Translated material
Linguistics of disasters
Vladimir Plungyan
The number of small languages is rapidly declining, which is why the most complete descriptions of living languages are so necessary. The Russian encyclopedic publication “Languages of the World” serves this purpose.
The number of small languages is rapidly declining, which is why the most complete descriptions of living languages are so necessary. The Russian encyclopedic publication “Languages of the World” serves this purpose.
"Languages of the world" is a special term. This is the customary designation for our human languages (from Russian and English to Aleutian and Tahitian) when we are talking about all these languages as a whole - a collection of about six thousand copies, each of which is a one-of-a-kind mystery.
Around the middle of the 19th century, it became fashionable to compare languages to living organisms. This comparison, which has survived to this day and is not controversial, is a tribute to the era when Darwinian biology was the “queen of sciences.” But in one respect it is quite accurate. Languages are also born and die.
A language dies when there are no people left who acquire it in infancy as the first language of communication with the outside world (this language is called “native” or “maternal”). A language that ceases to be native to anyone becomes “dead” (this is also a scientific term). Of course, modern schoolchildren read texts in the dead Latin language, and doctors all over the world still write prescriptions in it. However, such languages do not live and do not develop: they are museum exhibits. In most cases, a dead language is doomed to rapid and irrevocable oblivion, especially if it was not lucky enough to acquire writing during its lifetime. Of course, languages always died, but earlier they also arose: the same people, having divided and dispersed over long distances, began to speak different languages after several centuries. The modern world is too united for new languages to arise in it.
It is believed that every year several - from three to seven - languages disappear on Earth. If current processes continue at the same pace (this cannot be guaranteed, however), then pretty soon giant languages (such as Indonesian, Spanish, Arabic and, of course, English) will absorb small and medium-sized languages and begin to merge with each other. True, the time when the whole world speaks some kind of single “English-Chinese” is still far away, but the fact that the number of small languages is now rapidly declining is an indisputable fact. Is it good or bad?
The answer to this question is not so simple. On the one hand, if a language is currently spoken by only 50 or 100 people, then it is doomed to disappear within one generation. Those who speak it will simply be forced to dissolve among more numerous nations in order to ensure their daily existence (things like fiction or, especially, scientific literature in this language, of course, don’t even need to be mentioned—even languages that speak this language are sometimes deprived of this “luxury.” which are spoken not by tens and hundreds, but by thousands and millions of people).
It is almost impossible to live life using only the language of your village. Even to go to the market in the nearest city, you often need to be able to speak another language. What about finishing school? Go to a prestigious university? To get a good job? At the same time, the lion's share of information needed by modern man exists only in a few “world” languages. If a person who was unlucky enough to speak a “big” language since childhood does not want to exist in complete isolation, he must master one, or more often several, foreign languages. Man, however, is a rather lazy creature: if, in addition to his native language, he has to learn some other language as more necessary, then in the end he will prefer this other language to his native one. This happens, for example, with the second or third generation of immigrants in a foreign country.
But if from a practical point of view one language is better than many, then from other points of view the disappearance of any language is, without any exaggeration, a cultural catastrophe.
Can they be saved?
Thanks to the efforts of biologist enthusiasts (such as Darrell or Grzimek), the movement to save rare and endangered animal species became almost widespread in the second half of the 20th century. At least in “prosperous” countries, public opinion views the disappearance of a species of shrew or the reduction in the range of a hawk as a tragedy. There is no doubt that the disappearance of the shrew is regrettable - like any decrease in diversity, it leads to the impoverishment and simplification of our world and thus carries with it danger. But the loss of a language in its cultural consequences is a disaster, the magnitude of which is difficult to overestimate.
What is valuable to humanity, for example, in the Entsy language (which is now spoken by about 200 people on Taimyr, almost all over 40 years old) or in the language called Rapanui (which is spoken by no more than a thousand inhabitants of Easter Island)? Today it can be considered proven that language is not just a tool for communication or transmitting information. Language is also (and perhaps primarily) a tool for understanding the world and a way of storing this knowledge. A person thinks with the help of language, and at the same time it is far from indifferent with the help of what language a person thinks. The tool in this case affects the result.
To simplify the matter somewhat, we can say that each language contains a special philosophy, a special way of perceiving the world. Each language imperceptibly teaches people who speak it to think in a special way: to pay attention to something, to attach paramount importance to something, not to notice something at all. Every language has words that express in a concentrated form the specific culture of the people who speak that language. But the “individuality” of a language is manifested in the choice of not only abstract, but also the most ordinary words and even grammatical constructions - all this reflects a special vision of the world in a given culture. This truth is well known to everyone who has done a lot of translation from one language to another. Even in closely related languages, there are many words and constructions that cannot be literally translated from one language to another. If you want to speak and write well in a foreign language, then the best advice that an experienced teacher usually gives is not to try to translate anything into that language from your native language, but just start thinking in that language. But this also means that a mechanical transition from one language to another is impossible: by changing the language, we actually change the personality. Therefore, what is said, for example, in Japanese, cannot be conveyed either by means of English or by means of the Russian language without some very significant losses.
To clarify this idea a little, let's look at any Russian text. Let it not even contain such concepts specific to the Russian consciousness and certainly untranslatable as “daring,” “brashness,” “recklessness,” or from another area - “sloppiness,” “rudeness,” “hackwork” (or a completely new word “ freebie"). Let it not contain such seemingly simpler, but also difficult to convey words in a foreign language, such as “cozy”, “soulful”, “look at the light” or “jump”. It is enough to carry out a much more modest experiment: try to translate from Russian, for example, such a phrase without loss: “Well, why don’t you put at least half a spoonful of sugar for yourself?” It contains neither particularly rare, difficult or unusual words, nor particularly mysterious grammatical forms and constructions. But try to find a full-fledged foreign language equivalent for the Russian particles “that”, “zhe” or “even”, or for the Russian diminutive suffix, or even for the capacious dative case “se”. Of course, to a foreigner, in general, it is possible to explain quite well how “sugar” and “sugar” differ from each other. But in how many languages can this difference be conveyed as briefly and accurately?
But it’s not only the Russian language that is full of untranslatable forms, words and constructions. There are no more and no less of them in Russian than in any other language, be it English, Japanese or Rapa Nui.
So, every language is the key to a system of knowledge about the world. Such knowledge acquires particular value for studying the history of peoples, human psychology, various options and possibilities for human development, but, of course, they can be used in many other areas. The problem, however, is that while science is thinking about how best to use the storehouses of collective memory, these unique storehouses themselves, one after another, are disappearing forever. This is why any language should be valuable to us, no matter how many people speak it and whether those people use computers or stone axes. “Primitive” languages, as has long been known, do not exist; Moreover, perhaps nowhere have linguists encountered such incredibly complex and bewitchingly beautiful grammatical structures as in New Guinea, the Far North or the Amazon jungle.
Today, linguists literally observe with despair the irreversible process of reduction and unification of the linguistic palette of humanity. Of course, they are not able to stop or at least slow down the process. The only thing they can do is to preserve in as complete a form as possible what is still available, in other words, to create the most complete descriptions of living languages as possible. And, of course, we need to start with those whose existence is now in the greatest danger. It is for these languages that, first of all, detailed grammars should be written, complete dictionaries compiled, and as many authentic texts as possible collected and translated - fairy tales, legends, proverbs, chronicles and genealogies, life stories, everyday dialogues.
It is not easy to accomplish this task: on the one hand, society, unfortunately, is not yet ready to fully understand its importance. Those who have money are more likely to invest it in the study and promotion of the “world” language, because the practical benefits of knowing it are obvious, but is it possible to derive immediate benefits from an arbitrarily complete Enets grammar? Meanwhile, to describe endangered languages, it is necessary to organize long expeditions to hard-to-reach (and often dangerous) places, to pay for the work of those who will share knowledge of their native language, and, of course, for the efforts of qualified specialists. And here we are faced with the second side of the problem. It's not easy to create good language descriptions. This is difficult even for languages spoken by millions of people and taught in hundreds of universities. Are there many good grammars of French or Russian? But if your French grammar is silent about something, a French friend will always answer a tricky question. And how should a linguist who writes a grammar feel, realizing that soon no one will be able to answer a single question about this language?
A good description of language requires a good theory of language. It is necessary to develop theoretical linguistics, a science that is studied by not many specialists and which, unlike the practical teaching of foreign languages, is taught in few places. The teaching of this discipline is relatively good only in a few large centers, primarily in the USA, Australia, as well as at Moscow University in the department of theoretical and applied linguistics, known, among other things, for its many years of expeditions to Dagestan, the Pamirs, to Siberia, the Far East and other linguistically interesting corners of our country.
But there is much more to be done here than what has already been done. That’s why any successful experience, even if imperfect in some respects, is so valuable. Such experiments may well include the multi-volume encyclopedic publication “Languages of the World”, which has just turned 25 years old since the start of work on it.
Languages of the world in "Languages of the world"
"Languages of the World" is a unique publication in many respects. This concerns both the content of the project and the history of its implementation.
Of course, the idea of an encyclopedia in which one could find sufficiently detailed information about all known human languages is not in itself new. The closest they came to its implementation was in the 20s in France; Leading linguists of the time participated in the work, but the publication ceased on the second volume (nevertheless, the French encyclopedia contained brief information about approximately two thousand languages, that is, about a third of all living languages were covered in one form or another).
The idea of the Russian edition was impressively uncompromising from the very beginning: it was supposed to cover all human languages about which at least some information is available. But this idea arose in 1975, when the decrepit and clumsy bureaucratic machine of “Soviet science” seemed just right to generate only utopias, doomed either to quick oblivion or, which is almost the same thing, to “eternal” fulfillment. Neither one nor the other, however, happened, and this alone allows us to consider “Languages of the World” as a kind of phenomenon. At the same time, the publication managed to turn out to be non-standard, interesting and simply good in quality. As a result, today we can state a very important psychological shift in the consciousness of the “linguistic community”: they believed in the publication, its volumes began to rapidly disappear from sale, they began to be referenced. Moreover, now almost no one doubts that the project will be completed: from 1993, when the preparatory period ended, until now, 10 volumes have already been published, each of which is dedicated to a specific area or group of related languages; Several new volumes are awaiting their turn in publishing houses, the rest are in progress. But there were times when this project was called the “linguistic BAM”...
The reason for the success, in general, is not original: the project was simply carried out not by officials or indifferent performers, but by enthusiasts. First it was Marina Andreevna Zhurinskaya, who managed not only to gather about a dozen out-of-the-box linguists, but also to force them, in a relatively short period of time, to develop a viable standard scheme for describing the language - the ideological “nerve” of the entire project. By the beginning of the 90s, quite a lot of material had accumulated - individual articles, descriptions of groups of languages, as well as various kinds of drafts, sketches and preparations, and a new problem arose. How to turn all this interesting, but varied and often raw material into coherent encyclopedia articles? And, most importantly, how to achieve the publication of all this huge mass of texts, if at that time (as, indeed, now) receiving six hundred rubles on time for a researcher’s salary was perceived as an unexpected gift of fate? At this stage, “Languages of the World” was lucky once again - Andrei Aleksandrovich Kibrik took on the thankless menial task of turning piles of folders with yellowed typescript into the now well-known volumes in hard gray binding. It was he, together with three other members of a small working group at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who, with rare thoroughness and perseverance, managed to put the materials in order, unify and improve descriptions, and finally obtain grants for publications, and in some cases even pay fees to the authors of articles (a practice almost disappeared from modern scientific life).
The World Languages project managed to overcome first the phantoms of Soviet bureaucracy, and then post-Soviet devastation and impoverishment. This is an amazing and gratifying fact. Perhaps this means that there will be a place for happy exceptions not only in the fate of scientific projects, but also in the fate of many - still living - languages of our planet.
Vladimir Plungyan - Doctor of Philology, senior researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences