Ancient Language becomes Extinct

Hurtling along at great speed into a globally technology-connected future, conditions are set for localised cultures, that depended on their isolation, to evolve out of existence. Now BBC passes on the message from Professor Anvita Abbi of Jawaharlal Nehru University, that Bo, one of humanity's oldest languages has vanished into history, with the demise of it's last speaker. This language used to exist in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India which, as the map below (from andamanese.net) shows, has undergone drastic demographic change.



I remember a documentary my family saw in the 1980s on these islands. The documentary-maker-explorers described the tribals as easily provoked and very dangerous. Standing on the ships off the shore they would wave food parcels and gifts to the nervous bewildered tribals, who kept their poison-tipped arrows poised. Not very different from the meeting of cultures portrayal in the latest Avatar movie.

Times will change and cultures will transform, but in an age where audio and video recording of every expression is possible, the heritage can be preserved to some extent. Prof. Abbi has done a lot of work in this direction recording the exact phonetics as well.

Boa Sr, who died last week aged around 85, was the last speaker of ‘Bo’, one of the ten Great Andamanese languages. The Bo are thought to have lived in the Andaman Islands for as much as 65,000 years, making them the descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on Earth.

Boa Sr was the oldest of the Great Andamanese, who now number just 52. Originally ten distinct tribes, the Great Andamanese were 5,000 strong when the British colonized the Andaman Islands in 1858. Most were killed or died of diseases brought by the colonizers.

- www.survivalinternational.org

And, sadly this will not be last language to disappear in the region.

It is generally believed that all Andamanese languages might be the last representative of those languages whose history goes back to pre-Neolithic times in Southeast Asia and possibly the first settlement of the region by modern humans. These isolated Andamanese languages that are spoken by the descendents of the aboriginal population of Southeast Asia are, at present, ‘very critical’ stage.

- www.andamanese.net

A useful description of how to identify languages on the path of fading out is in a paper by Prof. Abbi and colleagues:

Moribund languages are characterized by lack of will to learn and teach the heritage language. The language does not get transferred from the older to the younger generation. Another important feature of the moribund languages is loss of registers and reduced domains of use. In the restricted domains that the language is used show traces of earlier varieties in lexical items and grammatical structures once spoken. The loss of various registers also results in the lack of total mutual intelligibility even among the speakers who have retained the language.

- Where Have all the Speakers Gone? A Sociolinguistic Study of the Great Andamanese, by Anvita Abbi, Bidisha Som and Alok Das, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. PDF file

Library of the Human Imagination

Here's a personal library that most of us can only dream of. In fact, most public libraries can also just aspire to.

Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer ... is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you

- Wired News Article (includes more photos)

Here's a fascinating video talk by the owner/curator, Jay Walker:

Happy 60th Birthday, India

Six decades ago, an age old idea of an independent unified India reached reality. The old power structures of empire, kingdoms, and fiefdoms were shed. Few countries have had such a pantheon of varied and enlightened founders as India did on it's independence.

Indian civilization has always been about the human mind and in the age where mind meets technology, the nation has found its calling for the future. In the second largest human nation in the world, there's a new self confidence among the people and pride in their own abilities. Hope is easier to find, and a realisation is spreading of the possibilites.

The rest of the world is in various states of curiousity and discomfort with the rise. The press of the developed nations keeps pointing to the long tail of economically lagging population and cites a percieved economic gap (it's more of a continuous distribution than a gap). They try to badger the achievers into guilt for not taking care of everyone. Socialist preachings from the supporters of capitalism.

Remarkable transitions in the last one and a half decade has and will continue to create turmoil. Change is never easy, but its inevitable. The world's largest democracy has plenty of space for representation and amalgamation. Every faith is represented here, as is every political ideology. Yet they are all unified in searching for a better and balanced future.

Following are some memorable quotes and speech excerpts:

... I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. ...

- Swami Vivekananda, leading spiritual and Vedanta philosopher, addressing the 1893 World Parliament of Religions

I don’t know which is the greater task: to decentralise a top-heavy civilization or to prevent an ancient civilization from becoming centralised and top-heavy. In both cases the core of the problem is to discover what constitutes a good civilization, then proclaim it to the people and help them to erect it.

- Mahatma Gandhi, founding father of India

India is industrially more developed than many less fortunate countries and is reckoned as the seventh or eighth among the world's industrial nations. But this arithmetical distinction cannot conceal the poverty of the great majority of our people. To remove this poverty by greater production, more equitable distribution, better education and better health, is the paramount need and the most pressing task before us and we are determined to accomplish this task. We realize that self-help is the first condition of success for a nation, no less than for an individual. We are conscious that ours must be the primary effort and we shall seek succour from none to escape from any part of our own responsibility. But though our economic potential is great, its conversion into finished wealth will need much mechanical and technological aid. We shall, therefore, gladly welcome such aid and co-operation on terms that are of mutual benefit. We believe that this may well help in the solution of the larger problems that confront the world. But we do not seek any material advantage in exchange for any part of our hard-won freedom.

- Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, in a Speech to the US Congress, 1949

... The building of a free, democratic India has been one of the greatest adventures of humankind this past century. In these sixty years we have done much and we have achieved much.

[...] Today, when we look back and look around I believe we can say with some sense of satisfaction that India is on the move. There is a new dynamism in our people. A new sense of confidence in their capabilities. A new sense of hope in their collective future. They recognize we have a long road ahead in our tryst with destiny; and more to be done to redeem our pledge in full measure.

However, the people of India also know that they can do it. This new sense of confidence, this new outburst of energy of our people, has to be harnessed and channelised in the right direction for India to regain its due place in the comity of modern Nations.

- Dr. Manmohan Singh, current Prime Minister, speech
on the occasion of 60th anniversary of India’s Independence

Related article

• The Midnight Generation and India’s Tryst with Freedom

Evolving Language

Some time ago, I had a brief conversation with a colleague (who happens to be Canadian) on languages. He overheard me talking on the phone with an Indian friend in Hindi, combined with English shortcut phrases. Overcome with curiosity, he couldn't help asking me which language I was thinking in, while I was having this bilingual conversation. It was a good question for I couldn't tell.

Language is a carrier of the human consciousness, and like it, it's continually evolving. Divided by geography, our ancestors each evolved their own separate languages. Now due to the amplification of our transportation and communication abilities, the world is shrinking, languages and cultures are coming together.

English is the primary language in many countries, mostly the nations that arose after the dissipation of the British Empire. As it was the last great empire - 'on which the sun never sets', so English is the widest understood tongue today. In India, the favoured language of commerce and education is English. Another recent example is the Soviet Union - nations that now constitute the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) still largely support Russian. For example, on my visit to Armenia, I encountered Russian still to be the favoured language of business and government. The current adult generation was educated in Russian medium.

Language is affected by the manner in which it is used. Traditionally, it was used for discourse and expression of feelings, it could become very poetic and beautiful. However, when used for formal workflows - business, science, law, government etc. - it tends to become very fixed, industrial and inhuman. That's when we have to start memorizing book-loads of vocabulary.

Enter the digital age - English is the language of computer science. If you wanted to do computer programming, you have to do so in English. One of the reasons that India enjoys such an advantage in Information Technology. I had the very strange experience of learning BASIC computer language in Spain, in Spanish. That was another multi-lingual experience I didn't fully realise until later.

Language is evolving still, with the Internet it's become a medium as well as a technology itself. The rest can probably be explained by the video below, which has been circulating for some time in my work place, and being shown in an awful lot of presentations.

Everything is Miscellaneous - from David Weinberger

Humans have the capacity to handle the huge amounts of information, but as we get immersed in the digital information age, even that capacity is under strain. One of the main ways we organise our perception of concepts and objects around us is to categorise them, then set up hierarchies of those categories.

However, here is an interesting counter-point from David Weinberger. He's written a book - Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, which I may read 'eventually', but if you're pressed for time and rather see the video it is provided below.




Further Links

• The book on Amazon
  
• David's Blog
  

Introduction to the Book

We all know when printing first started, but when was the first book compiled will always be a bit of a mystery with different civilizations staking their claim.



In India the tradition of passing detailed philosophical and spiritual knowledge from Guru to Shishya (student) was largely done through oral tradition. No doubt, the knowledge in question may have suffered distortion and amplification through such a medium, before the first written manuscripts were compiled and made into standard reference.

Following is a fun take on the 'introduction of a book' to European monks. It analogous to what it's like to introduce someone to new computer programs.

Bringing knowledge back to life

I had referred in one of my previous blog entries to the loss of digital knowledge due to the fast changing computer landscape. A far more subtle loss is occurring in the written and printed archives, as editions of old texts lie decaying behind closed doors. Sometimes caring individuals invest their time and money in bringing fragments of these back to active life. Their are many such treasures in my own family hierlooms that are so delicate that they crumble at the merest touch. Stories like the following lend hope of their salvation.

Imaging technology restores 700-year-old sacred Hindu text from PhysOrg.com

Scientists who worked on the Archimedes Palimpsest are using modern imaging technologies to digitally restore a 700-year-old palm-leaf manuscript containing the essence of Hindu philosophy.

[...]

The end of Bangalore

What I was afraid of has finally happened. As part of a patriotic and anti-colonial posturing by the oh-so humble Indian politicians, another city (my old city) has lost its identity. Bangalore has been renamed Bengaluroo. Hmm ... doesn't that sound like the capital of West Bengal?



Bangalore was a name which I loved because it packed a phonetic bang. "Bang-a-lore" I would sing riding around on my trusty motorcycle. When I first arrived in Bangalore, the head of the state goverment was Chief Minister Bangarappa (Bang-a-rapper?). I got my college degree from 'Bangalore University' a name that's known internationally. Believe it or not, Bangalore is an globally recognized (pronounce-able) brand associated with the information technology revolution of India. Due to its loss, the city will take a hit.

      

It's even funny to know what Bengaluroo may actually mean. There's a popular story that a king from the Hoysala dynasty, while on a hunting expedition, stopped for a meal break and was fed boiled beans by a kindly old lady, and thus he named the old hamlet after that dish - benda kala ooru (in Kannada), the village of boiled beans. However some historians seek to console us that it's not true and that the name actually derives from some specimen of flora.

Indian cartographers have been tearing out their hair vigorously for the past decade or so. Trivandrum became Thiruvananthapuram (even Indians have problems saying that out loud). Bombay (now, did't that sound explosive) became an uninspiring Mumbai. Madras became Chennai (which sounds like another food item). Calcutta became Kolkata (in Hindi that would sound like 'I bit [something] yesterday'). And I haven't even started discussing individual street names yet.

"But it's all the Britisher's fault", protests the Indian politician, "because they couldn't pronounce the Indian dialect, they twisted it into a English sounding word". Granted, but that does not mean that you are doing anyone favours by renaming these cities 40 years after Independence. When the true generation of Indian freedom fighter did not have any problem with these names, why do you?

These names have become identities or brands in their own right, with long histories. A Bombay or Madras does not get located in Britain because of its name. There are no other places in the world with theses names. These names also belonged to India, in fact the India of your fathers and grandfathers. Bangalore had been named thus since 1537.

The politician thinks he or she can go down in history as the person who got the city's name changed. Let me tell you - history doesn't care. In another 100 years your contributions will be judged on other criteria. And what would happen if other politicians got the same idea? Even worse, what would happen if the latest pundit, numerologist, psychic or guru-ji decided that the current name is 'cursed with bad luck'? Well, we'll go skipping along singing another name-changing tune.

See also article in the Economist