Reading on a Thursday
Jun. 2nd, 2022 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allekhaI ended up reading two similar books on language death in quick succession - and I have a book on language decipherment sitting around in Calibre, so maybe that should be next. One was, well, Language Death by David Crystal, and the other was Dying Words by Nicholas Evans.
Language Death did have some interesting points about the language recording and revival process, like how emotionally stressful it can be for a linguist, as well as how conflicts around rights often derail projects. (Of course a language should belong to a community and not be exploited by outsiders; but if you're asking someone to come do a task that demands years of work and highly trained expertise, is it surprising that they feel the deserve some rights to the results? Probably should figure that one out before there are results to argue over.) That being said, a lot of the book is very skippable if you've been exposed to other pop-linguistics stuff before, as it brings up the same Interesting Language Facts that tend to come up elsewhere.
Dying Words was a lot more interesting overall, and I could almost see it convincing someone who thinks language death isn't that big of a deal. He brings up a lot more examples of interesting language differences and how they can (soft Sapir-Whorf) affect what people have to pay attention to as they speak, some from his own fieldwork and many from that of others. The book also ties linguistics to archaeology, anthropology, and ethnobotany showing how a dead language can provide evidence for how people moved and interacted across history, like how the Austronesian family migrated out of Taiwan, or how storytelling traditions in various languages provide evidence for how human memory mechanisms work and what the limits on outliers are.
There's also some funny anecdotes in there. The one I remember best was illustrating the need for more than pure linguistic work - an ethnobotanist is working with a community who tell him over a thousand plant names, but when he asks them about rocks, they will only tell him 'oh, that one's a rock' and that's it. He comes back next year with his friend, who's a geologist, and suddenly they start teaching his friend all their names for different kinds of rocks. When he asks what's up, they say, unlike the plants, it was obvious you didn't know the first thing about rocks, so we didn't bother telling you a bunch of stuff you wouldn't understand, but this guy sure knows his rocks, so he'll understand what we teach him.
If you read one of them, it's the one I'd recommend. The one downside is that it does come off as a bit confused as to its audience. The introduction tells you what IPA is and to ignore it if you don't know what the letters sound like, but sometimes the author drops in linguistic and grammar terms I didn't understand with my LING100 level of knowledge.
Also, both of these authors bring up ecology metaphors, and I have to say, I don't like most biology metaphors for linguistics. Language evolution is in a lot of ways not really like biological evolution, and linguistic diversity seems to serve a different purpose than ecological diversity. I get the temptation to reach for it, but I don't think it works that well.
In manga, I finished my free volumes of Subaru and just picked up the fourth. It's not what I expected from seeing that it was a ballet manga - it's a psychological drama where the main character is messed up from watching her twin brother die at a young age and from her parents subsequently neglecting her, and it comes through in how she dances. The author sometimes draws her doing ballet prettily, sure, but more often it's drawn in such a way that I had to look up if he's ever done horror manga (he has not). It's not just for us, the reader; she scares other people with her dance at times. When she's trying out for a position in the corps for Swan Lake, she draws the other dancers into her intensity so much that the choreographer is reminded of a dancer he knew (Subaru's teacher, in fact) who said, 'They're human girls turned into swans by an evil spell. Those aren't circumstances where they'd be dancing gracefully, are they?' and thinks about how he's wanted to direct that kind of Swan Lake.
So far, Subaru does seem to get over her shortcomings a bit too easily, but she has plenty of flaws to work on, so I'm interested in reading more. I'm also finding it sadly hilarious that the only adult in her life so far who cares that she's been hanging around a dodgy cabaret since she was, like, nine is a teacher who shows up for two pages. Her parents know but don't care until she tells them that she wants to go pro (you guys... did check that she was just doing ballet there, right?), the aforementioned choreographer just asks who her teacher was when she tells him she learned from the cabaret owner, and when she vanishes from her normal ballet lessons for two months, her teacher cares more about Subaru disrespecting her by learning from someone else (and someone well-known?) and tells her to GTFO and never show up at her studio again.
Language Death did have some interesting points about the language recording and revival process, like how emotionally stressful it can be for a linguist, as well as how conflicts around rights often derail projects. (Of course a language should belong to a community and not be exploited by outsiders; but if you're asking someone to come do a task that demands years of work and highly trained expertise, is it surprising that they feel the deserve some rights to the results? Probably should figure that one out before there are results to argue over.) That being said, a lot of the book is very skippable if you've been exposed to other pop-linguistics stuff before, as it brings up the same Interesting Language Facts that tend to come up elsewhere.
Dying Words was a lot more interesting overall, and I could almost see it convincing someone who thinks language death isn't that big of a deal. He brings up a lot more examples of interesting language differences and how they can (soft Sapir-Whorf) affect what people have to pay attention to as they speak, some from his own fieldwork and many from that of others. The book also ties linguistics to archaeology, anthropology, and ethnobotany showing how a dead language can provide evidence for how people moved and interacted across history, like how the Austronesian family migrated out of Taiwan, or how storytelling traditions in various languages provide evidence for how human memory mechanisms work and what the limits on outliers are.
There's also some funny anecdotes in there. The one I remember best was illustrating the need for more than pure linguistic work - an ethnobotanist is working with a community who tell him over a thousand plant names, but when he asks them about rocks, they will only tell him 'oh, that one's a rock' and that's it. He comes back next year with his friend, who's a geologist, and suddenly they start teaching his friend all their names for different kinds of rocks. When he asks what's up, they say, unlike the plants, it was obvious you didn't know the first thing about rocks, so we didn't bother telling you a bunch of stuff you wouldn't understand, but this guy sure knows his rocks, so he'll understand what we teach him.
If you read one of them, it's the one I'd recommend. The one downside is that it does come off as a bit confused as to its audience. The introduction tells you what IPA is and to ignore it if you don't know what the letters sound like, but sometimes the author drops in linguistic and grammar terms I didn't understand with my LING100 level of knowledge.
Also, both of these authors bring up ecology metaphors, and I have to say, I don't like most biology metaphors for linguistics. Language evolution is in a lot of ways not really like biological evolution, and linguistic diversity seems to serve a different purpose than ecological diversity. I get the temptation to reach for it, but I don't think it works that well.
In manga, I finished my free volumes of Subaru and just picked up the fourth. It's not what I expected from seeing that it was a ballet manga - it's a psychological drama where the main character is messed up from watching her twin brother die at a young age and from her parents subsequently neglecting her, and it comes through in how she dances. The author sometimes draws her doing ballet prettily, sure, but more often it's drawn in such a way that I had to look up if he's ever done horror manga (he has not). It's not just for us, the reader; she scares other people with her dance at times. When she's trying out for a position in the corps for Swan Lake, she draws the other dancers into her intensity so much that the choreographer is reminded of a dancer he knew (Subaru's teacher, in fact) who said, 'They're human girls turned into swans by an evil spell. Those aren't circumstances where they'd be dancing gracefully, are they?' and thinks about how he's wanted to direct that kind of Swan Lake.
So far, Subaru does seem to get over her shortcomings a bit too easily, but she has plenty of flaws to work on, so I'm interested in reading more. I'm also finding it sadly hilarious that the only adult in her life so far who cares that she's been hanging around a dodgy cabaret since she was, like, nine is a teacher who shows up for two pages. Her parents know but don't care until she tells them that she wants to go pro (you guys... did check that she was just doing ballet there, right?), the aforementioned choreographer just asks who her teacher was when she tells him she learned from the cabaret owner, and when she vanishes from her normal ballet lessons for two months, her teacher cares more about Subaru disrespecting her by learning from someone else (and someone well-known?) and tells her to GTFO and never show up at her studio again.
