been pushing to make Hebrew less gender-specific and who has created a set of all-inclusive characters for the Hebrew alphabet.
“Research has shown that using the ‘standard’ masculine form has a negative impact on girls and women and their chance to succeed in modern society,” she added.
Michal Shomer with her book “Multi-Gender Hebrew,” which offers a set of all-inclusive characters for the Hebrew alphabet.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
The lack of gender-neutral pronouns and constructs in Hebrew means that the masculine plural form of verbs and pronouns has long been used as the standard form when referring to, or addressing, a mixed crowd, for example.
Now, when addressing or referring to a mixed or general group of people, Israelis are increasingly using both the masculine and feminine forms of each verb and pronoun, along with corresponding adjectives, or are mixing them up in an effort to create a more inclusive Hebrew.
Such efforts, however, have been criticized by some Israelis as cumbersome and needless tinkering with the cherished official language of the Jewish state that is a binding marker of identity. It has also resulted in a backlash from religious conservatives.
Critics complain that the constant doubling up of genders turns each phrase into a potential tongue twister and stymies the natural flow of speech and prose.
“To repeat that more than once is awful, the text becomes one big annoyance, you don’t want to hear it anymore!” grumbled Ruvik Rosenthal, a language maven who in his latest book, “My Life, My Language,” titled a chapter about gender and Israel’s lingua franca “In praise of sex-maniac Hebrew,” borrowing a phrase from Yona Wallach, a feminist poet.
Dr. Rosenthal said he supports the push for more inclusive language, but also pointed out what he views as some of its limitations. Referring to what he called “engineered” writing — the use of slash signs and dots in a belabored effort to incorporate both gender endings that has become more common in Israel in recent years — Dr. Rosenthal added, “It’s not grammatical. It’s ugly, it’s complicated and in practical terms it’s not suited to speech.”
The Israeli author Ruvik Rosenthal, a critic of gender-neutral Hebrew, said, “It’s ugly, it’s complicated and in practical terms it’s not suited to speech.”Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Some ultraconservatives and strict Orthodox Jews oppose the new focus on linguistic equality, since they reject the principle of equality in general. Avi Maoz, a lawmaker from a party opposed to L.G.B.T.Q. rights, has protested against the use on government forms of a gender-neutral formula for ascertaining parental information, “Parent 1” and “Parent 2,” which includes same-sex couples.
In a measure of how seriously many Israelis relate to their language, the social media platforms of the venerable Academy of the Hebrew Language, the state’s authority on Hebrew scholarship, are among the most popular in the country, with more than a million views a month.
The academy, charged with coining Hebrew words to keep up with the times and maintaining grammatical standards, finds itself arbitrating between linguistic anarchy and societal change.
Called upon to weigh in on the gender debate, it has recommended the moderate and judicious use of both the masculine and feminine forms in certain settings, without going overboard.
But its scholars are also skeptical about the new language campaigns.
A cabinet containing Jewish holy books at a synagogue in Tel Aviv. Modern Hebrew has retained the grammatical norms of the ancient form — and, some Israelis say, its inherent gender biases.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
“People feel that if they speak this way and not that way, things will work out as they want,” said Ronit Gadish, head of the Academy’s Scientific Secretariat, which is charged with setting norms for modern Hebrew. “Gender equality sits on that platform. People delude themselves that if they change the language to fit their agenda, they will win their battles for some cause or other.”
Hebrew is by no means the only language that has been the target of calls for change. Many world languages, like French, make every noun either masculine or feminine. And the United Nations has issued guidelines for nondiscriminatory communications in the six official languages of the organization: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
Nor is gender inclusivity the only existential issue facing Hebrew. Many Israelis pepper their speech with English terms, and among tech entrepreneurs in particular, English professional terms are often used in the original or in some cannibalized, Hebraicized form.
But it’s the gender issue that is causing the most angst in Israel.
Merav Michaeli, the feminist leader of the Labor party, is widely credited with having led the charge for a more inclusive Hebrew. At first she tended to favor only using the feminine form, but has switched to more frequent use of both.
Among the native Arabic-speaking citizens who make up a fifth of the Israeli population, no such prominent movement for more gender-inclusive language appears to have arisen as yet, though some young, progressive Palestinians mostly associated with the feminist movement make a point of addressing mixed groups in feminine forms.
“Research has shown that using the ‘standard’ masculine form has a negative impact on girls and women and their chance to succeed in modern society,” Ms. Shomer said.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Chaim Levinson, a Hebrew-speaking journalist and radio host, said he had trouble with the new “multi-gender” language campaign.
“It doesn’t come naturally to people; it takes a lot of effort,” he said.
“The religiously observant are against multi-gender language because of equality,” he added. “I’m against clumsiness. For my part, let it all be in the feminine form.”
At the beginning of this academic year, Mr. Levinson, who also teaches new media at a college in Jerusalem, received a letter from the college in his inbox with a link to a 24-page manual of gender-inclusive language guidelines.
It was subtitled, “Language creates reality.” But some experts say it should be the other way round.
“The public’s distress is clear,” said Vicky Teplitsky Ben-Saadon, the coordinator of terminology at the Hebrew language academy’s Scientific Secretariat, referring to the number of queries the institute receives on the matter. “Linguistically, we at the academy are not the owners of Hebrew. We don’t invent it,” she said, adding, “We determine a standard based on what has proven itself. A living language develops as it develops.”
{img]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/07 ... &auto=webp[/img]
Vicky Teplitsky Ben-Saadon, left, the coordinator of terminology at the Hebrew Language Academy’s Scientific Secretariat, with Ronit Gadish, right, the head of the secretariat.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Some American students and academics have tried to build gender-inclusive language projects for Hebrew, but they have not caught on here.
Then there is Ms. Shomer’s innovation of a dozen new Hebrew characters — 11 all-inclusive letters combining masculine and feminine markers and one new vowel sign. A visual communications designer, she created the system as part of her graduation project.
Critics say that the combined glyphs are unpronounceable and mostly good for graphic signage, such as the multi-gender “Welcome” signs using her characters now hanging outside many Israeli schools.
But according to Ms. Shomer, there have been more than 12,000 downloads of her free program with the new inclusive characters since it was released in early 2021.
“Letters are not added to a language in one day,” she said. “I am patient. I know that change takes time.”
The entrance to a school in Tel Aviv with a gender-neutral welcome sign above its door, using Ms. Shomer’s characters.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Languages
Associated Press
Israel archaeologists find ancient comb with 'full sentence'
This undated image released by the Israel Antiquities Authority on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2022, shows an ivory comb with an entire sentence in the Canaanite language, a 3,700-year-old inscription encouraging people to rid themselves of lice believed to be dated back as far as 1700 BC that was discovered in Tel Lachish, Israel. Israeli researchers say the discovery shines new light on some of humanity’s earliest use of an alphabet and its ability to write. (Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority via AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
ELEANOR H. REICH
Wed, November 9, 2022 at 4:02 AM
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli archaeologists have found an ancient comb dating back some 3,700 years ago and bearing what is likely the oldest known full sentence in Canaanite alphabetical script, according to an article published Wednesday.
The inscription encourages people to comb their hair and beards to rid themselves of lice. The sentence contains 17 letters that read: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard."
Experts say the discovery shines new light on some of humanity’s earliest use of the Canaanite alphabet, invented around 1800 B.C. and the foundation of the all successive alphabetic systems, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin and Cyrillic.
The mundane topic indicates that people had trouble with lice in everyday life during the time — and archaeologists say they have even found microscopic evidence of head lice on the comb.
The comb was first excavated in 2016 at Tel Lachish, an archaeological site in southern Israel, but it was only late last year when a professor at Israel’s Hebrew University noticed the tiny words inscribed on it. Details of the find were published Wednesday in an article in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.
The lead researcher, Hebrew University archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel, told The Associated Press that while many artefacts bearing the Canaanite script have been found over the years, this is the first complete sentence to be discovered.
Garfinkel said previous findings of just a few letters, maybe a word here and there, did not leave much room for further research on the lives on the Canaanites. "We didn’t have enough material,” he said.
The find also opens up room for debate about the ancient era, Garfinkel added. The fact that the sentence was found on an ivory comb in the ancient city's palace and temple district, coupled with the mentioning of the beard, could indicate that only wealthy men were able to read and write.
“It is a very human text,” Garfinkel said. “It shows us that people didn’t really change, and lice didn’t really change."
Canaanites spoke an ancient Semitic language — related to modern Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic — and resided in the lands abutting the eastern Mediterranean. They are believed to have developed the first known alphabetic system of writing.
Finding a complete sentence would further indicate that Canaanites stood out among early civilizations in their use of the written word. “It shows that even in the most ancient phase there were full sentences” Garfinkel added.
He said experts dated the script to 1700 B.C. by comparing it to the archaic Canaanite alphabet previously found in Egypt’s Sinai desert, dating back to between 1900 B.C. and 1700 B.C.
But the Tel Lachish comb was found in a much later archaeological context, and carbon dating failed to determine its exact age, the article notes.
Austrian archaeologist Felix Höflmayer, an expert on the period who was not part of the publication, said this method of dating was not definitive.
“There are just not enough securely dated early alphabetic inscriptions currently known,” he said. Nonetheless, he added the discovery was highly significant, and will help solidify Tel Lachish as a center of the early alphabet development.
“Seventeen letters preserved on a single object is definitely remarkable,” Höflmayer said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 21420.html
Israel archaeologists find ancient comb with 'full sentence'
This undated image released by the Israel Antiquities Authority on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2022, shows an ivory comb with an entire sentence in the Canaanite language, a 3,700-year-old inscription encouraging people to rid themselves of lice believed to be dated back as far as 1700 BC that was discovered in Tel Lachish, Israel. Israeli researchers say the discovery shines new light on some of humanity’s earliest use of an alphabet and its ability to write. (Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority via AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
ELEANOR H. REICH
Wed, November 9, 2022 at 4:02 AM
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli archaeologists have found an ancient comb dating back some 3,700 years ago and bearing what is likely the oldest known full sentence in Canaanite alphabetical script, according to an article published Wednesday.
The inscription encourages people to comb their hair and beards to rid themselves of lice. The sentence contains 17 letters that read: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard."
Experts say the discovery shines new light on some of humanity’s earliest use of the Canaanite alphabet, invented around 1800 B.C. and the foundation of the all successive alphabetic systems, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin and Cyrillic.
The mundane topic indicates that people had trouble with lice in everyday life during the time — and archaeologists say they have even found microscopic evidence of head lice on the comb.
The comb was first excavated in 2016 at Tel Lachish, an archaeological site in southern Israel, but it was only late last year when a professor at Israel’s Hebrew University noticed the tiny words inscribed on it. Details of the find were published Wednesday in an article in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.
The lead researcher, Hebrew University archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel, told The Associated Press that while many artefacts bearing the Canaanite script have been found over the years, this is the first complete sentence to be discovered.
Garfinkel said previous findings of just a few letters, maybe a word here and there, did not leave much room for further research on the lives on the Canaanites. "We didn’t have enough material,” he said.
The find also opens up room for debate about the ancient era, Garfinkel added. The fact that the sentence was found on an ivory comb in the ancient city's palace and temple district, coupled with the mentioning of the beard, could indicate that only wealthy men were able to read and write.
“It is a very human text,” Garfinkel said. “It shows us that people didn’t really change, and lice didn’t really change."
Canaanites spoke an ancient Semitic language — related to modern Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic — and resided in the lands abutting the eastern Mediterranean. They are believed to have developed the first known alphabetic system of writing.
Finding a complete sentence would further indicate that Canaanites stood out among early civilizations in their use of the written word. “It shows that even in the most ancient phase there were full sentences” Garfinkel added.
He said experts dated the script to 1700 B.C. by comparing it to the archaic Canaanite alphabet previously found in Egypt’s Sinai desert, dating back to between 1900 B.C. and 1700 B.C.
But the Tel Lachish comb was found in a much later archaeological context, and carbon dating failed to determine its exact age, the article notes.
Austrian archaeologist Felix Höflmayer, an expert on the period who was not part of the publication, said this method of dating was not definitive.
“There are just not enough securely dated early alphabetic inscriptions currently known,” he said. Nonetheless, he added the discovery was highly significant, and will help solidify Tel Lachish as a center of the early alphabet development.
“Seventeen letters preserved on a single object is definitely remarkable,” Höflmayer said.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 21420.html
Re: Languages
AFP
Iraq's Christians fight to save threatened ancient language
Laure AL KHOURY
Tue, May 30, 2023 at 9:02 PM CDT·4 min read.
Syriac 'is our history', says Salah Bakos who teaches the language in Qaraqosh, in Iraq'a Nineveh region
Iraq's shrunken and conflict-scarred Christian community is launching a new television channel as part of efforts to save their dying language, spoken for more than 2,000 years.
Syriac, an ancient dialect of Aramaic, has traditionally been the language spoken by Christians in Iraq and neighbouring Syria, mostly in homes but also in some schools and during church services.
However, Syriac-speaking communities in the two countries have declined over the years, owing to decades of conflict driving many to seek homes in safer countries. In Iraq, the Christian population is thought to have fallen by more than two-thirds in just over two decades.
"It's true that we speak Syriac at home, but unfortunately I feel that our language is disappearing slowly but surely," said Mariam Albert, a news presenter on the Syriac-language Al-Syriania television channel.
Iraq's government launched the channel in April to help keep the language alive. It has around 40 staff and offers a variety of programming, from cinema to art and history.
"It is important to have a television station that represents us," said Albert, a 35-year-old mother.
Many programmes are presented in a dialect form of Syriac but Albert said the channel's news bulletins are broadcast only in classical Syriac, a form not widely understood by everyone.
The goal of Al-Syriania is "to preserve the Syriac language" through "entertainment", said station director Jack Anwia.
"Once upon a time, Syriac was a language widespread across the Middle East," he said, adding that Baghdad has a duty "to keep it from extinction".
"The beauty about Iraq is its cultural and religious diversity," he said.
- 'Sidelined' but not dead -
Iraq is known as a cradle of civilisations, including the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, who produced the earliest known written legal code. The country was also home to the city of Ur, which the Bible cites as Abraham's birthplace.
Today, the country is overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim but also home to Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Christians, Yazidis and other minorities, while Arabic and Kurdish are the official languages.
Before the 2003 United States-led invasion of the oil-rich country, Iraq was home to around 1.5 million Christians.
In the 20 years since, which included the brutal onslaught of the Islamic State group (IS) that swept the country in 2014, their population has declined to roughly 400,000, mostly living in the north.
The Syriac language has been "sidelined", according to Kawthar Askar, head of the Syriac language department at Salahaddin University in Arbil, in the autonomous Kurdistan region.
"We can't say it's a dead language... (but) it is under threat" of disappearing, he said.
The cause is migration, Askar said, adding that families who emigrate often continue speaking Syriac among themselves but later generations abandon it.
Askar's department teaches the language to around 40 students, with more studying it in Baghdad.
Syriac is also taught at around 265 schools across Iraq, according to Imad Salem Jajjo, responsible for Syriac education within the education ministry.
- 'Our mother tongue' -
The earliest written record of Syriac dates to the first or second century BC and the language reached its peak between the fifth and seventh centuries AD, Askar said.
At its height, Syriac was spoken in everyday conversation, used in literature, the sciences and within public administration.
With the seventh-century Islamic conquests, more people in the region began speaking Arabic.
By the 11th century, Syriac was clearly in decline.
Despite the decades of conflict that have ravaged Iraq, hundreds of Syriac books and manuscripts have survived.
In 2014, days before IS fighters seized swathes of northern Iraq, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul left the city, salvaging a trove of centuries-old Syriac manuscripts from the invading jihadists.
Around 1,700 manuscripts and 1,400 books -- some dating to the 11th century -- are now conserved at Arbil's Digital Centre for Eastern Manuscripts, which is supported by the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Dominican order.
The conservation will "preserve the heritage and guarantee its sustainability", archbishop Michaeel Najeeb told AFP.
Syriac "is our history, it is our mother tongue", said Salah Bakos, a teacher from Qaraqosh, a town near Mosul, which adopted the language into its curriculum 18 years ago.
"Teaching Syriac is important, not only to children but all segments of our society... even if parents say it is a dead language that serves no purpose".
https://news.yahoo.com/iraqs-christians ... 47789.html
Iraq's Christians fight to save threatened ancient language
Laure AL KHOURY
Tue, May 30, 2023 at 9:02 PM CDT·4 min read.
Syriac 'is our history', says Salah Bakos who teaches the language in Qaraqosh, in Iraq'a Nineveh region
Iraq's shrunken and conflict-scarred Christian community is launching a new television channel as part of efforts to save their dying language, spoken for more than 2,000 years.
Syriac, an ancient dialect of Aramaic, has traditionally been the language spoken by Christians in Iraq and neighbouring Syria, mostly in homes but also in some schools and during church services.
However, Syriac-speaking communities in the two countries have declined over the years, owing to decades of conflict driving many to seek homes in safer countries. In Iraq, the Christian population is thought to have fallen by more than two-thirds in just over two decades.
"It's true that we speak Syriac at home, but unfortunately I feel that our language is disappearing slowly but surely," said Mariam Albert, a news presenter on the Syriac-language Al-Syriania television channel.
Iraq's government launched the channel in April to help keep the language alive. It has around 40 staff and offers a variety of programming, from cinema to art and history.
"It is important to have a television station that represents us," said Albert, a 35-year-old mother.
Many programmes are presented in a dialect form of Syriac but Albert said the channel's news bulletins are broadcast only in classical Syriac, a form not widely understood by everyone.
The goal of Al-Syriania is "to preserve the Syriac language" through "entertainment", said station director Jack Anwia.
"Once upon a time, Syriac was a language widespread across the Middle East," he said, adding that Baghdad has a duty "to keep it from extinction".
"The beauty about Iraq is its cultural and religious diversity," he said.
- 'Sidelined' but not dead -
Iraq is known as a cradle of civilisations, including the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, who produced the earliest known written legal code. The country was also home to the city of Ur, which the Bible cites as Abraham's birthplace.
Today, the country is overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim but also home to Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Christians, Yazidis and other minorities, while Arabic and Kurdish are the official languages.
Before the 2003 United States-led invasion of the oil-rich country, Iraq was home to around 1.5 million Christians.
In the 20 years since, which included the brutal onslaught of the Islamic State group (IS) that swept the country in 2014, their population has declined to roughly 400,000, mostly living in the north.
The Syriac language has been "sidelined", according to Kawthar Askar, head of the Syriac language department at Salahaddin University in Arbil, in the autonomous Kurdistan region.
"We can't say it's a dead language... (but) it is under threat" of disappearing, he said.
The cause is migration, Askar said, adding that families who emigrate often continue speaking Syriac among themselves but later generations abandon it.
Askar's department teaches the language to around 40 students, with more studying it in Baghdad.
Syriac is also taught at around 265 schools across Iraq, according to Imad Salem Jajjo, responsible for Syriac education within the education ministry.
- 'Our mother tongue' -
The earliest written record of Syriac dates to the first or second century BC and the language reached its peak between the fifth and seventh centuries AD, Askar said.
At its height, Syriac was spoken in everyday conversation, used in literature, the sciences and within public administration.
With the seventh-century Islamic conquests, more people in the region began speaking Arabic.
By the 11th century, Syriac was clearly in decline.
Despite the decades of conflict that have ravaged Iraq, hundreds of Syriac books and manuscripts have survived.
In 2014, days before IS fighters seized swathes of northern Iraq, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul left the city, salvaging a trove of centuries-old Syriac manuscripts from the invading jihadists.
Around 1,700 manuscripts and 1,400 books -- some dating to the 11th century -- are now conserved at Arbil's Digital Centre for Eastern Manuscripts, which is supported by the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Dominican order.
The conservation will "preserve the heritage and guarantee its sustainability", archbishop Michaeel Najeeb told AFP.
Syriac "is our history, it is our mother tongue", said Salah Bakos, a teacher from Qaraqosh, a town near Mosul, which adopted the language into its curriculum 18 years ago.
"Teaching Syriac is important, not only to children but all segments of our society... even if parents say it is a dead language that serves no purpose".
https://news.yahoo.com/iraqs-christians ... 47789.html
Re: Languages
MOST ANCIENT LANGUAGES SPOKEN IN INDIA
Urdu (700 years)
Hindi (800 years)
Gujarati (1000 years)
Bengali (1500 years)
Marathi (1500 – 2000 years)
Odia (2000 years)
Malayalam (2000 years)
Telugu (1500 – 2000 years)
Kannada (2000 years)
Sanskrit (3000 years)
Tamil (5000 years)
Urdu (700 years)
Hindi (800 years)
Gujarati (1000 years)
Bengali (1500 years)
Marathi (1500 – 2000 years)
Odia (2000 years)
Malayalam (2000 years)
Telugu (1500 – 2000 years)
Kannada (2000 years)
Sanskrit (3000 years)
Tamil (5000 years)