Last native speaker of 65,000 year old language dies

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Green Sleeves

Green Sleeves

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Jun 14, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/04/ancient-language-extinct-speaker-dies

"Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue. Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s."

Find this story incredibly sad even if it probably wont register on the Richter scale of emotions for most people. For the old woman it must have been the loneliest experience imaginable at the end of her life, her language dead. When a language dies a culture dies with it. Thats possibly worse than knowing that your entire family has died before you. Its an even bigger loss too when you consider that this ancient langauge was one of the oldest languages on the planet.

Cant help despising all the colonisers, settlers, missionaries, global corporations and assorted fuckwits who arrived in places like The Andaman Islands armed with bibles, whisky and guns, believing they had some god-given right to fuck over and corrupt less developed less militarised cultures.

God Save The Queen.
 
Green Sleeves said:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/04/ancient-language-extinct-speaker-dies

"Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue. Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s."

Find this story incredibly sad even if it probably wont register on the Richter scale of emotions for most people. For the old woman it must have been the loneliest experience imaginable at the end of her life, her language dead. When a language dies a culture dies with it. Thats possibly worse than knowing that your entire family has died before you. Its an even bigger loss too when you consider that this ancient langauge was one of the oldest languages on the planet.

Cant help despising all the colonisers, settlers, missionaries, global corporations and assorted fuckwits who arrived in places like The Andaman Islands armed with bibles, whisky and guns, believing they had some god-given right to fuck over and corrupt less developed less militarised cultures.

God Save The Queen.
Click to expand...

I do take some of your points but something needs to be done about saving a language long before it gets to that stage. It's as good as gone by the time it gets to a few hundred or even a few thousand speakers (although there may be a few exceptions in terms of revived languages that have come back from the dead), never mind one or a solitary individual. She may not have spoken the language for some time and may have been none the wiser about it being one of the oldest on the planet.

They need govt and community support and initiatives long before they get to that stage and that seems to be happening with Gaelic - much to the chagrin of some monolingual anglos in this country evidently. :wink:
 
The last known monoglot Cornish speaker is believed to have been Chesten Marchant, who died in 1676 at Gwithian. It is not known when she was born. William Scawen, writing in the 1680s, states that Marchant had a "slight" understanding of English and had been married twice.
Popularly it is claimed that the last native speaker of Cornish was the Mousehole resident Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1777. Notwithstanding her reported last words, "Me ne vidn kewsel Sowsnek!" ("I will not speak English!"), she spoke at least some English as well as fluent Cornish and may well have been one of the last to do so before the revival of the language in the 20th century.
 
Green Sleeves said:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/04/ancient-language-extinct-speaker-dies

"Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue. Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s."

Find this story incredibly sad even if it probably wont register on the Richter scale of emotions for most people. For the old woman it must have been the loneliest experience imaginable at the end of her life, her language dead. When a language dies a culture dies with it. Thats possibly worse than knowing that your entire family has died before you. Its an even bigger loss too when you consider that this ancient langauge was one of the oldest languages on the planet.

Cant help despising all the colonisers, settlers, missionaries, global corporations and assorted fuckwits who arrived in places like The Andaman Islands armed with bibles, whisky and guns, believing they had some god-given right to fuck over and corrupt less developed less militarised cultures.

God Save The Queen.
Click to expand...
I sometimes think us pious whiteys would be much happier if the fuzzies wuzzies still lived in stone age misery, whole communities disappearing without anyone ever knowing - like trees falling unwitnessed in the forest - everytime the weather took a turn for the worse or a new bug went around.

I also wonder at the Blut und Boden enthusiasm for preserving races and cultures - as long as they're somewhere else; and the related sentimentalism for primitive superstition and unenlightenment - as long is it's somewhere else.

Nowt as queer as folk.
 
gun ainm said:
single culture, single religion, single politics, single diet?

poorer world

nightmare
Click to expand...
well I agree; but I find it odd that people can feel this way while seeming to care little about the culture of their own neck of the woods being diminished, indeed can be quite enthusiastic about it. this comment doesn't refer to GS or you specifically, it's just something that's struck me in the coverage of this story.
 
jimmyhibs said:
Tha thu a ceathamh an thid agad agus cha bi thu gad tuigsean.
Click to expand...

Which translates very loosely as: "Just because the great unwashed of Wick went to war with the Gaelic speakers over a fucking orange in 1859* its time to let bygones be bygones."

*Sabaid Mhor Inbhir-Uig
 
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