Cò leis thu? or Cò às a tha thu? (Who are your people? or Who do you belong to?) This is the traditional way of asking someone about their roots in Gaelic. So let's take a moment to ponder for a moment who we are and where we have come from. For as Scottish MP George Reid declared 'As a people, if you do not know where we have come from, how can we know where we are going?' [First Gaelic debate by Scotland's new Parliament] (Quoted in Glaser, 2007 pp. 141)
I am reading a very interesting text at the moment. It's taken from a book by Konstanze Glaser (see below) and I came across the quote below as well as the one above.
This is by a Scottish poet and academic called Christopher Whyte about being able to relate to the Gàidhealtachd (Gaelic speaking area) only after he had himself learned Gaelic.
Is mi nam bhalach, bhithinn gu tric sna Tròiseachan no an Earra-Ghàidheal. Chuir e dragh orm nach b'urrainn dhomh bruidhinn ris an fhearann, no na beanntan ainmeachadh, oir robh cànain aca ach Gàidhlig.
(As a boy I would often stay in the Trossachs or in Argyll. It annoyed me that I could not speak to the land or name the mountains because their only language was Gaelic.) (Quoted in ibid. pp. 142)
But Gaelic is dying. Perhaps it's more correct to say that the people who speak Gaelic are becoming fewer and fewer, because the number of speakers that are dying is greater than the number of people being born into and raised in the language. But nothing removes the fact that the language has been in terminal decline for many years.
So I sit here in room reading this text both for college and my general education and I think of a language I found out about only this week. That language is Akkala Sámi. Or I should say 'was'. The last known speaker of Akkala Sami, Marja Sergina, died in the last days of 2003. The 29th of December to be exact. I'm five years too late in discovering this language. It is now extinct. And because very little of the language was documented its passing is all the more tragic. Its voice has been silenced.
And I think of all the languages that are extinct and all the languages that are endangered or moribund. I think of the school children of the shrinking Gàidhealtachd and the Gaeltacht and I think of the kooli lapsed of Estonia, safe in their coccon of eesti keel. And I wonder when those same children are old and grey with maybe great-grandchildren, what language will be on the babbling lips of those same great-grandchildren. And I wonder and the silence caves in and I can hear nothing but the silence. A milk white nothingness.
Cò leis thu? Cé hé tusa? Kes oled?
Glaser, Konstanze. (2007): Minority Languges and Cultural Diversity in Europe: Gaelic and Sorbian Persepectives. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters
6 replies:
Very interesting. I have an article on my blog about the last of the Yahis but it's in Spanish. If search on Kroeber, Waterman and Yahi there are many interesting articles about how they documented as much of the languages as possible before Ishi died.
Cheers! It is indeed a fascinating topic and currently I am reading an article on how linguists could do a much better job about preserving languages. I might post about it here soon.
i have thought of a foolproof method of ensuring linguistic inheritance, if by chance my grandchildren didnt speak my mothertoungue i would kick them up the arse everytime i saw them, within weeks they would be fluent enough in the heritage language to plead & beg for mercy.
Akkala or Ahkkil Saami used to be considered a dialect of Kildin Saami. ironically, it was just the most recent chunk of Saami to be awarded the honour of a separate language by linguists. and there is quite a lot of documentation of Kildin from the past two centuries. that includes an almost mainstream dictionary of several tens of thousands words.
so: what is documented of Ahkkil Saami could well be found by looking into materials claiming to be either Kildin or Russian Saami or Eastern Saami (respectively Lapp). of course, you would have to know the toponyms, the villages or communities (the Northern Saami equivalent term is _siida_) and the families to look for.
in any case, even an Ahkkil literature could be constructed, if someone only had the will and the connections and the necessary Kildin proficiency to do so. some differences between Ahkkil and Kildin, moreover, could be traced by means of fieldwork conducted among speakers of neighbouring dialects.
(the blason populaire genre usually documents the peculiarities of a related neigbouring dialect or language, which has distinct differences from that of a native speaker. and, of course, there is the habit of mocking neighbouring accents, which -- according to my experience -- is not uncommon among the Northern Saami.)
the ten Saami languages form a chain or a continuum with one or two distinct boundaries blocking mutual intelligibility.
Thanks for the info about Akkala Ohpuu. I didn't know about that.
I take it you meant that as a joke, Vevrikl...
Post a Comment