The last whisper

The last two posts have been about biological extinction; today's, to continue in the same elegiac tone, is about language extinction.

A study in Ethnologue found that of the Earth's current seven-thousand-odd languages, 3,143 -- around forty-four percent -- are in danger of going extinct.  Languages become endangered from a number of factors; when children are not taught as their first language, when there's government suppression, or when a different language has become the primary means of communication, governance, and commerce.  

Of course, all three of those frequently happen at the same time.  The indigenous languages of North and South America and Australia, for example, have proven particularly susceptible to these forces.  In all three places, English, Spanish, and Portuguese have superseded hundreds of languages, and huge swaths of cultural knowledge have been lost in the process.

In almost all cases, there's no fanfare when a language dies.  They dwindle, communication networks unravel, the average age of native speakers moves steadily upward.  Languages become functionally extinct when only a few people are fluent, and at that point even those last holdouts are already communicating in a different language with all but their immediate families.  When those final few speakers die, the language is gone -- often without ever having been studied adequately by linguists.

Sometimes, however, we can pinpoint fairly closely when a language died.  Curiously, this is the case with Ancient Egyptian.  This extinct language experienced a resurgence of interest in the early nineteenth century, due to two things -- the British and French occupations of Egypt, which resulted in bringing to Europe hundreds of priceless Egyptian artifacts (causing "Egyptomania" amongst the wealthy), and the stunning decipherment of hieroglyphics and Demotic by the brilliant French linguist Jean-François Champollion.

For a millennium and a half prior to that, though, Ancient Egyptian was a dead language.  And as weird as it sounds, we know not only the exact date of its rebirth, but the date it took its last breath.  Champollion shouted "Je tiens mon affaire!" ("I've figured it out!") to his brother on 14 September 1822.  

And the last inscription was made by the last known literate native speaker of Ancient Egyptian on 24 August 394 C.E.

It's called the "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom," and was carved on the wall of a temple in Philae.  It shows the falcon-god Mandulis, who was a fairly recent invention at the time, and like the Rosetta Stone, it has an inscription in hieroglyphics and Demotic:

A drawing of the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom. The hieroglyphic inscription is in the upper right, the Demotic in the lower right. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mickey Mystique, Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, drawing, 01, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The text reads:

Before Mandulis, son of Horus, by the hand of Esmet-Akhom, son of Nesmeter, the Second Priest of Isis, for all time and eternity.  Words spoken by Mandulis, lord of the Abaton, great god.

I, Esmet-Akhom, the Scribe of the House of Writings(?) of Isis, son of Nesmeterpanakhet the Second Priest of Isis, and his mother Eseweret, I performed work on this figure of Mandulis for all time, because he is fair of face towards me.  Today, the Birthday of Osiris, his dedication feast, year 110.

[Nota bene: The "year 110" is not, of course, by the Julian calendar; in Egypt, governmental records were dated using the number of years since the accession of the Roman emperor Diocletian in 284 C.E.  The "Birthday of Osiris" is what we now call the 24th of August.]

At this point, Greek and Latin had already superseded Egyptian in written records, so Esmet-Akhom was the last of a dying breed.  Ancient Egyptian lingered on for a while as a spoken language amongst the working classes; liturgical Coptic is a direct descendant.  But any final vestiges of Egyptian as a living language were eradicated in the seventh century when the Graeco-Roman state of Egypt fell to the Arabs.

So it may well be that the priests of Esmet-Akhom's family were the last people capable of reading and writing Egyptian, at least until Champollion came along.

I know change is the way of things, and given the interconnectedness of the world today, that widely-spoken languages will inevitably gain more and more of an edge over minority languages.  (Consider that a full forty percent of the Earth's people speak one of eight languages -- Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, and Russian.)  But still, I can't help but find the loss of linguistic diversity, and the cultural information those dead languages once encoded, to be sad.

And you have to wonder how Esmet-Akhom himself felt, writing his defiantly confident inscription "for all time and eternity" at the end of the fourth century.  Did he know that Egyptian was, even at that point, moribund?  A means of communication that had existed for over four thousand years was on the road to extinction; what was left was only a whisper, and even that would soon be silenced.

Has to make you wonder what linguistic shifts will occur in the next thousand years.

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A linguistic resurrection

Earlier this month, I wrote a piece here at Skeptophilia on the reconstruction of an extinct language -- Timucuan, an indigenous language from northern Florida.  As I pointed out in the earlier piece, these sorts of efforts aren't just entertaining linguistic puzzles.  Each language encodes in its structure information about the culture, beliefs, and worldview of the people who spoke it, information which all too often is lost forever because of the effects of war, colonialism, and the simple but unfortunate effects of time on the written records.

As a linguist, I find this terribly sad.  When a language goes extinct, it's as if an entire culture's collective memory is wiped clean.  But astonishingly, sometimes artifacts will surface that allow us to reassemble an ancient language, bringing that long-extinguished knowledge back from the grave.

My eagle-eyed writer friend Gil Miller, always on the lookout for topics for Skeptophilia, sent me an article about such a miraculous resurrection this week.  It has to do with the Amorite language, spoken by a people who lived in southern Mesopotamia on the order of four thousand years ago.  While there's no doubt the people themselves were real enough -- they're mentioned in a number of records from the time, including the Bible -- the language is so poorly attested that some linguists questioned whether it even existed as a distinct language, suggesting that the Amorite people might have spoken a dialect of Akkadian.

The discovery of a remarkable artifact in Iraq has put that to rest.  It's a pair of clay tablets covered in cuneiform writing, describing everyday customs and religious practices in Akkadian, which is well understood by linguists -- with parallel text in Amorite.

One of he Akkadian/Amorite tablets [Image credit: David I. Owen]

The comparison to the Rosetta Stone is obvious.  With the Rosetta Stone, however, the reason for having the inscription in three scripts (Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphic, and Demotic) was clear.  It was an official decree from King Ptolemy V Epiphanes, so as an official document, it was important that it be readable to anyone in the region who was literate, regardless what script they knew.  Here, though, the text is about such mundane matters that it's an open question why anyone wanted it written in two different languages.  "The two tablets increase our knowledge of Amorite substantially, since they contain not only new words but also complete sentences, and so exhibit much new vocabulary and grammar," said Yoram Cohen, of Tel Aviv University, who co-authored the study.  "The writing on the tablets may have been done by an Akkadian-speaking Babylonian scribe or scribal apprentice, as an impromptu exercise born of intellectual curiosity...  Or it may be a sort of 'tourist guidebook' for Akkadian speakers who needed to learn Amorite."

Whatever its purpose, the tablets confirm that Amorite was a distinct language from the Western Semitic branch of the linguistic family tree (a branch it shares with Aramaic and modern Hebrew).  More than just increasing our knowledge of a single long-dead language, however, it provides an impetus to keep looking for traces of ancient cultures.  This amazing linguistic resurrection shows that lost doesn't necessarily mean forever -- and that with luck, perseverance, skill, and knowledge, we might still be able to gain a lens into what we thought was a long-gone culture.

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Voices from the past

Sometimes I'll bump into a story that is so down my alley that I'm surprised I didn't find out about it earlier.  That was my reaction to the link sent to me by a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, about a discovery back in 2017 of some samples of two languages that were up till then almost completely unknown.

The discovery was made because of palimpsests, which are documents that have been erased and written over.  This happened because the writing surfaces available -- mostly parchment made from lambskin -- were often considered more valuable than the text written on them, so when it was in short supply people would erase what was there (often it was sanded off with a stone) and rewrite over the new surface.  Some parchments were reused multiple times this way.

The erasing process, though -- just like using an eraser on a piece of paper today -- was never perfect, and traces of the original document(s) were left behind.  Which is why some researchers studying parchments at one of the oldest continuously-run libraries in the world, Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, were able to detect passages from two languages for which there were almost no samples left, Caucasian Albanian and Christian Palestinian Aramaic.

Saint Catherine's Monastery [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Berthold Werner / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA.]

The palimpsests were read by photographing them repeatedly in different frequencies of light (including ultraviolet and infrared) and turning a computer loose on the composite images to see what was there that might not be visible to the naked eye.  The results were stunning -- new text from one hundred and thirty different palimpsests that has drastically increased our knowledge of the two extinct languages.

Caucasian Albanian (the language, and place, are unrelated to the present country of Albania), in the Lezgic family of languages -- its closest currently-spoken relative is Udi, spoken by about four thousand people in Azerbaijan and the Caucasian region of Russia.  Caucasian Albanian seems to have vanished from the region some time around 1000 C.E., and until now was only known from a handful of inscriptions on stone tablets.  Linguist Josh Gippert, who is an expert in this language family, is unequivocal about the find.  "This one discovery has brought about a twenty-five percent increase in the readability of Caucasian Albanian," Gippert said.

Christian Palestinian Aramaic is a dialect of Aramaic spoken between the fifth and thirteenth centuries C.E. by the Melkites, a Christian group in Syria.  Over the years, the speaking of Christian Palestinian Aramaic dwindled, replaced by Arabic, and seems to have vanished completely some time in the Middle Ages.  "This was an entire community of people who had a literature, art, and spirituality," said Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, who oversaw the project. "Almost all of that has been lost, yet their cultural DNA exists in our culture today.  These palimpsest texts are giving them a voice again and letting us learn about how they contributed to who we are today."

The whole thing is pretty stupendous, not only for the ingenuity of the discovery but because it gives us at least a little bit more information about languages that haven't been spoken for eight hundred years or more.  We're seeing language extinctions today at an increasing rate, as the world's dominant languages (primarily Mandarin, English, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic) replace small/isolated languages.  There are hundreds of languages for which there are only a handful of remaining native speakers -- primarily older people -- which will be extinct without intervention (and possibly even with intervention) in the next twenty years.  Indigenous languages in Australia and South America are especially at risk.  There are places where indigenous people in two villages ten miles apart speak mutually unintelligible languages, and the natives there have mostly adopted the lingua franca (English and Spanish, respectively) in order to be able to travel and communicate.

You can understand why they do it, but it's still kind of sad, considering the cultural knowledge that is vanishing before our eyes.

In any case, the discovery in Egypt is a happy note, giving us a window into the speech of people from over a thousand years ago.  It's nice to know that we can still hear the voices of people who were thought to be silenced forever.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]